When it comes to food contamination, even an infinitesimal quantity is noteworthy. Tbh many posts on this board are relatively low quality (and/or AI generated) but still spark interesting discussion.
The FDA was already in bad shape as far as inspections go. In 'The Secret Life of Groceries' (published in 2020) I believe the statistic was that the people responsible for keeping our food system safe only have the capacity to inspect around 5% of domestic agricultural and food processing operations nation-wide. That speaks more to the amount and size of agri-business in the United States than the FDA's capacity, but it also doesn't mean great things for the federal government's ability to preemptively intervene in most cases.
DOGE cuts to FDA, HHS, FSIC, FTC, EPA, and more have inevitably made this problem much worse.
> I believe the statistic was that the people responsible for keeping our food system safe only have the capacity to inspect around 5% of domestic agricultural and food processing operations nation-wide.
Over what time period? If they can inspect 5% in a year, that's not too bad.
Keep in mind that if they inspect without notice and do it randomly, companies have a decent incentive to keep things working in order. If serious issues are found, a given plant can be shut down for months, which if you're small enough, means you go out of business.
I don't know what a "good" number is - that would involve statistics. I'd imagine it should be more than 5%, but not something like 35% - that's quite high.
OP really should have just shared the USDA website annoucment[1]. Regardless this comment reminds me of a fictitious but expositiory scene from a Theodore Roosvelt Documentry. Where he served a steak dinner to a bunch of food lobbyist and read the excepts from the Jungle. It might be a shockingly small amount but for the 20K people eating bad meat it matters, and having tainted/uninspected meat floating about is bad. These are not computers that are facing downtime they are people. People who could be subjected to crippling food born illiness. I commend the adminstration (a rare occurrence but earned)
Fun story: for my final project in my high school junior-year history+literature class, I did the same: my friends and I grilled and served hotdogs to our class, and then proceeded to read the chapter of The Jungle that describes all manner of foul material falling into the sausage machinery. The reactions of my classmates still makes me grin 30 years on.
Thank you! This was the very first question that popped into my head. My gut said it had to be a fraction. I did not realize just how small a fraction.
Comparing it to the amount of chicken consumed in a year seems disingenuous. How long does chicken last after it's slaughtered? The meaningful number you could have provided is what % of the current chicken stock is contaminated.
>How many people will consume this, how many people will get sick?
This can't be inferred from the 0.00007% figure? Or are you hoping to use the rhetorical tactic of doing "huge number * small percentage = big number" to shock readers? eg. "0.0001% chance of getting stuck by lightning * all americans = 300 people per year hit by lightning. That's enough to fill an auditorium!"
So let's see, in the past few years we've had the Boar's head listeria recalls, Taylor farms lettuce contamination, the McDonalds e.coli recalls in 14 states, now chicken wings...
Defunding the FDA and forcing out 4500 staff via DOGE cuts caused this. Right now we have 400 safety inspectors covering 36,000 facilities vs the FDA's own estimates they need at least 1,500 inspectors.
Don't worry! They're going to relax the rules on small scale meat processing allowing it to occur at facilities that rarely if ever see an inspector, surely this will make everything better. You can be certain the people of America will be healthier than ever after this amazing initiative.
The guy in charge of all of this has eaten road kill and rotting carcasses and he appears to be completely fine. I'm sure there will not be any issues.
Isn't one of the main problems with meat factories that they're processing such an insane number of animals a day, which contributes massively to dirtiness?
Not to excuse the idea that they shouldn't be inspected, of course.
It's wild how in America at least, the people have to relearn the same lessons every generation or two. It turns out, some regulations are actually beneficial to a society. Maybe don't take a chainsaw to the groups who implement and look after these regulations.
The destruction is the whole point. In a way we are in the shock therapy era of the US, experiencing what Russia went through post-USSR, which resulted in massive corruption, wealth inequality, and development of an authoritarian regime.
> At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. - Lincoln.
From the same speech where Lincoln then warned that a tyrant could overtake the U.S. political system from within...
Not American but some of your 19th century politicians where spectacular orators.
You're missing the point. The efficacy of these regulatory bodies are not a concern for those controlling them. Those individuals have the means to isolate themselves from anything that might negatively affect the rest of us hogs, and they get to collect the spoils. They're just ripping the copper wiring out of the walls.
I try to walk a tricky path with foreign critics: Yes, your criticism is mostly valid, but please please do not think "it can't happen in my country", because I remember when I thought that too.
This infection on the body politic can and has jumped to infect others, and does not require an abnormally weak host to attack, and overconfidence is a kind of weakness.
That's true. They are uniquely proud of their ignorance though. It is, as they say, the best -- the greatest. No one does it better. I mean, did you know that dumb was spelled with a -b at the end?
I don't know any who are. You sure you haven't just seen a few videos that were circulated online specifically because of how insane they were, or something?
This is true, although it’s true for most if not all developed societies. People read less and less. We live in a post-literate, hyper-visual era. I am not sure if short form video is effective at educating people on why we have public health and food inspection agencies, but I confess I’m not optimistic.
Video seems spectacularly promising, especially for those that cannot read, which has been a pretty high percentage historically. But it's not being done right. Nobody would rather watch a video called Food Regulations in the US when they could watch 100 Minecraft Players Compete for A Bar of Literal Gold or whatever
We don't have to relearn the concept, we just have a bunch of dumb idiots who we have to fight off every couple years and we often lose because a critical segment of people cannot remember what happened last time, don't understand anything, or are evil.
This isn’t a relearning it’s a power struggle. We’ve known this the whole time but a bunch of people who value power over the health of the nation want it the other way. They have power now so the rest of us have to suffer. This is what they mean when they say empathy is weakness — without empathy they can count their money and not have to feel bad about how they came by it. They just make a proclamation, move some data on a spreadsheet, and more money starts flowing in. That poors in some backwater consequently start shitting blood is of no concern.
I don't really know if this is the cause. But the whole DOGE thing sounded highly irresponsible. Did they understand what they were cutting. Furthermore, there may be even worst consequences in the more distant future.
Funny. Two of OP’s events are prior to the DOGE cuts so they could not be causative.
But these panics are so amusing. Pete’s breaking the trains. Hegseth (was it him?) is crashing the planes. RFK’s eating the infected meat. The Haitians are eating the cats and dogs. We need a prediction market for the next panic.
These problems will surface whenever they get big enough, whatever size the agency is.
As an extreme, if there was one single guy in charge you'd still get recalls every time a problem reaches national levels, and you could get a lot of them.
Increasing inspectors and making the agency do more will help deal with issues before they reach that level (that's also assuming regulations are favorable to their job...), potentially lowering the number of wide range recalls they have to call for.
No this makes no sense. Like, I can see where you were thinking, but it's just wrong with the USDA because of how different problems at different points are handled.
