Seems like the practical application for this, given the flow structure in food service sourcing, is an opt-in allergen certification.
Business that pride themselves on whole ingredients/ could answer the questions about what's in their food could seek that status and be listed as allergen safe establishments.
People who need to know where's safe to go could check an app, or a website, or a list.
In practice, the app could have your allergens loaded as a profile and when you pull up one of the certified places, it could show you the menu with unsafe things marked or safe things marked.
It seems likely to me that there would be an unfortunate correlation between establishments that know exactly what is in everything and ones who are precious/protective about their recipes.
So some obfuscating intermediary that still serves that need would be great.
@futurebird This really hard for me at church, because I'm allergic to a common ingredient in most foods and I have to ask at every station. Some of the members remember now, but I still have to ask. Usually I just have the rice and a dessert.
You also run into situations like this one: I was looking at a package of chocolate truffles once, and among the ingredients was "copra." Because I'm an incorrigible nerd, I know that's coconut and I can't eat it. But how many people would recognize that?
The trouble is, the composition of a particular dish can change from day to day. Often suppliers will source different ingredients depending on what's cheapest on the market at the time. Packaged foods might have a list of all ingredients they know about, but if they bought any of those components from another manufacturer, there could be things in there they don't know about. It may be literally impossible to provide a full list in many cases.
For most restaurants, the only truly honest answer they could give you is "we don't know." I think the only exception to that would be the rare ones that make everything in house from fresh food.
@futurebird I've run very grassroots community events where we had a mix of "feel free to bring your own" "bring&share" (with ingredient lists requested) and provided bought food where kept the food packaging with ingredients was kept WITH each item (till it was empty) and I had a loose vegetarian/vegan/meat&fish separation.
We had signs and announcements asking people NOT to cross-contaminate food. Some folk still couldn't risk that but bought their own.
@futurebird List of ingredients in alphabetical order? That's unusual, may I ask why? I prefer to have it ordered by its share in the final product as one may tolerate X in a matrix but not as the first/ most present ingredient.
It's a pain to scan a long list and need to read every single item to know if the one that will harm you is on it. I get the idea of listing things by order of quantity, but without knowing any of the quantities it's kind of useless. I could have HOURS of my life back if they were alphabetized.
@futurebird I've never thought of it that way! Here the allergens are written either in bold or upper case making it easier to spot in a list. But I do wish there was a summary, same way they do "may contain X, Y and Z"
That said it shouldn't be that hard... and maybe there already is an app that lets one take a photo of such lists and then it quickly highlights the things that might be a problem.
I need to look into that.
Summaries are nice for people with common allergies, but many people have obscure allergies so "just list it all" seems to be the best route IMO.
@futurebird As a Pakistani, I think "we don't know" would be honest answer a lot of time. Some things I would assume are present by default: ginger, garlic, turmeric, red chili powder and garam masala.
I actually have never looked up what goes in garam masala (and I very much doubt there is a canonical composition), since I always buy powdered one. What I remember seeing in it during my childhood: black pepper, cloves, black cardamom, cinnamon, cumin seeds, coriander seeds and (a bit more doubtful than the rest) fennel seeds.
So, I imagine it is hard to keep track of exact list of ingredients.