Boar's Head plant posed an 'imminent threat' years before listeria outbreak | Hacker News Reader

Boar's Head plant posed an 'imminent threat' years before listeria outbreak

washingtonpost.com

90 pointshoward941108 comments

"Deli meat produced at the Jarratt, Va., plant between May 10 and July 29 is believed to be responsible for the deaths of nine people and the hospitalization of dozens of others in the nation’s largest listeriosis outbreak since 2011. Boar’s Head issued a recall of more than 70 products produced during that time, such as ham, bologna and bacon, according to the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Food safety experts say the pattern of violations reflect a failed food safety system and have questioned why the plant was not closed sooner."

Buy your food from a local farmer. It is healthier and tastes better (and doesnt support big agra corps). For everyone that thought boars head was 'premium' you'll be blown away. Even the lowest quality local farms are usually going to be better than the best industrial producers.

You can often buy a whole (or half or 1/4) animal. They will have a butcher to process the animals for you.

Search for "community supported agriculture" here is one directory[1] but there are others. There may be a co-op near you that goes farm to farm collecting food orders and delivers them to you or to a pickup spot close to you.

[1] https://www.localharvest.org/csa/

This discussion is about deli meat. Are you implying that Frank the Farmer down the road making baloney in a bathtub is "healthier and tastes better" than processed deli cuts made in a USDA inspected factory?

Not excusing what happened here at all but this assertion and all "buy local" hysteria is simply subjective hippy nonsense.

A few years back some "local" cheese makers got busted with plenty of food safety and quality issues and then you read they're wearing filthy shit-covered boots into the cheese making room.

"Buy local" has zero relationship to food safety or quality.

Could you link to an article on those local (to where, btw?) cheesemakers?

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/dirty-wash-compan...

Thanks! That article's so beyond my expectations, haha.

This discussion is about industrial food processors making food products at-scale in factories.

> you implying that Frank the Farmer down the road making baloney in a bathtub

The farmers almost never do the processing, Certainly none of the farms I have seen do.

But that's a nice misdirection and mental picture you tried to paint there. Let me try doing the same thing: Do you think the Thiel and Vc funds slopping bulk meat paste around a factory with underpaid temp workers who don't even all know each other is more sanitary than a second generation butcher with only a single room and no large factory equipment to maintain?

Do you think a bunch of animals fed bulk food waste of unknown origins while kept in sunlight free boxes and bred to grow so fast they have heart attacks are healthier than animals that can wonder around outside and eat what they like?

> "Buy local" has zero relationship to food safety or quality.

"Buy industrial" absolutely has a negative relationship to quality. Both the animals and the processing are done with as many corners cut as they can get away with because something thats simply not worth doing for a local farmer becomes extremely valuable when done at factory scale.

The farmers almost never do the processing, Certainly none of the farms I have seen do.

Which defeats the point of buying the foods at issue from a farmer, unless you are suggesting that everyone buy the equipment they need to make deli meat at home from the quarter-cow they just purchased.

Both the animals and the processing are done with as many corners cut as they can get away with because something thats simply not worth doing for a local farmer becomes extremely valuable when done at factory scale.

This discussion is about processed meats, primarily deli meats. You are not buying deli meats from a local farmer, because as you have also stated, they don't do the processing.

But if you meant to say, buy from a local butcher then yes, by all means do that because they will buy from the local farmer and process the meat for you.

> Which defeats the point of buying the foods at issue from a farmer, unless you are suggesting that everyone buy the equipment they need to make deli meat at home from the quarter-cow they just purchased.

Most farmers have a butcher that they will bring the animal to so you don't need to handle it. I have never had to process any animals myself or even bring them to a butcher. Considering your whole post is based off that faulty assumption I'll end replying to you directly there.

This was already mentioned in the first post. Why are these commenters building these straw men and seemingly being purposely obtuse? This whole comment chain is so weird and kind of surreal. People who have zero idea of what local agriculture actually looks like in practice have such strong opinions on it and are willing to talk so condescendingly to those of us that actually care about how food is made.

One of the site rules is 'assume good faith' but we have one comment talking about bathtub bologna and another implying that anyone who buys meat outside of a grocery store needs to process the animal themselves.