When an inspector in a plant notices a problem, like an employee not following hygiene rules, that doesn't trigger a recall, because that's not enough evidence of unsafe product. They usually issue a "Noncompliance Record", which the plant is required to resolve.
Inspections aren't usually the trigger for a recall! If an inspection surfaces evidence of an active health hazard, like some biological test comes back with a pathogen, that could trigger a recall.
Here, the facility was flagrantly violating the law in it's entirety. Unless they were somehow doing this on accident, they have been operating fraudulently. This recall is because this product was not inspected at all, and so via the precautionary principle, and also as a somewhat punitive action, the product has to be recalled.
More frequent inspections could only have caught this earlier. More frequent inspections will cause more problems to be Noncompliance that gets fixed rather than a problem persisting until it makes someone sick and that actually triggers a recall.
Inspections prevent recalls. Few inspections allow problems to escalate to recalls.
They have permanent on site inspectors, which is a contributing factor to consolidation. Whether the inspection is worth anything is a different matter.
And industry is wholesale enjoying the gross drop in QA. I feel like at this point lawsuits need to happen to provide an alternative counter to the urge to drop costs in QA.
These businesses earnestly do not care until it affects their bottom line
The FSIS, a branch of the USDA (not the FDA: for the difference in jurisdiction see https://www.fda.gov/media/172542/download), found this problem, according to the original article. The food from the Shanghai Ravioli Company had false inspection marks and no country of origin, much like an earlier case of food imported from Canada.
> The products apparently have “false marks of inspection” with “EST. 18004.”
Nothing in the article suggests that budget cuts had anything to do with this. USDA safety inspectors doing their job found yet another foreign company failing to protect American health. DOGE and the FDA had nothing to do with this story, but the parent poster felt obliged to make political statements without reading the article, which happens frequently here.
One might be tempted to wave the numbers away as "Obviously there are fewer recalls, because they don't do inspections to begin with!"
That might be true. It's hard to prove or disprove, though. Perhaps if we look at the statistics on the other end, the actual hospitalizations from tainted food?
> “The number of recalls does not necessarily correlate with the level of surveillance,” said Robert Custard, an environmental health expert who also represents the West Virginia Association of Sanitarians. “Some years you're going to have more than others because of the luck of the draw. This year you may have less total recalls, but the cyclospora outbreak that we had this summer may have the highest number of human cases for any foodborne outbreak in recent history.”
Custard, who worked at the Virginia Department of Health for more than two decades, said cuts to public health staffing and funding can mean fewer people are available to inspect and test possible food-safety problems before they cause illness.
"When you do less testing, you're going to find less problems," Custard said. "When you find less problems, you end up with fewer recalls."
>"When you do less testing, you're going to find less problems," Custard said. "When you find less problems, you end up with fewer recalls."
This isn't necessarily true though. Issues found by inspection only occasionally lead to recalls. Most of the time, it's minor corrective action (called a noncompliance record) like "An employee wasn't following sanitation rule X, show us that you are properly training your employees to follow sanitation rule X".
This recall is not driven by a food safety concern! It's mildly punitive, and is done to encourage trust. Just like that time costco had to throw away a truck full of butter over a labeling issue, the American food system works very hard to ensure that certain labels on food mean something, so that consumers can make informed decisions in the supermarket and therefore have a semi-functional free market experience.
Recalls happen from positive evidence of a pathogen, from reported illness, or from noncompliant product. If you have no inspections, then companies may normalization of deviance their way to less safe products, which can cause more illness, which would cause more recalls.
Fewer inspections could only lead to fewer recalls if the majority of recalls are labeling issues or otherwise never would have caused illness.
Reasonable take, source provided, yet downvoted. I have a boatload of issues with Trump admin, but the stats here are hard to dispute. I guess it's just making news more now.
No it’s an asinine take when you stop and think. People were fired, agencies were thrown in disarray, there’s constant reports of them fudging numbers or just straight up not doing the work to collect the actual numbers, and you want to try and pretend this is reasonable?
This is conjecture. Right now the stats simply don't reflect it. If there's evidence of corner cutting leading to rising reports of recalls or foodborne illness outbreaks, I'll certainly reconsider.
> “The status quo was, the federal government is going to collect and disseminate data and statistics,” said John Kubale, a University of Michigan professor who helps direct the world’s largest archive of social science research data, including sensitive U.S. federal government data. “That is no longer a reasonable assumption.”
Is there evidence to suggest that inspections or shortage of them cause this? Why wouldn’t it be instead a need to cut corners and produce food differently, or anything else?
Per TFA less than one truck load of imported chicken is being recalled across 5 states that are small enough one delivery driver probably hits three of them in a single route because the importer got caught falsifying their paperwork.
Your comment and all the speculative piling on it spawned look kinda silly in light of this context.
If that's true, the opposition should make them pay a political price for it. That's how a competitive political system should work.
Yet almost always I hear nothing or almost nothing from the Democrats, not about Taylor Farms either. It's been that way for many years; I can't understand it.
If someone doesn't pay a political price for bad performance, they will keep doing it.
Every day something happens that would have been on the daily news for weeks under Obama, but nobody cares because it's Trump. Part of it is media bias, where the right doesn't talk about this stuff because it makes them look bad, and the left doesn't talk about it because they are afraid of being called biased, but I also think it's just too damn much.
Everything about this administration is so unhinged, from DOGE to Lake Ontario to Iran to Greenland to taxes to shooting people in the streets to literally every god damned thing that we have absolutely no framework for even conceptualizing what the hell is happening.
Also, half the country lives in a bubble where Trump is anointed by god and saving the country from trans vegan child rapists.
The FDA has been failing to complete inspections on multiple types of facilities (drug and food) for a long time, since at least 2018, and it seems to have deep issues with its staff, culture, and/or management:
Why not? If the agency is doing a poor job you might be better of defunding it or disbanding, or forcing smarter, cheaper, more efficient testing. If money fixed problems we'd have great schools and great health care.
The problem is that the money that could be used is being applied to the wrong problem or is being siphoned off by those whose only goal is accumulation of money since that accumulation might guarantee more power in the process of selecting how to direct the next cash infusion, which they also hope to accumulate.
The other issue is that looking into both standard and "Major" recalls by the FDA this year isn't statistically different from any other. In fact there's no overall trend going back years, it mostly seems to be media coverage and the (understandable) rage and frustration with the current admin. It's still a shame to see so many people on HN thoughtlessly repeat a media narrative without considering the stats though.
Firing USDA inspectors etc. is definitely directionally stupid. But yeah, this issue is preexisting. A huge portion of USGov’s rules and regulations were written in response to the social push when stuff like The Jungle was hitting the public perception—which is to say, when public health could be meaningfully improved by a simple non-magnified visual inspection of meat destined for sale. And so that’s what we get: a visual inspection of meat destined for sale.
