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.

>You can be certain the people of America will be healthier than ever after this amazing initiative.

Naturally. Only the strong survive!

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

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

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

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.

> 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?

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.

[dead]

Who owns them matters less than whether they ever get inspected.

In order to have grounds for those lawsuits you'll need to show damages first, ie people need to die.

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."

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.

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.

The fact that those problems occurred prior to Doge underscores the stupidity of Doge cutting FDA resources.

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.