How many cherries in frozen pie? FDA may soon drop rules

[left-of-center2012]

Emails show the Food and Drug Administration planned to start the process for revoking the standard for frozen cherry pies this week, followed by a similar revocation of the standard for French dressing. Plans to get rid of the obscure rules had been tucked into the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda .

Standards for an array of foods including cottage cheese and canned peas were put in place decades ago partly to ensure a level of quality. They spell out how products with specific names can be made, including ingredients that are required or not allowed. The rules for frozen cherry pies say they must be 25% cherries by weight with no more than 15% of the cherries being blemished.

Lee Sanders of the American Bakers Association said she’s hopeful the cherry pie standard will finally be revoked, but that it would not make a big difference for the industry. “I feel confident our members are producing cherry pies with more than enough cherries,” she said.
The frozen cherry pie standard is an outlier because other fruit pies don’t have similar rules.

The FDA also plans to take another look at milk, which federal regulations define as coming from a cow. The dairy industry has called for a crackdown on soy, rice and almond drinks makers that use the term. While any changes to the milk rule are likely to be contested, getting rid of the standard for frozen cherry pie is unlikely to be controversial.

https://www.apnews.com/8f96ed4c30f045428dc49d180760a750

[JDC]

1. Why is the deregulation argument always an effort to reduce quality?

In order to make money. To call something cherry pie, it's seems like it should have more than cherry syrup in it. Is this really a burden to the industry or just to the their additional bottom line. It's always the latter.

[Drahthaardogs]

3. And don't you love the industry response

"We will police ourselves",. Uh huh...suuuuuuurrre Lucy. Just put that football down again and I'll kick it.

[Nay]

5. They'll police themselves, all right. After finding a product advertised as "carrot cake," I

read the fine print only to read that the 'carrot shreds' were 'carrot-flavored pieces." Those cherry pies are going to contain 'cherry-flavored pieces.'

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

2. I doubt that this will affect the local bakery. Their pies will continue to be amazing.

The food-like stuff known as "cherry pie" that appears in school cafeterias, army mess halls, prison feeding facilities, I'm sure there is money to be saved by the elimination of rules.

[MiniMe]

4. Sounds like it only effects frozen cherry pies

The Bakery should be fine

[angstlessk]

6. If milk can only come from a cow,

is a lactating woman now considered a cow? Is a goat now a cow?

What now brown cow?

[hunter]

7. I'll never be a politician...

... because I think the factory farm dairy industry needs to die. It's bad for the earth's natural environment, and it's not so great for people or cows either.

When my children were young I used to buy milk by the gallon, largely because that's what my parents did when they could afford it, but I wouldn't do it again. (I do the grocery shopping and make most of the meals in our family.)

My wife is lactose intolerant, as many people are, and by the time our children were teens they were drinking the soy milk I bought for her anyways, and that was the end of any care I had about the price of a gallon of cow's milk.

[shanti]

8. And it's cherry "pieces"

Not even whole cherries.

[edhopper]

9. Because McDonalds had no cherries

in their Cherry Pie. They had grapes. But fuck the consumer.