Say what you will about the overall regulatory environment of Canada and the EU—you can buy meat there and know that you will not get salmonella, because it’s been tested for salmonella, and it won’t be sold for consumption if that test is positive. Stateside we’re just told: well, cook it properly or it’s on you.
Interesting -- I stand at least in part corrected. It _is_ the case that there's regulations intended specifically to address this. It seems they're not 100% effective, though.
What gets me about your linked cases is that, with one exception, they're all to foods that you'd consume without further preparation or cooking. Not sure what to make of that--but it's not what you'd expect for a salmonella source.
When I saw the EST. 18004 in the article I thought the inspection stamps were bad ai attempts, but after some research I found out the EST here is not supposed to be a year, but the id of the establishment being inspected. You can look up the number or the company and see no entries here https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/fsis-inspected-establis...
I recall there was a farmer trying to sue over the USDA Organic rating. From what I recall, if something is produced outside the US and they apply the label, the USDA takes them at their word and does not actually test it.
Why do they keep letting Tyson's frozen garbage through? The processed chicken "honey tenders" are great but most of the supposedly less processed frozen chicken I have bought from them recently has been nasty.
I’ve purchased entire packs of “boneless skinless thigh” from Tyson which after opening had all the bones and all the skin. I cannot for a minute understand how that passed inspection.
In any case organics seem to be both less brined (aka not paying for salt water) and well prepared, everytime.
That seems like process error rate. Inspection, as far as I know, samples output and checks processes. But inspected processes also have error rates. That’s how it goes. So the pack you got probably was not “inspected” in the sense that no human laid critical eyes on it and its contents till you.
Because low quality food or bad tasting food is not a health hazard (well, not a health hazard under the USDA's purview. The population being too fat is HHS's job)
Tyson and Purdue have the occasional problem that causes a recall, like everyone else. In a system like this, some background noise of recalls is expected and normal and not indicative of a problem. For example, this recall is about a labeling issue, and while the USDA is calling this a high risk recall, that's because recalling improperly labeled food is done to encourage trust in food labels, which America does really well, except for all the bullshit terms companies put on food that have no legal definition.
You are supposed to be able to buy from a different company if you think Tyson chicken is shitty, which it is, but for some reason the people who say that's how it's supposed to work keep letting Tyson buy all the other companies that sell chicken products.
Step one is basically just never buy chicken breast. Chicken breast often has some white stripes on it, which is a result of chicken breast essentially being forced to grow bigger than it naturally would. This is known to make the chicken taste bad and have a bad texture, but Americans are bad at paying attention to anything that can't be turned into a simple numerical metric, like price per pound.
It's like when your enemy undermines your logistics in a game. It's an attack, but not a direct attack. If you attack directly you might get called the aggressor.
There's also currently a recall of 30,000 pounds of Argentina beef at the same time Trump announced they would be increasing the allowed imports of Argentina beef and are relaxing beef import regulations so that they can undercut American ranchers.
Interesting comments here. I've never lived in a time when there weren't news stories about food recalls. I don't think they can be used as data, though. They don't tell me anything about wether the US food supply is worse than it was last year, or 10 years ago, or if its standing in the world is rising or falling.
The site is fairly politically polarized. However it is not a very large subset participating. Strategically blocking users using a Chrome extension can help you maintain epistemic hygiene. The comments section I see is much sparser and much less prone (though not immune) to human impersonation of robots.
I enjoy forums, so I prioritize spam filtering to preserve signal to noise. Others may prefer to read every cialis ad. I think these two extremes and everyone in between can coexist on the same forum, but in order to do so it helps to have adequately tuned filters customizable on a personal level. In more detail if you care to: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Overmod#Philosophy
I was primarily motivated to do this by repetitive commentary which is indistinguishable from bot content, and I continue to be motivated by this.
Curating your news is part of healthy media consumption. You literally connect consume all news. There is too much, and once you find an unreliable source, its generally best avoided.
I agree with you. I simply took umbrage with the characterization of other human beings with different points of view as “bots”.
It’s really no different than the cringy characterization of other humans as “NPCs” often spouted by children. That thinking indicates a sort of complex that is very off-putting.
Given that, this person would likely benefit from exposure to alternative viewpoints instead of further insulating themselves.
It's Friday, so probably a lot of the more well adjusted human beings are a little busy living life.
But yeah, good god people are being absurd.
However, there was similar absurdity a couple years ago, when an article about Costco having to dump a truckload of butter because it was mislabled, with everyone coming out of the woodwork to decry it as obvious government waste making us all poorer.
Which was insane of course. It was one truckload, just like here, and improperly labeled, just like here.
The US system takes the sanctity of product labeling extremely seriously, because the intent is that you can trust the label, and therefore make informed free market decisions! Strictly regulated labeling is a great way to reduce the information asymmetry between producer and consumer, and help keep a market competitive!
The reality is that nobody here is any better or worse than the average on any website that doesn't make you take a test before you can post. That was always true, but it's getting a little noisy. Notice how there is in fact pushback in this comments section to those running wild with assertions and bullshit, and those comments are getting downvoted to oblivion.
That is new and utterly toxic.
How many in this comment section even noticed that this is not safety related?
Let's see some stats on frequency of recalls over the years rather than relying on perfectly reliable human perception and never biased news headline frequency.
Do we need statistics by the administration? Look at the numbers of FDA recalls. And if you think recalls are happening less often, look for food poisoning cases too.
It's a good thing Elon cut out all those useless bureaucrats and boosted the economy! The dow is doing great! People should learn to eat the dow instead of chicken.
Food is getting so bad, you should just paste the article:
The reason echoes a recent issue the USDA has been following—one that's becoming peculiarly common.
If you’re wondering what has been going on with our food, you’re one of millions. Now, on Wednesday, August 26, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a recall notice on 24,900 pounds of chicken.
The event reportedly impacts foodservice businesses in New England—namely, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) says two separate frozen, not-ready-to-eat Buffalo chicken-flavored products from Boston-based Shanghai Ravioli Corporation, Inc. are being pulled.
Why is the recall happening?
FSIS surveillance reportedly found that products named as “Buffalo chicken rangoon” and “Benedetto’s Buffalo chicken mozzarella sticks.” The products apparently have “false marks of inspection” with “EST. 18004.”
The cited reason suggests the matter may follow a recent trend, in which the USDA is suddenly clamping down on imported foods. An industry trade site refers to Shanghai Ravioli Corporation as a “distributor of pasta and other goods,” which means they could be involved in importing.
The FSIS’s image of the products does not show a country of origin.
Sources have explained that animal-sourced foods brought in from foreign countries need to be inspected once they reach the U.S. side. Other recent USDA recalls for the same reason affected soup and bacon, both from Canada.
What’s the risk?
Wednesday’s FSIS announcement states, “Food produced without inspection may contain undeclared allergens, harmful bacteria, or other contaminants that put consumer health and safety at risk.”