Despite the propaganda portraying local agriculture as some hick operation the reality is it's far safer and more modern than industrial ag. My local food co-op has a website with an order form that delivers fresh food (dairy, produce, and meat, including deli meat!) In an insulated refrigerated cooler to my door.

And because apparently it needs repeating for some reason: no you don't need to process the animals yourself. Simply pick the meat you want, just like how you do it now.

Perhaps these small local suppliers are better, because they can charge boutique prices to the kind of discerning person who doesn't ride the bus to Walmart, but drives out to the roadside stand in their SUV and 5 kids and a husband help load the stuff in their coolers.

Or they can sell mail-order, or to the suburban farmers markets nearby.

The local co-ops are a perennial cult favorite and appeal to epicurean aficionados, but they're not getting equal shelf space at Safeway or enjoying economies of scale and amazing subsidies. Yet.

I have never had to process any animals myself or even bring them to a butcher. Considering your whole post is based off that faulty assumption I'll end replying to you directly there.

Consider yourself lucky. I grew up in cow country. Most farmers will provide you the meat itself and leave it up to you to process the meat or find a processor. Having the meat sent to a processor (or butcher) is an extra service that you pay separately for.

So yes, there's a strawman in your comment but it's not mine.

eu sabotaged local butchers and hunters with strict requirements for dissasembly of animals

Food regulations are often written with bulk producers in mind. When you have millions of pounds of meat from farms all over the country you are taunting disease. (Too many inputs to control. Farms all over the country, large facilities, long time between steps (harvest, processing, shipping, distribution, sale)). It's a miracle they are able to do this at all.

Your typical family is able to be far less sterile than any factory and nobody gets sick largely because it's not done at-scale (more pathogens from more places) with long delays between steps to give the pathogens time to replicate. The un-sterilized corner of my kitchen floor isnt going to make it into my food but the machines covered in meat paste might end up getting a bit back into the vat.

There aren’t enough local farmers for all 350 million people in the U.S. for this to be practical advice. It is only practical for a fraction of the population.

This is just like Blue Bell Ice cream. They killed people with their products. I'll never eat their stuff again and adding Boars head to the list.

Absolutely agreed. The race to the bottom is deadly.

A cautionary note: Often times a food manufacturing plant will contract with and produce multiple brands on the same equipment. For instance, I've seen brand name, store label, and bargain brand waffles come off the same line, with the same equipment and using the same ingredient stocks.

Of course, an industrial food plant isn't going to have a searchable presence online. It is quite difficult to find out exactly what any such facility makes, let alone what brands come out of it.

Of course I can't speak for every factory or brand, but my experience tells me to try and be cognizant of where bad products are made in addition to the brands themselves.

"Store brand" products are an IMO egregious case of this. Often it's utterly impossible to tell where a product has been manufcatured (as in: plant or factory), and somewhat ironically, correlated product recalls are often the only way of establishing where a store sources its "in house" brands.

The fact is that "in house" isn't, and what both the merchant and manufacturer are in fact preserving is the market ignorance of who the ultimate producer is.

What does it take for a plant to be shutdown pending corrective action?

The violations cited seem like they should be enough to warrant that. Because of their inaction, 9 peoples died. It's a failure of the regulatory agency

I do not suppose a regular person can get access to all of the failed food safety audits in the past few years?

Also, why is there not a remediation date by which there will be a follow-up assessment?

Many records can be accessed at https://www.fsis.usda.gov/about-fsis/freedom-information-act... and if for some reason one is not available a FOIA request can be submitted fairly simply

Eugh pdfs. Even worse, the first one I tried was a scanned PDF, though they had at least run it through OCR.

Probability not directly the answer to your question, but similar examples are Australian name and shame lists.

E.g. https://www.foodauthority.nsw.gov.au/offences

How do you come back from this? Their whole schtick is absolute, unadulterated quality. Perfection.

From this they garnered extremely high prices.

They had it in the bag.

Easy. Just keep spending on marketing and bribing stores to give them preferential placement.

You think they were a premium brand, that did not compromise on quality. Do you have any evidence of this?

