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Discussion (114 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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-...
https://news.google.com/search?q=usa+meat+processing
Naturally. Only the strong survive!
Definitely feels very ironic
From the same speech where Lincoln then warned that a tyrant could overtake the U.S. political system from within...
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2207547-fast-food-nati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Food_Nation
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
There are more than you listed as well, like the raspberries https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/outbrea...
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.
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.
This is great news because it means time travel is possible.
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 businesses earnestly do not care until it affects their bottom line
Your comment and all the speculative piling on it spawned look kinda silly in light of this context.
HN is so worthless now.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boars-head-listeria-recall-bug-...
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/boars-head-provisio...
Let's not let facts and real data get in the way though. Every post is being massively downvoted.
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.
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?
> “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."
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.
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.
https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/01/14/as-foodborne-illne...
https://medshadow.org/investigating-generics/fda-fails-in-la...
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?
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!"
DOGE cuts to FDA, HHS, FSIC, FTC, EPA, and more have inevitably made this problem much worse.
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.
That's a wild combination of words there.
In any case organics seem to be both less brined (aka not paying for salt water) and well prepared, everytime.
No running water and no toilets were fairly common in a lot of the smaller places.
Never got sick once.
It’s not unreasonable for people to expect their food not to poison them. Have you considered being less sociopathic?
Are we not interested in science and reason here?
I’ll leave the rest as an exercise to you.
inb4 correlation is not causation.
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.
lol
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.
This is important, I'm glad some one caught it... it's also kind of a nothing burger
Instead government is focused on banning name on vegan burgers and other stupid things.