The FSIS lists the recall as a Class I, which they deem as a high or medium risk. This ranking is used when “there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.”
The agency says it urges businesses not to serve the product and to discard or return them to the place of purchase.
The scale of modern industrial food is really hard to comprehend. in the US the per-capita lbs for chicken in 104 annually. That's 36 _billion_ lbs annually.
This is important, I'm glad some one caught it... it's also kind of a nothing burger
Its only a nothing burger if its a benign reason for the recall. Otherwise, 25,000lb is enough chicken to make a lot of people sick. People might eat a lot of chicken every year, but it only takes 1 bad meal.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was woke nonsense that’s being rightfully combated by common sense now.
Anyone complaining about all the food safety issues popping up actually hates capitalism and shouldn’t be allowed to participate in government. This is just capitalism at work and the market will sort out who is or is not willing to pay less for chronic diarrhea vs those willing to pay a premium for clean food.
Don’t take away the people’s choice in how much diarrhea they want.
I don't wanna pretend to be some expert, but i think the contention is that they were gutted so resources are sparse for inspections, leading to higher recall numbers.
I am also hesitant to really invest feelings into anything i see posted over and over like this though, and assume its intentionally being pumped, so I'd wanna see more actual numbers to prove its actually an uptick compared to normal. I remember having to get rid of some carrots just a few years ago personally, Chipotle seems to have some sort of e coli lettuce issue every couple years, none of these single events shock me.
Oh no! Surely under capitalism the competition from other producers would ensure that such a thing could never happen. Surely this is a freak event /s
Many commenters have pointed it out, but it's such an important point that it needs to be repeated every time. Capitalism without effective regulation has never worked out in all of human history. In the absence of an entity with a big enough stick (aka the government), overt or covert methods of collusion always emerge which leads to a race to the bottom.
Sadly for the Americans, approximately a third are so far down the path of 'govt bad' indoctrination that they need to relearn the lesson every couple of generations. Unfortunately for the rest of us, that third holds outsized political power due to the voting system.
This post is not of sufficient quality for this board and I hope it's not emblematic of a trend.
Thehealthy.com is not a real news outlet and this isn't real news. 25klbs of chicken is an infinitesimal amount of total consumed in the US.
When it comes to food contamination, even an infinitesimal quantity is noteworthy. Tbh many posts on this board are relatively low quality (and/or AI generated) but still spark interesting discussion.
> infinitesimal quantity
I have some expired salsa in my fridge. Where is CNN when I have such noteworthy news?
Seriously though this like a single weekend sale at one Walmart. This is barely even noteworthy local news in a small town.
The Boston-based "Shanghai Ravioli Corporation, Inc." selling buffalo wild chicken wings...
That's a wild combination of words there.
The FDA was already in bad shape as far as inspections go. In 'The Secret Life of Groceries' (published in 2020) I believe the statistic was that the people responsible for keeping our food system safe only have the capacity to inspect around 5% of domestic agricultural and food processing operations nation-wide. That speaks more to the amount and size of agri-business in the United States than the FDA's capacity, but it also doesn't mean great things for the federal government's ability to preemptively intervene in most cases.
DOGE cuts to FDA, HHS, FSIC, FTC, EPA, and more have inevitably made this problem much worse.
> I believe the statistic was that the people responsible for keeping our food system safe only have the capacity to inspect around 5% of domestic agricultural and food processing operations nation-wide.
Over what time period? If they can inspect 5% in a year, that's not too bad.
Keep in mind that if they inspect without notice and do it randomly, companies have a decent incentive to keep things working in order. If serious issues are found, a given plant can be shut down for months, which if you're small enough, means you go out of business.
I don't know what a "good" number is - that would involve statistics. I'd imagine it should be more than 5%, but not something like 35% - that's quite high.
Each facility expecting to be inspected, on average, once every 20 years is really not great.
If you're a company that has 20 facilities, all run in more or less the same way, it means you expect to be checked every year.
As I said: 5% may be too low. But perhaps 20% would be good/great.
25,000 lbs is .0000007% of the 35,000,000,000 lbs of chicken consumed in the US each year.
OP really should have just shared the USDA website annoucment[1]. Regardless this comment reminds me of a fictitious but expositiory scene from a Theodore Roosvelt Documentry. Where he served a steak dinner to a bunch of food lobbyist and read the excepts from the Jungle. It might be a shockingly small amount but for the 20K people eating bad meat it matters, and having tainted/uninspected meat floating about is bad. These are not computers that are facing downtime they are people. People who could be subjected to crippling food born illiness. I commend the adminstration (a rare occurrence but earned)
[1] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/shanghai-ravioli-co...
Fun story: for my final project in my high school junior-year history+literature class, I did the same: my friends and I grilled and served hotdogs to our class, and then proceeded to read the chapter of The Jungle that describes all manner of foul material falling into the sausage machinery. The reactions of my classmates still makes me grin 30 years on.
Half of a single truckload
Thank you! This was the very first question that popped into my head. My gut said it had to be a fraction. I did not realize just how small a fraction.
from those numbers it's actually 0.00007%. you missed shifting the decimal by two places when converting to a percentage.
Comparing it to the amount of chicken consumed in a year seems disingenuous. How long does chicken last after it's slaughtered? The meaningful number you could have provided is what % of the current chicken stock is contaminated.
35 Billion lbs of chicken? 100 lbs of chicken per person per year?
Dayummmmm!
Yeah came here to say this. Drop in the bucket.
Enough to make 50k very sick. Not a problem.
Can we stop pretending people health is insignificant because it is statistically insignificant?
How many people will consume this, how many people will get sick?
How many more product will be dangerous. Are we waiting for more death to just have bare minimum safety measures?
>How many people will consume this, how many people will get sick?
This can't be inferred from the 0.00007% figure? Or are you hoping to use the rhetorical tactic of doing "huge number * small percentage = big number" to shock readers? eg. "0.0001% chance of getting stuck by lightning * all americans = 300 people per year hit by lightning. That's enough to fill an auditorium!"
Let us know when you've completed construction of your perfect world.
You mean drop in the clucket.
Might be a family bucket.
Oh hey, that's the same percentage as the new-hire equity grant for most SWE roles nowadays!
So let's see, in the past few years we've had the Boar's head listeria recalls, Taylor farms lettuce contamination, the McDonalds e.coli recalls in 14 states, now chicken wings...
Defunding the FDA and forcing out 4500 staff via DOGE cuts caused this. Right now we have 400 safety inspectors covering 36,000 facilities vs the FDA's own estimates they need at least 1,500 inspectors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/health/food-safety-trump-...
Don't worry! They're going to relax the rules on small scale meat processing allowing it to occur at facilities that rarely if ever see an inspector, surely this will make everything better. You can be certain the people of America will be healthier than ever after this amazing initiative.
https://news.google.com/search?q=usa+meat+processing
The guy in charge of all of this has eaten road kill and rotting carcasses and he appears to be completely fine. I'm sure there will not be any issues.