Or did you believe it because they told you they were, and because they charge more?

This is the beauty of unregulated free markets. With no actual baseline for quality, it's often easier to dupe people into believing that you're not cutting corners, than it is to not cut corners.

And for all intents and purposes, this is an unregulated market. The inspectors have been finding a horror show for years, but couldn't shut it down because, well, that would impact the meatpacker's bottom line, and some apparatchik somewhere is getting paid off to make sure that won't happen, and he will make your life very unpleasant if you try to make waves.

Regulations with no teeth aren't regulations. Everyone's mad at Boar's Head, but the actual problem is in the systemic failures that lead to the plant being open after it failed inspection after inspection.

The business should be liquidated, it's current owners are clearly incapable of operating it.

It wasnt unregulated though. We have this thing called the FDA. Problem solved right?

When regulators can't shut a plant down for a violation like this, it's not actually regulated.

People watch historic documentaries (like HBO's Chernobyl /s) and ooh and aah about how stupid the Soviet safety and bureaucratic culture was, without a shred of self-reflection about how our systems also make ruinous outcomes inevitable.

Underregulated and unregulated are different things.

Saying that it's unregulated makes the solution appear simple, just add regulation. Recognizing that it is already ineffectively regulated implies that regulation doesn't have to just be present, it has to be good.

But then again it's a lot harder to come up with a solution that works past spherical cows in a vacuum so let's just call it unregulated.

It's a problem of incentive alignment, which is a core problem in politics. People and organizations love to maximize their gain at the cost of distributed harm - and all the political incentives, in any system of government are strongly aligned with this sort of thing.

The answer to this is, of course, good governance.

The answer to how to get good governance is, of course, a shoulder shrug emoji. (I can't give you a recipe for good governance, but I can definitely give you one for bad governance...)

Nine people are dead, the firm is at fault, and there are two broad forms of recourse. You can do something that lightly taps the owners' pocketbook, through suits filed in civil court, or you can start holding congressional hearings until you find nine or more people that you can execute.

You won't get the latter unless there is enough public outrage to get meaningful action. Unlike the courts, it is a very limited resource, it requires incredible effort to activate, and the payoff (better food safety, justice, encouraging the others) is distributed.

The solution is there, it's just infeasible given resource limitations.

> you can start holding congressional hearings until you find nine or more people that you can execute.

I like it when people just out themselves as extremists.

These deaths weren't caused by an oopsie daisies accident, this was a clear, blatant prioritisation of personal profit over human lives, with numerous warnings and opportunities to pull back. The plant's been operating despite years of failing inspections, and anyone in the industry knows that it shouldn't have.

Evil is the pursuit of personal gain at the direct expense of the welfare of others. This is the poster child for it. It's not an indirect consequence, it's not a 'we tried and there was still a bad outcome', it's not a 'this stuff is hard and we got unlucky', it's not a 'there are inherent risks to this activity that can't be well mitigated', it's not a 'we didn't know this was dangerous', it's not a 'all the alternatives looked bad'. It's actively and playing Russian Roulette with the lives of your customers, and it killed people.

There's nothing extreme about wanting justice for such blatant disregard for human life.

And justice is finding 9 or more people and executing them?

It's clear you don't care about justice or you'd be looking for the people responsible and punishing them based on how much culpability they have, personally.

What you're describing is eye-for-an-eye vengeance.

The harm was much greater than nine deaths, many other people were poisoned. Someone is responsible. They won't be held responsible under our current regulatory and liability framework.

If you want this kind of malfeasance to stop, that framework needs to be changed. There's a fundamental disconnect between decision-makers and beneficiaries of this harm, and the responsibility that they get to shirk.

Consider that tampering with food (for no personal gain) that doesn't seriously harm anyone carries sentences of multiple years. Scale this proportionately.

And why 9 or more? What if there are only 8 that can be found responsible?

I wonder if the other Boars Head plants also have issues. Avoid the entire brand? What brands have better hygiene?

From this, and linked articles on New York Times, the suggestion is laxed food safety standards are endemic across the entire processed food industry.

