For some reason, I was in the mood for white acre field peas recently so I put them on the grocery list. My husband does the basic (not specialty gluten-free) shopping at our house and he’s usually really good about avoiding gluten-containing products. He reads labels as well as any gluten-free expert. I’m usually the one who comes home with something that has wheat in it by mistake – not my husband.
As I was putting away the groceries, I quickly glanced at the back of the white acre pea can because I was not familiar with the brand Margaret Holmes. Imagine my surprise to see the words “MAY CONTAIN ALLERGENS: WHEAT (WHEAT GLUTEN)” under the ingredients which included only “fresh white acre peas, water, salt”. How in the heck would they get wheat into this product? My husband actually said he’d return the cans to the store, but I told him to hold off on that because I was pretty sure the peas were gluten-free.
The next morning I called the company that distributes the Margaret Holmes brand, McCall Farms, and was quickly put through to the quality assurance manager. This rarely happens so I was pretty impressed that the company had such a person on hand to address a consumer’s allergen concerns. The manager was not only very knowledgeable about gluten, but he also explained the whole process of how “may contain wheat” made its way onto a can of peas (that don’t even contain seasoning except for salt).
The FDA law regarding labeling all forms of wheat on labels of items sold in the U.S. went into effect in January 2006. When that happened, many companies went a bit overboard and started adding disclaimers to anything that was produced in a gluten-containing plant. McCall Farms planned to make a final decision about those types of disclaimers when the FDA finally ruled on what gluten-free labeling actually means. Like most of us, the companies thought the ruling was being finalized in August 2008, but that never happened.
As we all know, over two years later there is still no permanent decision by the FDA on this matter. Margaret Holmes white acre field peas are gluten-free and have been from day one. The company has sent them out for testing even though the product is not even labeled gluten-free in the first place. Due to the lack of a ruling by the FDA regarding gluten-free labels, the company might revamp its labels again, removing disclaimers that don’t actually belong on the products.
So, the next time you see something crazy on a label like “ingredients: pineapple, water” and the words may contain wheat underneath, you might want to think twice before passing the product up. Seriously, this is getting a bit ridiculous and if the FDA would just get off the fence and determine what gluten-free actually means in the U.S., many of these overly-zealous disclaimers would disappear.
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