Part of his eugenics-adjacent philosophy: survival of the fittest. Basically the opposite of the mission of the department he leads (public health)
Give it another six months and they'll introduce phrenology for the diagnosis of psychological conditions.
Then when he gets sick, it'll either be kept secret or attributed to nefarious agents of Goldstein seeking to undermine Big Brother.
I couldn't possibly be the statistical outcome of like chicken with regular bacteria, oh no...
> survival of the fittest. Basically the opposite of the mission of the department he leads (public health)
Essentially Ron Swanson minus the satire
Chase that road kill with some raw milk.
s/guy/worm/
> he appears to be completely fine.
Yup, looks fine, sounds fine... wait
Isn't one of the main problems with meat factories that they're processing such an insane number of animals a day, which contributes massively to dirtiness?
Not to excuse the idea that they shouldn't be inspected, of course.
>You can be certain the people of America will be healthier than ever after this amazing initiative.
Naturally. Only the strong survive!
High-T, low E. coli!
It's wild how in America at least, the people have to relearn the same lessons every generation or two. It turns out, some regulations are actually beneficial to a society. Maybe don't take a chainsaw to the groups who implement and look after these regulations.
The destruction is the whole point. In a way we are in the shock therapy era of the US, experiencing what Russia went through post-USSR, which resulted in massive corruption, wealth inequality, and development of an authoritarian regime.
Definitely feels very ironic
> At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. - Lincoln.
From the same speech where Lincoln then warned that a tyrant could overtake the U.S. political system from within...
Not American but some of your 19th century politicians where spectacular orators.
https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
Quoting Eric Schlosser: "there's shit in the meat"
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2207547-fast-food-nati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Food_Nation
Hell, it's not even as long as every generation or two. Its every four or eight years
You're missing the point. The efficacy of these regulatory bodies are not a concern for those controlling them. Those individuals have the means to isolate themselves from anything that might negatively affect the rest of us hogs, and they get to collect the spoils. They're just ripping the copper wiring out of the walls.
Americans don’t bother to read or learn from history
Americans are not uniquely ignorant. American ignorance is just blasted out to the entire world to see.
I try to walk a tricky path with foreign critics: Yes, your criticism is mostly valid, but please please do not think "it can't happen in my country", because I remember when I thought that too.
This infection on the body politic can and has jumped to infect others, and does not require an abnormally weak host to attack, and overconfidence is a kind of weakness.
That's true. They are uniquely proud of their ignorance though. It is, as they say, the best -- the greatest. No one does it better. I mean, did you know that dumb was spelled with a -b at the end?
I don't know any who are. You sure you haven't just seen a few videos that were circulated online specifically because of how insane they were, or something?
Am American; have always been.
I'm not proud of this stupid fucking bullshit, at all.
This is true, although it’s true for most if not all developed societies. People read less and less. We live in a post-literate, hyper-visual era. I am not sure if short form video is effective at educating people on why we have public health and food inspection agencies, but I confess I’m not optimistic.
Video seems spectacularly promising, especially for those that cannot read, which has been a pretty high percentage historically. But it's not being done right. Nobody would rather watch a video called Food Regulations in the US when they could watch 100 Minecraft Players Compete for A Bar of Literal Gold or whatever
We don't have to relearn the concept, we just have a bunch of dumb idiots who we have to fight off every couple years and we often lose because a critical segment of people cannot remember what happened last time, don't understand anything, or are evil.
This isn’t a relearning it’s a power struggle. We’ve known this the whole time but a bunch of people who value power over the health of the nation want it the other way. They have power now so the rest of us have to suffer. This is what they mean when they say empathy is weakness — without empathy they can count their money and not have to feel bad about how they came by it. They just make a proclamation, move some data on a spreadsheet, and more money starts flowing in. That poors in some backwater consequently start shitting blood is of no concern.
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.
Could gone to some great parties.
Did that instead.
— Elon Musk
You don't have to go back years, months will do.
There are more than you listed as well, like the raspberries https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/outbrea...
Sounds to me like the USDA is working as intended: they caught a company doing shady stuff and forced a recall.
Are you really trying to spin your own narrative here, using cherry-picked data and your own link as "evidence"?
The Boar's Head *and* McDonalds outbreaks were in 2024 under the previous admin, way before DOGE, completely undermining this sneed.
I don't really know if this is the cause. But the whole DOGE thing sounded highly irresponsible. Did they understand what they were cutting. Furthermore, there may be even worst consequences in the more distant future.
DOGE carefully cut:
- NLRB which was investigating employees fired as retaliation for criticizing Musk's actions
- OFCCP which was auditing Tesla for workplace discrimination
- EEOC which had sued Tesla for racial harassment and discrimination
- Five separate Inspectors General who were investigating Musk's companies
- NHTSA which has forced Tesla to perform recalls
- CFPB which had proposed rules that would cover Musk's planned payment product
- USDA (specifically the person investigating Neuralink)
- FDA - also the people investigating Neuralink
- SEC, FTC, and NOAA - again, those with Musk related business were cut
I am not saying that Musk bribed his way into killing nearly all of the regulatory actions he was facing ... but I am not NOT saying that either.
It's pretty clear that DOGE had a lot to do with consolidation of power, and very little to do with cost cutting.
> Did they understand what they were cutting.
No, they were using llm prompts to make decisions.
They absolutely understood exactly what they were doing. They're stupid, but they're not STUPID. Don't let them excuse malice by faking incompetence
> using cherry-picked data and your own link as "evidence"?
“Your own link”? Do you think the poster you’re replying to is The New York Times?
> Defunding the FDA and forcing out 4500 staff via DOGE cuts caused this.
This is great news because it means time travel is possible.
Funny. Two of OP’s events are prior to the DOGE cuts so they could not be causative.
But these panics are so amusing. Pete’s breaking the trains. Hegseth (was it him?) is crashing the planes. RFK’s eating the infected meat. The Haitians are eating the cats and dogs. We need a prediction market for the next panic.
The USDA was the one to issue this recall. Inadequate number of inspectors would make recalls go down not up.
These problems will surface whenever they get big enough, whatever size the agency is.
As an extreme, if there was one single guy in charge you'd still get recalls every time a problem reaches national levels, and you could get a lot of them.
Increasing inspectors and making the agency do more will help deal with issues before they reach that level (that's also assuming regulations are favorable to their job...), potentially lowering the number of wide range recalls they have to call for.
No this makes no sense. Like, I can see where you were thinking, but it's just wrong with the USDA because of how different problems at different points are handled.
When an inspector in a plant notices a problem, like an employee not following hygiene rules, that doesn't trigger a recall, because that's not enough evidence of unsafe product. They usually issue a "Noncompliance Record", which the plant is required to resolve.