It requires engagement from the employees...a culture. On this, everyone is failing. Our leaders have contorted and conflicting allegiances. Their minds are filled with numbers swelling and cash multiplying. The focus is not on delivering value for all stakeholders.

And how many of the employees feel comfortable blowing the whistle? A chunk of them are bound to be undocumented/illegally in the US, and it seems like those folks are being taken advantage of already because they have so much to lose. Blowing the whistle on some weird looking green slime or leaks or whatever can mean getting deported. Not saying the worker is a bad person for looking the other way, but I am saying that we are doing this to ourselves and these are some really obvious consequences of awful policy.

From 2009: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html

Slaughterhouses not testing their products for E coli, because it's too expensive. Slaughterhouses blacklisting customers who do their own testing. USDA has no effective regulatory powers to change that.

Single-page archive: <https://archive.is/OKqta>

Goes way before that: https://www.history.com/news/upton-sinclair-the-jungle-us-fo...

If I remember my US History USDA was a direct response to The Jungle. Society at the time was appalled, and demanded govt action.

Similar to the response to Silent Spring and the standing up of EPA.

I’ll admit, if arguments about nitrates being carcinogenic aren’t a convincing reason to avoid processed meat, this might just be one.

I always thought Boars Head _was_ the premium brand.

There's a German proverb that goes like "a butcher will only eat sausage he has made himself". Now you know the background.

Pretty scary how many people get fooled by "premium" branding. Think about what made you think that Boars Head was "premium". Was there any evidence that their meats were higher than average quality, that didn't ultimately come from the company itself? Or was it all their product positioning, price, what stores they were found in and so on (in other words, Marketing).

Compared to other brands available in the supermarket, my family finds that Boar's Head deli meats consistently taste better. There is something "cheap" that I find hard to quantify in the taste of generic grocery branded deli meats.

I'm not educated enough to know what the difference is here, but I don't think the fact that Boar's Head costs more is entirely a marketing device.

To my unsophisticated palate, Boar's Head tastes like it has less filler. Will never purchase their product ever again. The findings were so egregious, it makes my blood boil.

> There is something "cheap" that I find hard to quantify in the taste of generic grocery branded deli meats.

They tend to be watery and under seasoned. I can only assume it’s to make them as inoffensive as possible to accommodate the widest possible audience - but there’s no character to cheap deli meat, no striking taste.

Watery, yes, that's definitely a component of it!

Not to discount your experience, but taste is so context sensitive and subjective that just believing that you're consuming a higher quality product is often enough to make it "taste better". There's a great Penn & Teller's Bullshit episode that illustrates this phenomenon for fancy water[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2qydjVbLJk

Yup, that's completely true. But as somebody who typically prefers to buy "cheap" brands, and is usually completely satisfied by them, the fact that I experience such a wide gulf between Boar's Head and other brands makes me think it's not a marketing mind trick.

Ryan - You aren't wrong, but I'd note that in my local grocery stores, it's generic brands and your Smithfield / Oscar Mayer / Hormel in the cold case. You find Boar's Head at the in-store deli, sliced to order, and priced higher. So the illusion of premium here extends beyond marketing dress.

I honestly thought Boars Head tasted better and offered more variety than other brands, but then again I never did a blind taste test. It could have all been affected by their marketing. They do a LOT to separate their products from other deli meat - even down to having separate displays and even cooler units.

Did you ever try the previous brands available at your grocer before Boars Head cornered the market? For my local grocers it was an immediate reduction in variety, increase in price and equal-to-worse quality. Nothing about that move was better for the customer.

Where I live, both of the two major supermarket chains (Publix x 3, Kroger x 3) with stores within an epsilon of my house feature Boar's Head next to their house brands. Other than the odd Food Depot there are no other grocery corp brands within probably 25 miles.

I have historically frequently bought Boar's Head meats from the deli counter because I can get them sliced prosciutto thin and they have the texture to support that. And the overall flavor experience when buried in a creatively built sandwich is "not terrible". Absolutely revolting when compared directly against handmade pastrami, ham, corned beef etc., but not bad in a sandwich.

