<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>

  "Srhackett" relays to the group news about Tamari (which I often use)
having shown ".00017 of gluten" in testing. Its maker, he writes,
therefore could not guarantee it to be GF.  Considering that the soy
sauce, in turn, is a small percent of the mass of any dish I flavor with
it, we're talking about ingesting contamination in the amount of a
number preceded by something like five zeros right of the decimal
point.  (Of course, we have to assume that there would be quite a bit of
variability from batch to batch for so tiny a component.) some
questions:
  Is the .00017 an unacceptable amount?

  Are there many other products most of us accept as GF that are not as
rigorously tested and that are apt to have a greater "gluten' component
than Tamari's test showed?

  Can we assume absence of gluten contamination for any soy, or any
other crop, grown in the broad fields of America's oh so windy Great
Plains and shipped by tractor-trailers and RR cars?

  Is the difficulty of avoiding any gluten contamination so great for
many makers as to make them as unreluctant as Tamari appears to be about
politely telling Celiacs (implicitly) to buzz off?

  I know the archive has relevant material by Dr. Kasarda and others but
it would be good to have comments in the specific context raised by
Tamari's response.

Albert D. Biderman
[log in to unmask]