Inspections aren't usually the trigger for a recall! If an inspection surfaces evidence of an active health hazard, like some biological test comes back with a pathogen, that could trigger a recall.
Here, the facility was flagrantly violating the law in it's entirety. Unless they were somehow doing this on accident, they have been operating fraudulently. This recall is because this product was not inspected at all, and so via the precautionary principle, and also as a somewhat punitive action, the product has to be recalled.
More frequent inspections could only have caught this earlier. More frequent inspections will cause more problems to be Noncompliance that gets fixed rather than a problem persisting until it makes someone sick and that actually triggers a recall.
Inspections prevent recalls. Few inspections allow problems to escalate to recalls.
Worse is that we ended up with an oligpoly of 3 foreign owned meat packing conglomerates.
Who owns them matters less than whether they ever get inspected.
It will take decades to undo the damage - the blame is most certainly diffuse here.
They have permanent on site inspectors, which is a contributing factor to consolidation. Whether the inspection is worth anything is a different matter.
And industry is wholesale enjoying the gross drop in QA. I feel like at this point lawsuits need to happen to provide an alternative counter to the urge to drop costs in QA.
These businesses earnestly do not care until it affects their bottom line
In order to have grounds for those lawsuits you'll need to show damages first, ie people need to die.
I honestly feel that we living in twilight zone in the United States.
The FSIS, a branch of the USDA (not the FDA: for the difference in jurisdiction see https://www.fda.gov/media/172542/download), found this problem, according to the original article. The food from the Shanghai Ravioli Company had false inspection marks and no country of origin, much like an earlier case of food imported from Canada.
> The products apparently have “false marks of inspection” with “EST. 18004.”
Nothing in the article suggests that budget cuts had anything to do with this. USDA safety inspectors doing their job found yet another foreign company failing to protect American health. DOGE and the FDA had nothing to do with this story, but the parent poster felt obliged to make political statements without reading the article, which happens frequently here.
It sounds bad when you only point out the recent examples, but overall the recalls haven't increased under Trump.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2026/08/28/food-r...
One might be tempted to wave the numbers away as "Obviously there are fewer recalls, because they don't do inspections to begin with!"
That might be true. It's hard to prove or disprove, though. Perhaps if we look at the statistics on the other end, the actual hospitalizations from tainted food?
I mean it’s literally quoted in your link
> “The number of recalls does not necessarily correlate with the level of surveillance,” said Robert Custard, an environmental health expert who also represents the West Virginia Association of Sanitarians. “Some years you're going to have more than others because of the luck of the draw. This year you may have less total recalls, but the cyclospora outbreak that we had this summer may have the highest number of human cases for any foodborne outbreak in recent history.”
Custard, who worked at the Virginia Department of Health for more than two decades, said cuts to public health staffing and funding can mean fewer people are available to inspect and test possible food-safety problems before they cause illness.
"When you do less testing, you're going to find less problems," Custard said. "When you find less problems, you end up with fewer recalls."
>"When you do less testing, you're going to find less problems," Custard said. "When you find less problems, you end up with fewer recalls."
This isn't necessarily true though. Issues found by inspection only occasionally lead to recalls. Most of the time, it's minor corrective action (called a noncompliance record) like "An employee wasn't following sanitation rule X, show us that you are properly training your employees to follow sanitation rule X".
This recall is not driven by a food safety concern! It's mildly punitive, and is done to encourage trust. Just like that time costco had to throw away a truck full of butter over a labeling issue, the American food system works very hard to ensure that certain labels on food mean something, so that consumers can make informed decisions in the supermarket and therefore have a semi-functional free market experience.
Recalls happen from positive evidence of a pathogen, from reported illness, or from noncompliant product. If you have no inspections, then companies may normalization of deviance their way to less safe products, which can cause more illness, which would cause more recalls.
Fewer inspections could only lead to fewer recalls if the majority of recalls are labeling issues or otherwise never would have caused illness.
Just like Trump's solution to COVID testing: don't test and the numbers are 0!
Reasonable take, source provided, yet downvoted. I have a boatload of issues with Trump admin, but the stats here are hard to dispute. I guess it's just making news more now.
No it’s an asinine take when you stop and think. People were fired, agencies were thrown in disarray, there’s constant reports of them fudging numbers or just straight up not doing the work to collect the actual numbers, and you want to try and pretend this is reasonable?
This is conjecture. Right now the stats simply don't reflect it. If there's evidence of corner cutting leading to rising reports of recalls or foodborne illness outbreaks, I'll certainly reconsider.
You’re right, we should totally give them the benefit of the doubt!!
https://www.notus.org/trump-white-house/federal-data-is-disa...
> “The status quo was, the federal government is going to collect and disseminate data and statistics,” said John Kubale, a University of Michigan professor who helps direct the world’s largest archive of social science research data, including sensitive U.S. federal government data. “That is no longer a reasonable assumption.”
A sane person would "reconsider" upon recalling that it was Trump who said, "We'd have fewer COVID cases if we'd just stop testing so much."
But it sounds like you need more of a push than that.
Is there evidence to suggest that inspections or shortage of them cause this? Why wouldn’t it be instead a need to cut corners and produce food differently, or anything else?
Per TFA less than one truck load of imported chicken is being recalled across 5 states that are small enough one delivery driver probably hits three of them in a single route because the importer got caught falsifying their paperwork.
Your comment and all the speculative piling on it spawned look kinda silly in light of this context.
I remember this happening similarly during Trump 1.
If that's true, the opposition should make them pay a political price for it. That's how a competitive political system should work.
Yet almost always I hear nothing or almost nothing from the Democrats, not about Taylor Farms either. It's been that way for many years; I can't understand it.
If someone doesn't pay a political price for bad performance, they will keep doing it.
It's as if the fourth estate is bought and paid for by a side that directly benefits from these kind of money extracting policies
Every day something happens that would have been on the daily news for weeks under Obama, but nobody cares because it's Trump. Part of it is media bias, where the right doesn't talk about this stuff because it makes them look bad, and the left doesn't talk about it because they are afraid of being called biased, but I also think it's just too damn much.
Everything about this administration is so unhinged, from DOGE to Lake Ontario to Iran to Greenland to taxes to shooting people in the streets to literally every god damned thing that we have absolutely no framework for even conceptualizing what the hell is happening.
Also, half the country lives in a bubble where Trump is anointed by god and saving the country from trans vegan child rapists.
That's a descriptive approach; I'm talking about why.
The FDA has been failing to complete inspections on multiple types of facilities (drug and food) for a long time, since at least 2018, and it seems to have deep issues with its staff, culture, and/or management:
https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/01/14/as-foodborne-illne...
https://medshadow.org/investigating-generics/fda-fails-in-la...
The big Boar's Head listeria recalls were in Summer 2024, before Trump was elected, before Doge existed...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boars-head-listeria-recall-bug-...