However: in the last year I have noticed Boarshead moving more of their cured charcuterie meats into "nitrate free", which is a lie, they use celery instead, but of course that degrades the texture and flavor a bit.

So now I just buy the house brand meats when I'm slumming, and make my own pastrami, ham, and corned beef from time to time. For two olds a 5lb batch of cured meat is a lot. Like 6-12 months. But homemade charcuterie is so astoundingly good.

So no, I don't consider Boar's Head a premium brand. At least, not anymore. I smell enshittification at work.

Also, everybody should have the chance to try out real charcuterie.

Any tips on how to get started?

It is expensive to go blind in on buying artisanal charcuterie without knowing how to optimize for what you want. Kinda like California cheese. Good, but... $30/lb for cheddar?

I have eaten at restaurants that have "charcuterie boards" but if they're reasonable in price... you get what you pay for. An easy out is to put "prosciutto" on the board as the prize. Quotes because there's orders of magnitudes difference in price and flavor quality across "prosciutto" analogues.

My recommendation is, if you are at all adventurous in the kitchen, is to buy a copy of Michael Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn's "Charcuterie", and just start making stuff that you think looks interesting. I have had quite few dinners where I contributed stuff out of that book and people raved. Nothing special about me, I just followed the recipes. It's an extraordinary cookbook. The vegetarian rilletes are great but I've had people swoon over the duck rilletes that started with me and a dusty farm and a couple of ducks (still quacking). (The book assumes you have duck parts, not live ducks.)

In the olden tymes I would say drop me a line if you needed help/more advice but in this weird world that doesn't seems to work anymore.

Thank you for the info. I’ll definitely check out the book especially since I only have duck parts and not live ducks.

You can always just go to a butcher.

In order to do so, one has to have a local butcher who is still in operation.

For many, any such local butchers were driven out of business years ago by the lower cost options in the supermarkets produced by the bulk producers, so the option to "just go to a butcher" is no longer available, at any cost.

I’ve never lived in a city or suburb that doesn’t have one locally. Is it a small town thing?

It's available. Just be prepared for Boars Head price shock. Hell, the butcher probably carries Boars Head.

Butchers are found throughout much of the US, in at least in urban/suburban areas. If your only local food option is WalMart or Dollar Store, you might have a long trip before you, though with a chest freezer, and an icebox and dry ice for the trip itself, meat tends to freeze and preserve well.

I recently ate hot dogs from a local butcher.

Oh my God -- so much better.

Definitely go to a local butcher. You have no idea how much better it is. Comparatively, even the seemingly high quality supermarket Hot dogs taste like water plastic with salt, compared to the delicious meaty spongy texture sausage sticks that are local butcher hot dogs. It's seriously a whole lot better.

18 months ago when I moved cross country to the Atlanta area I was delighted and excited to find out that my house was 10 min from a real butcher! OMG, what I always wanted. Then I talked to the counter man (no butcher on site), bought the meats, and then asked some questions about the curing process, and discovered that the reason the meats tasted like Boar's Head is that butcher shop chain (3 stores) explicitly taste competed against Boar's Head. To the point of being "nitrate-free", oops celery is in the label.

No point paying the premium (I would have paid double for authentic charcuterie), and then I tried to buy a goose during the Holidays and nope, can't do that. Haven't been back.

Keep looking around. In my small town in the middle of nowhere, we have two legit butchers that draw from regional small farms. In any large city I have to assume there are options available. That stated - if there is any way you can participate in a CSA / connect directly with the rancher, I find that the meat is not only superior quality but the prices often are as well. Case in point - my partner recently bought ground beef at Walmart that was $3/pound higher than what I buy from a long-time family friend who raises his beef in an absolutely splendid grass-covered mountain paradise.

I avoid pork entirely. The business is outrageously cruel and dirty even by industrial farming standards.

What does pork specifically have to do with this? BH supplies all sorts of deli meat, not just pork

Dietz & Watson?

I have no idea if they are cleaner or not, but I like their name. :)

As more has come out about this, it is quite disappointing. I used to swear by Boars Head and would choose the store I am going too based on if they carried it.

A mistake happening and causing a serious problem is still obviously bad, but is one thing. But from what they are describing I have no idea how this was able to continue running.

