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.

> 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)

[1] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/shanghai-ravioli-co...

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.

Oh hey, that's the same percentage as the new-hire equity grant for most SWE roles nowadays!

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

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.

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.

> Defunding the FDA and forcing out 4500 staff via DOGE cuts caused this.

This is great news because it means time travel is possible.

The USDA was the one to issue this recall. Inadequate number of inspectors would make recalls go down not up.

Worse is that we ended up with an oligpoly of 3 foreign owned meat packing conglomerates.

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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...

A chicken in every pot and china is going to pay for it!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

Buffalo chicken rangoon is a pretty crazy bit of work recall notwithstanding.

TBF, there are current problems with imported chicken products elsewhere.

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”

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.

Nice one, Poe would be proud

We do have regulation on food and safety and the recall is because of those parameters.

The party of "personal responsibility" literally never hold themselves accountable for anything. It's always someone else's fault.