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.
rjsw · 2026-08-28 20:06:08 UTC
TBF, there are current problems with imported chicken products elsewhere.
dotspec · 2026-08-28 20:32:55 UTC
Buffalo chicken rangoon is a pretty crazy bit of work recall notwithstanding.
riffraff · 2026-08-28 20:40:46 UTC
"Benedetto’s Buffalo chicken mozzarella sticks" is pretty insane too.
loloquwowndueo · 2026-08-28 20:10:46 UTC
I wonder who they’re going to blame and tariff for this.
IncreasePosts · 2026-08-28 20:15:57 UTC
A chicken in every pot and china is going to pay for it!
lovich · 2026-08-28 20:11:24 UTC
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.
Atreiden · 2026-08-28 20:29:04 UTC
Nice one, Poe would be proud
lovich · 2026-08-28 20:58:58 UTC
The karma on this comment varying between positive and negative every few minutes would seem to agree.
randycupertino · 2026-08-28 20:21:51 UTC
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.
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?
nazgulsenpai · 2026-08-28 20:42:58 UTC
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.
bix6 · 2026-08-28 20:57:49 UTC
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?
nazgulsenpai · 2026-08-28 21:08:51 UTC
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.
bix6 · 2026-08-28 21:18:32 UTC
You’re right, we should totally give them the benefit of the doubt!!
> “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.”
CamperBob2 · 2026-08-28 22:29:05 UTC
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.
bix6 · 2026-08-28 20:54:50 UTC
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."
bakies · 2026-08-28 21:05:47 UTC
Just like Trump's solution to COVID testing: don't test and the numbers are 0!
mrguyorama · 2026-08-28 23:02:10 UTC
>"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.
mmooss · 2026-08-28 20:30:38 UTC
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.
CursedSilicon · 2026-08-28 20:41:25 UTC
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
InsideOutSanta · 2026-08-28 21:07:10 UTC
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.
mmooss · 2026-08-28 22:29:10 UTC
That's a descriptive approach; I'm talking about why.
gnuplustoejam · 2026-08-28 20:31:32 UTC
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.
MyHonestOpinon · 2026-08-28 20:42:33 UTC
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.
shepardrtc · 2026-08-28 22:19:20 UTC
> Did they understand what they were cutting.
No, they were using llm prompts to make decisions.
soniczentropy · 2026-08-28 23:14:20 UTC
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
porkpieshoe · 2026-08-28 22:31:36 UTC
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.
jrflowers · 2026-08-28 23:25:36 UTC
> 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?
WillPostForFood · 2026-08-28 20:32:04 UTC
The big Boar's Head listeria recalls were in Summer 2024, before Trump was elected, before Doge existed...
Let's not let facts and real data get in the way though. Every post is being massively downvoted.
Arubis · 2026-08-28 20:55:41 UTC
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.
gnuplustoejam · 2026-08-28 21:17:05 UTC
> 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?
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.
gnuplustoejam · 2026-08-28 21:53:05 UTC
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.
usefulcat · 2026-08-28 21:02:59 UTC
The fact that those problems occurred prior to Doge underscores the stupidity of Doge cutting FDA resources.
bsian · 2026-08-28 21:36:43 UTC
“I’m right either way”
jknoepfler · 2026-08-28 22:05:14 UTC
The solution is very clearly neither deregulation nor defunding regulatory agencies.
WillPostForFood · 2026-08-28 22:39:18 UTC
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.
doodlebugging · 2026-08-28 23:17:27 UTC
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.
EA-3167 · 2026-08-28 21:18:11 UTC
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.
deepfriedbits · 2026-08-28 20:38:10 UTC
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.
ramgine · 2026-08-28 20:45:12 UTC
Americans don’t bother to read or learn from history
deepfriedbits · 2026-08-28 20:47:53 UTC
Americans are not uniquely ignorant. American ignorance is just blasted out to the entire world to see.
tremon · 2026-08-28 21:17:57 UTC
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?
ssl-3 · 2026-08-28 21:39:45 UTC
Am American; have always been.
I'm not proud of this stupid fucking bullshit, at all.
kulahan · 2026-08-28 22:19:04 UTC
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?
Terr_ · 2026-08-28 21:52:37 UTC
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.
adriand · 2026-08-28 21:01:38 UTC
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.
nancyminusone · 2026-08-28 21:26:38 UTC
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
walrus01 · 2026-08-28 21:07:41 UTC
Quoting Eric Schlosser: "there's shit in the meat"
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.
dgellow · 2026-08-28 21:39:42 UTC
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
noir_lord · 2026-08-28 21:48:47 UTC
> 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.
