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- Hacker News
- 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.by tmaly
- 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.by exe34
- 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.
- TBF, there are current problems with imported chicken products elsewhere.by rjsw
- Buffalo chicken rangoon is a pretty crazy bit of work recall notwithstanding.by dotspec
- 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!
- 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?
by nsxwolf - 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.
by vict7 - 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?
by mrguyorama - 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.by arjie
- 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...by bradly
- 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-...
- 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
by RobRivera - Worse is that we ended up with an oligpoly of 3 foreign owned meat packing conglomerates.
- The USDA was the one to issue this recall. Inadequate number of inspectors would make recalls go down not up.by xyzelement
- > Defunding the FDA and forcing out 4500 staff via DOGE cuts caused this.
This is great news because it means time travel is possible.
- 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.
- 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...
by Carrok - 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.
- 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.by walrus01
- 25,000 lbs is .0000007% of the 35,000,000,000 lbs of chicken consumed in the US each year.by nba456_
- Yeah came here to say this. Drop in the bucket.by computershit
- 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.by anthonyIPH
- 35 Billion lbs of chicken? 100 lbs of chicken per person per year?
Dayummmmm!
- from those numbers it's actually 0.00007%. you missed shifting the decimal by two places when converting to a percentage.
- How many people eating bad 25,000 lbs of chicken can get sick? If 10% so 2,500 people. Would that be too small a number to matter?by segmondy
- 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.by rootusrootus
- Half of a single truckloadby missedthecue
- 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...
by xphos