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/boars-head-provisio...
The fact that those problems occurred prior to Doge underscores the stupidity of Doge cutting FDA resources.
“I’m right either way”
The solution is very clearly neither deregulation nor defunding regulatory agencies.
Why not? If the agency is doing a poor job you might be better of defunding it or disbanding, or forcing smarter, cheaper, more efficient testing. If money fixed problems we'd have great schools and great health care.
Money does fix those problems.
The problem is that the money that could be used is being applied to the wrong problem or is being siphoned off by those whose only goal is accumulation of money since that accumulation might guarantee more power in the process of selecting how to direct the next cash infusion, which they also hope to accumulate.
The other issue is that looking into both standard and "Major" recalls by the FDA this year isn't statistically different from any other. In fact there's no overall trend going back years, it mostly seems to be media coverage and the (understandable) rage and frustration with the current admin. It's still a shame to see so many people on HN thoughtlessly repeat a media narrative without considering the stats though.
McDonalds was October 2024 too.
Let's not let facts and real data get in the way though. Every post is being massively downvoted.
Firing USDA inspectors etc. is definitely directionally stupid. But yeah, this issue is preexisting. A huge portion of USGov’s rules and regulations were written in response to the social push when stuff like The Jungle was hitting the public perception—which is to say, when public health could be meaningfully improved by a simple non-magnified visual inspection of meat destined for sale. And so that’s what we get: a visual inspection of meat destined for sale.
Say what you will about the overall regulatory environment of Canada and the EU—you can buy meat there and know that you will not get salmonella, because it’s been tested for salmonella, and it won’t be sold for consumption if that test is positive. Stateside we’re just told: well, cook it properly or it’s on you.
> Canada and the EU—you can buy meat there and know that you will not get salmonella
Where can I locate this Salmonella-immune Bizarro Canada and Bizarro EU on a map?
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/04/ongoing-salmonella-ou...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/90-confirmed-salmonell...
https://www.foodpoisoningnews.com/salmonella-outbreak-in-can...
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/08/polish-eggs-linked-to...
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2025/10/salmonella-sickens-50...
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/04/one-dead-in-german-sa...
Interesting -- I stand at least in part corrected. It _is_ the case that there's regulations intended specifically to address this. It seems they're not 100% effective, though.
What gets me about your linked cases is that, with one exception, they're all to foods that you'd consume without further preparation or cooking. Not sure what to make of that--but it's not what you'd expect for a salmonella source.
Salmonella is destroyed by heat.
That's why you should thoroughly cook your food, especially if you have a weakened immune system.
Eggs get recalled for Salmonella because we like them sunny side-up.
Salmonella in ready-to-eat foods, introduced by cross-contamination, is a different story.
When I saw the EST. 18004 in the article I thought the inspection stamps were bad ai attempts, but after some research I found out the EST here is not supposed to be a year, but the id of the establishment being inspected. You can look up the number or the company and see no entries here https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/fsis-inspected-establis...
I wonder who they’re going to blame and tariff for this.
A chicken in every pot and china is going to pay for it!
I recall there was a farmer trying to sue over the USDA Organic rating. From what I recall, if something is produced outside the US and they apply the label, the USDA takes them at their word and does not actually test it.
Why do they keep letting Tyson's frozen garbage through? The processed chicken "honey tenders" are great but most of the supposedly less processed frozen chicken I have bought from them recently has been nasty.
I’ve purchased entire packs of “boneless skinless thigh” from Tyson which after opening had all the bones and all the skin. I cannot for a minute understand how that passed inspection.
In any case organics seem to be both less brined (aka not paying for salt water) and well prepared, everytime.
That seems like process error rate. Inspection, as far as I know, samples output and checks processes. But inspected processes also have error rates. That’s how it goes. So the pack you got probably was not “inspected” in the sense that no human laid critical eyes on it and its contents till you.
Because low quality food or bad tasting food is not a health hazard (well, not a health hazard under the USDA's purview. The population being too fat is HHS's job)
Tyson and Purdue have the occasional problem that causes a recall, like everyone else. In a system like this, some background noise of recalls is expected and normal and not indicative of a problem. For example, this recall is about a labeling issue, and while the USDA is calling this a high risk recall, that's because recalling improperly labeled food is done to encourage trust in food labels, which America does really well, except for all the bullshit terms companies put on food that have no legal definition.
You are supposed to be able to buy from a different company if you think Tyson chicken is shitty, which it is, but for some reason the people who say that's how it's supposed to work keep letting Tyson buy all the other companies that sell chicken products.
Step one is basically just never buy chicken breast. Chicken breast often has some white stripes on it, which is a result of chicken breast essentially being forced to grow bigger than it naturally would. This is known to make the chicken taste bad and have a bad texture, but Americans are bad at paying attention to anything that can't be turned into a simple numerical metric, like price per pound.
Chicken thigh won't develop that striping.
It's like when your enemy undermines your logistics in a game. It's an attack, but not a direct attack. If you attack directly you might get called the aggressor.
There's also currently a recall of 30,000 pounds of Argentina beef at the same time Trump announced they would be increasing the allowed imports of Argentina beef and are relaxing beef import regulations so that they can undercut American ranchers.
~5000 chickens if anyone cares :(
I feel safer eating food in a central American country than I do in the united states right now.
I spent a week in Cancun, ate everything I could find that was busy on the side of the road where the locals were eating, and was absolutely fine.
No running water and no toilets were fairly common in a lot of the smaller places.
Never got sick once.
George Carlin: you are all diseased …
Interesting comments here. I've never lived in a time when there weren't news stories about food recalls. I don't think they can be used as data, though. They don't tell me anything about wether the US food supply is worse than it was last year, or 10 years ago, or if its standing in the world is rising or falling.
Are we not interested in science and reason here?
The site is fairly politically polarized. However it is not a very large subset participating. Strategically blocking users using a Chrome extension can help you maintain epistemic hygiene. The comments section I see is much sparser and much less prone (though not immune) to human impersonation of robots.
i.e. create a personal bubble to avoid being exposed to alternative points of view. We’ve seen how well that has been working out.
I enjoy forums, so I prioritize spam filtering to preserve signal to noise. Others may prefer to read every cialis ad. I think these two extremes and everyone in between can coexist on the same forum, but in order to do so it helps to have adequately tuned filters customizable on a personal level. In more detail if you care to: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Overmod#Philosophy
I was primarily motivated to do this by repetitive commentary which is indistinguishable from bot content, and I continue to be motivated by this.
Curating your news is part of healthy media consumption. You literally connect consume all news. There is too much, and once you find an unreliable source, its generally best avoided.
I agree with you. I simply took umbrage with the characterization of other human beings with different points of view as “bots”.
It’s really no different than the cringy characterization of other humans as “NPCs” often spouted by children. That thinking indicates a sort of complex that is very off-putting.