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
ModernMech · 2026-08-28 21:48:35 UTC
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.
malfist · 2026-08-28 22:22:57 UTC
Hell, it's not even as long as every generation or two. Its every four or eight years
glhaynes · 2026-08-28 22:40:21 UTC
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.
Could gone to some great parties.
Did that instead.
— Elon Musk
wilg · 2026-08-28 22:56:02 UTC
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.
throwaway85825 · 2026-08-28 20:39:34 UTC
Worse is that we ended up with an oligpoly of 3 foreign owned meat packing conglomerates.
vkou · 2026-08-28 20:57:48 UTC
Who owns them matters less than whether they ever get inspected.
antonymoose · 2026-08-28 21:11:47 UTC
It will take decades to undo the damage - the blame is most certainly diffuse here.
throwaway85825 · 2026-08-28 22:34:20 UTC
They have permanent on site inspectors, which is a contributing factor to consolidation. Whether the inspection is worth anything is a different matter.
gnuplustoejam · 2026-08-28 20:40:52 UTC
> Defunding the FDA and forcing out 4500 staff via DOGE cuts caused this.
This is great news because it means time travel is possible.
arjie · 2026-08-28 21:13:49 UTC
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.
bakies · 2026-08-28 20:40:57 UTC
I remember this happening similarly during Trump 1.
walrus01 · 2026-08-28 20:42:47 UTC
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.
>You can be certain the people of America will be healthier than ever after this amazing initiative.
Naturally. Only the strong survive!
Bluestein · 2026-08-28 21:01:57 UTC
High-T, low E. coli!
rjbwork · 2026-08-28 20:52:36 UTC
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.
nielsbot · 2026-08-28 21:03:40 UTC
Part of his eugenics-adjacent philosophy: survival of the fittest. Basically the opposite of the mission of the department he leads (public health)
walrus01 · 2026-08-28 21:04:53 UTC
Give it another six months and they'll introduce phrenology for the diagnosis of psychological conditions.
Terr_ · 2026-08-28 21:46:45 UTC
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...
swed420 · 2026-08-28 22:27:37 UTC
> survival of the fittest. Basically the opposite of the mission of the department he leads (public health)
Essentially Ron Swanson minus the satire
dgellow · 2026-08-28 21:38:10 UTC
s/guy/worm/
cdrnsf · 2026-08-28 22:15:57 UTC
Chase that road kill with some raw milk.
antonvs · 2026-08-28 22:19:41 UTC
> he appears to be completely fine.
Yup, looks fine, sounds fine... wait
kulahan · 2026-08-28 22:17:46 UTC
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.
codegeek · 2026-08-28 21:00:09 UTC
I honestly feel that we living in twilight zone in the United States.
RobRivera · 2026-08-28 21:00:51 UTC
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
onlypassingthru · 2026-08-28 21:25:36 UTC
In order to have grounds for those lawsuits you'll need to show damages first, ie people need to die.
nickff · 2026-08-28 21:05:09 UTC
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:
The USDA was the one to issue this recall. Inadequate number of inspectors would make recalls go down not up.
makeitdouble · 2026-08-28 21:58:05 UTC
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.
mrguyorama · 2026-08-28 22:40:48 UTC
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.
cucumber3732842 · 2026-08-28 21:43:33 UTC
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.
Telemakhos · 2026-08-28 22:08:56 UTC
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.
mannanj · 2026-08-28 22:19:57 UTC
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?
Comments
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.
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.
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-...
There are more than you listed as well, like the raspberries https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/outbrea...
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?
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.”
But it sounds like you need more of a push than that.
> “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."
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.
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.
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.
No, they were using llm prompts to make decisions.
- 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.
“Your own link”? Do you think the poster you’re replying to is The New York Times?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I'm not proud of this stupid fucking bullshit, at all.
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.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2207547-fast-food-nati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Food_Nation
Definitely feels very ironic
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.
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
Could gone to some great parties.
Did that instead.
— Elon Musk
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.
https://news.google.com/search?q=usa+meat+processing
Naturally. Only the strong survive!
I couldn't possibly be the statistical outcome of like chicken with regular bacteria, oh no...
Essentially Ron Swanson minus the satire
Yup, looks fine, sounds fine... wait
Not to excuse the idea that they shouldn't be inspected, of course.
These businesses earnestly do not care until it affects their bottom line
https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/01/14/as-foodborne-illne...
https://medshadow.org/investigating-generics/fda-fails-in-la...
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.
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.
Your comment and all the speculative piling on it spawned look kinda silly in light of this context.
> 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.
lol