AIBU over nutty labelling of cakes?

[LunaLoveg00d]

Bake sale at work yesterday for Macmillan. We were all asked to make something at home and bring it it. No mention of any ingredients which were banned. This is a workplace which is exclusively adult - no children around.

I baked a coffee and walnut cake. The walnuts were not hidden in the cake (in fact there were no nuts in the cake at all) but I had used half walnuts on the icing as decoration. They were very visible. We had also been given little cards to write what the cake was, and who had made it, so obviously I wrote "coffee and walnut cake".

Went down to the bake sale at lunch to discover someone had scrawled in great big red letters CONTAINS NUTS.

AIBU to think that:

a) the name alone is a bit of a giveaway
b) the nuts were clearly visible and if you're a nut allergic adult then you'd probably be capable of identifying a walnut??

And yet, at one point Sainsbury's used to put "may contain milk" on their own-brand skimmed milk.

They've now changed it to "contains milk".

I wouldn't have thought anyone could honestly say that they weren't aware that vegetarians didn't eat chicken, and yet... it happens that people are convinced chicken doesn't count as meat. Allergies are life-threatening, so why assume that Carol in accounts can realise on her own that walnuts are nuts when she struggles with the idea that vegetarians don't eat tuna?

Labelling has to be universal, otherwise the absence of a label lulls people into a sense of false security, hence the labelling of milk.

After you've red-penned everything with more obscure ingredients (for example, not everyone realises that marzipan contains almonds), it will appear at first sight to some shoppers that the remainder must be nut-free because "if it contained nuts, it would say that on" .

YABabitU.

An adult with an allergy probably does know not to choose a coffee and walnut cake. But cakes are frequently eaten by more than one person. And there are quite a lot of people who would not automatically connect "nothing with nuts, please" to a walnut cake. Especially if they're thinking about 19 different things at once, in a rush and desperate to eat a bit of the Batenburg they also picked up that they know isn't suitable for friend because someone had realized not everyone knows Batenburg has almonds in it and so had put a big red sign saying "Contains nuts" in front of it.

People make mistakes over allergies. Especially when they aren't used to it and haven't seen the results of a serious allergic reaction. Highlighting information people are known to miss that is pertinent to decisions with possible life threatening consequences isn't that over the top.