Given that, this person would likely benefit from exposure to alternative viewpoints instead of further insulating themselves.
It's Friday, so probably a lot of the more well adjusted human beings are a little busy living life.
But yeah, good god people are being absurd.
However, there was similar absurdity a couple years ago, when an article about Costco having to dump a truckload of butter because it was mislabled, with everyone coming out of the woodwork to decry it as obvious government waste making us all poorer.
Which was insane of course. It was one truckload, just like here, and improperly labeled, just like here.
The US system takes the sanctity of product labeling extremely seriously, because the intent is that you can trust the label, and therefore make informed free market decisions! Strictly regulated labeling is a great way to reduce the information asymmetry between producer and consumer, and help keep a market competitive!
The reality is that nobody here is any better or worse than the average on any website that doesn't make you take a test before you can post. That was always true, but it's getting a little noisy. Notice how there is in fact pushback in this comments section to those running wild with assertions and bullshit, and those comments are getting downvoted to oblivion.
That is new and utterly toxic.
How many in this comment section even noticed that this is not safety related?
Are you familiar with the concept of cause and effect? Are you aware of any major changes to these agencies in the past couple years?
I’ll leave the rest as an exercise to you.
inb4 correlation is not causation.
Let's see some stats on frequency of recalls over the years rather than relying on perfectly reliable human perception and never biased news headline frequency.
That is a perfectly reasonable request.
Is it reasonable to trust statistics provided by the current administration?
Do we need statistics by the administration? Look at the numbers of FDA recalls. And if you think recalls are happening less often, look for food poisoning cases too.
Awkward prose of GenAI.
Speaking of supply chain security breaches...
Maybe eating ultra processed frozen meat products wasn't such a good idea in the first place. Sad that some may have to learn the hard way.
Ah yes, blame the victim for their decision while also attempting to moralize the consumption of frozen food.
It’s not unreasonable for people to expect their food not to poison them. Have you considered being less sociopathic?
You import it illegally, you eat it.
Time to break up Big Food.
It's a good thing Elon cut out all those useless bureaucrats and boosted the economy! The dow is doing great! People should learn to eat the dow instead of chicken.
that's not very much chicken at all.
Remember when the food was safe in America; it was 2024.
You mean the year of the Taylor's Farms tainted supply of onions to McDonald's, and the Boar's head recall?
This adds nothing of intellectual merit to the conversation but Pearlmania500 has become my spirit animal in this regard: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GlXFO6Wfcic
Food is getting so bad, you should just paste the article:
The reason echoes a recent issue the USDA has been following—one that's becoming peculiarly common.
If you’re wondering what has been going on with our food, you’re one of millions. Now, on Wednesday, August 26, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a recall notice on 24,900 pounds of chicken.
The event reportedly impacts foodservice businesses in New England—namely, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) says two separate frozen, not-ready-to-eat Buffalo chicken-flavored products from Boston-based Shanghai Ravioli Corporation, Inc. are being pulled. Why is the recall happening?
FSIS surveillance reportedly found that products named as “Buffalo chicken rangoon” and “Benedetto’s Buffalo chicken mozzarella sticks.” The products apparently have “false marks of inspection” with “EST. 18004.”
The cited reason suggests the matter may follow a recent trend, in which the USDA is suddenly clamping down on imported foods. An industry trade site refers to Shanghai Ravioli Corporation as a “distributor of pasta and other goods,” which means they could be involved in importing.
The FSIS’s image of the products does not show a country of origin.
Sources have explained that animal-sourced foods brought in from foreign countries need to be inspected once they reach the U.S. side. Other recent USDA recalls for the same reason affected soup and bacon, both from Canada. What’s the risk?
Wednesday’s FSIS announcement states, “Food produced without inspection may contain undeclared allergens, harmful bacteria, or other contaminants that put consumer health and safety at risk.”
The FSIS lists the recall as a Class I, which they deem as a high or medium risk. This ranking is used when “there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.”
The agency says it urges businesses not to serve the product and to discard or return them to the place of purchase.
Buffalo chicken rangoon is a pretty crazy bit of work recall notwithstanding.
"Benedetto’s Buffalo chicken mozzarella sticks" is pretty insane too.
TBF, there are current problems with imported chicken products elsewhere.
This is the dumbest article on the front page of HN I've seen in awhile.
Are there bots on here now upvoting stupid nonsense?
> Boston-based Shanghai Ravioli Corporation
lol
I don't recall signing up to live in a Neal Stephenson novel.
I like mine with New York City based Philadelphia Cream Cheese
“They could be involved in importing”
The scale of modern industrial food is really hard to comprehend. in the US the per-capita lbs for chicken in 104 annually. That's 36 _billion_ lbs annually.
This is important, I'm glad some one caught it... it's also kind of a nothing burger
Its only a nothing burger if its a benign reason for the recall. Otherwise, 25,000lb is enough chicken to make a lot of people sick. People might eat a lot of chicken every year, but it only takes 1 bad meal.
Elon Musk has so much blood on his hands for this and USAID
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was woke nonsense that’s being rightfully combated by common sense now.
Anyone complaining about all the food safety issues popping up actually hates capitalism and shouldn’t be allowed to participate in government. This is just capitalism at work and the market will sort out who is or is not willing to pay less for chronic diarrhea vs those willing to pay a premium for clean food.
Don’t take away the people’s choice in how much diarrhea they want.
Nice one, Poe would be proud
The karma on this comment varying between positive and negative every few minutes would seem to agree.
Elon musk and Trump should be held responsible for all this. We should have more regulation on food safety.
Instead government is focused on banning name on vegan burgers and other stupid things.
We do have regulation on food and safety and the recall is because of those parameters.
I don't wanna pretend to be some expert, but i think the contention is that they were gutted so resources are sparse for inspections, leading to higher recall numbers. I am also hesitant to really invest feelings into anything i see posted over and over like this though, and assume its intentionally being pumped, so I'd wanna see more actual numbers to prove its actually an uptick compared to normal. I remember having to get rid of some carrots just a few years ago personally, Chipotle seems to have some sort of e coli lettuce issue every couple years, none of these single events shock me.
The party of "personal responsibility" literally never hold themselves accountable for anything. It's always someone else's fault.
Oh no! Surely under capitalism the competition from other producers would ensure that such a thing could never happen. Surely this is a freak event /s
Many commenters have pointed it out, but it's such an important point that it needs to be repeated every time. Capitalism without effective regulation has never worked out in all of human history. In the absence of an entity with a big enough stick (aka the government), overt or covert methods of collusion always emerge which leads to a race to the bottom.
Sadly for the Americans, approximately a third are so far down the path of 'govt bad' indoctrination that they need to relearn the lesson every couple of generations. Unfortunately for the rest of us, that third holds outsized political power due to the voting system.