Emergencies really do crop up more often for poor people. Necessities, like vacuum cleaners or phones or bedding or shoes, need replacement or repair more often when you only buy the cheapest possible option.
Poor people’s health tends to be compromised by cheap, unhealthy food; stress; being around lots of similarly-poor contagious sick people who can’t afford to stay home or get treatment; inadequate healthcare; and often, hazardous and/or demanding work conditions.
So we get sick more. On top of that, many people are poor specifically because of disability. All of that is expensive – even if you just allow your health to deteriorate, eventually you can’t work, which is – say it with me – expensive.
When you’re poor, even the cheapest (most temporary) solution for an emergency often breaks the bank. Unexpected expenses can be devastating. People who aren’t poor don’t realize that an urgent expense of thirty dollars can mean not eating for a week. Poor people who try to save find our savings slipping away as emergency after emergency happens.
I don’t think people who’ve never been poor realise what it’s like. It’s not that we’re terrible at budgeting, it’s that even the most perfect budget breaks under the weight of the basic maths: we do not have enough resources.
The more I read the more I want to open up a museum on eugenics and modernity which highlights how science, government, art history, and other fields colluded to make eugenics a global phenomenon.
This stuff does get legitimately aggravating when you do need to avoid any of the common allergens they’re supposed to label for, though. Especially given how common this labeling approach is.
Examples like that one are ludicrous enough that I have to get a dark laugh. One of my other favorites? Items like chocolate which the company won’t guarantee aren’t full of celery and mustard cross-contamination either. Hard to imagine how that could even be relevant, right?
But, it’s also an insultingly good indication that the brand in question isn’t even pretending to try. (No surprise with that particular label, but hey.) It’s enough cheaper and easier that–as a blanket policy–they are not willing to guarantee that anything they are selling is not contaminated all to hell with pretty much any substance they are actually required to list. To the point that they’re afraid of liability over the quality of their supply chain.
They almost may as well not have to warn for any allergens, if they’re unwilling to guarantee the bay leaves they’re selling don’t contain traces of completely ridiculous other foods.
(Also, what other inappropriate substances might be in there in trace amounts, which they don’t have to warn for? They probably don’t even know or care, if that’s the kind of quality oversight involved.)
Would I expect dry bay leaves to reasonably come into contact with egg in processing? Not really, unless the same factory is packaging powdered eggs or something. Soy or wheat? So many other seasonings do contain those ingredients, and there could possibly be a shared facility risk. And dust gets everywhere. Hopefully not the same production line, but they’re not willing to guarantee that much.
As someone with celiac and not anaphylactic food allergen responses, I might go ahead and take the risk with those bay leaves. Worst case, give them a good rinse before putting them in my food to try and get rid of any possible traces of wheat flour dust.
This is a simpler case than many others, dealing with a single ingredient product consisting of readily identifiable whole leaves. And again, I don’t have any known risk of more immediately fatal reactions, “just” autoimmune misery.
When at least half the products you look at in the store carry shotgun cross-contamination warnings like that? It’s a problem.
Petroleum, when you think about it, is definitely an escaped piece of worldbuilding from a twee gothic fantasy dystopia
“The elven civilization gets energy from poisonous, flammable rock juice mined deep underground, sometimes causing earthquakes in the process. It’s slowly roasting their planet, but they keep doing it anyway to light their disposable palaces and fuel nihilistic displays of opulent wealth. Its stabler aethers are used in cosmetics rubbed upon the skin.”
Like, all it needs is a sinister glowing magenta aesthetic to be absolutely ludicrously fake
“where did it come from?”
“oh just the bodies and bones of great beasts of legend, crushed for aeons beneath mountains of stone”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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