I know right now it is stopping me from getting basically any deli meat or similar products from any brand.

>I used to swear by Boars Head and would choose the store I am going too based on if they carried it.

This, we used to get meat from the 'good' Kroger because their deli had a better selection than the one in our neighborhood. If the premium brand is poison, I'm not sure what that says for the budget brands.

I think your perception of "premium" is flawed in this case.

People keep saying that in this thread, but Boar’s Head does taste better than the crap that was more common before it. I’ve since found better deli meats, but even if I never eat another Boar’s Head product again, I’ll never eat Oscar Meyer or the other crap that was on the shelf next to it either again, or whatever Safeway was selling in its deli before they did their whole rebrand to serving Boar’s Head (actually I don’t shop there either anymore but for unrelated reasons).

Tastes better but also has a better texture. For me it got to the point that I would rather have deli meat less than get more of some cheaper brand.

Only job of my life I miss is the one where I had at-will access to an espresso machine and deli slicer. Thinly sliced London Broil Roast Beef as thin as the slicer will allow fresh off the slicer just can’t be beat.

What's a brand that regularly available in stores that you like?

Premium Cold Cuts means something different these days

The town is tiny with a population of 652 people. Seems like a perfect scenario for the company: setup plant in small town to employ cheap labor, be the largest employer in the town, use that leverage to prevent action taken against them. I can hear it now... "Now hold on here, we can't go shutting down the largest employer of registered voters in town. I personally spoke to the plant manager and they assured me they are committed to fixing the issues. Plant stays open." - The Mayor

Maybe even some county officials like the Sheriff making sure the plant runs smoothly.

You’re assuming that the mayor decides whether the plant stays open? I’m pretty sure that’s not the way it works.

I feel certain that the entire industry is probably at least this bad. It’s not a question of if, but when.

It's a Jungle out there...

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle>

(Meant to promote awareness of worker safety rather than food hygiene. "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach" -- Sinclair. Still, its impact and legacy are profound.)

People think I'm crazy, 'cause I worry all the time

If you paid attention, you'd be worried too

You better pay attention

Or this world you love so much might just kill you

Randy Newman, notable for use as the theme to Monk:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_a_Jungle_Out_There_(song)>

what's particularly disappointing is that the USDA knew about this for TWO YEARS prior to the outbreak and forced no action. and of course there will be no accountability.

I wonder if this would’ve happened without the Trump deregulation in 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1055451

Does anyone think there is room for a D2C company to start curing its own meats and deliver cold cuts to people's doorstep?

Startup cured deli meats sounds like a recipe for distributed delivery of salmonella.

Could include some locally sourced "raw water" and offer options for unpasteurized, unrefrigerated milk.

Yes, I'd also like to have some small batch organic snake oil. Given its tremendous health benefits Big Pharma and their lobbyists in DC are choking the supply of it.

> Could include some locally sourced "raw water"

Pro tip: it's cheaper to sell to consumers if it's dehydrated first.

Add AI infused Kubernetes to the recipe and a16z will be all over to invest in startup like this.

Are these products really "cured" then? Wasn't that a process used to preserve food before the existence of refrigeration? I understand it could be done incorrectly, but I'm also confused at what modern products are exactly.

Curing it seeks to prevent the product from degrading on its own terms. It doesn't really help protect against contamination that happens after the curing. So, while the cured meat itself isn't a great environment for bacteria/other pathogens to grow, if it gets other organic material on it, or if something else happens to compromise the curing, it can still be a vector.

ah I remember the good ol’ days when you could pitch a VC on “Uber but for salmonella” and easily secure your Series A

Try with...salmonella.ai

Salmonella as a Service!

Most butchers already offer this.

https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/list-of-direct-to-cons...

Looks like several exist.

It’s really disappointing to hear that a prominent brand with a positive reputation like boar’s head actually had serious hygiene issues. Articles I’ve read talk about the disgusting conditions in the plant, and I have to assume this is true across the entire company. There’s no way I’ll buy their products again, or eat at restaurants carrying their food (many advertise their sandwiches as using boars head). I wish restaurants were forced to reveal their supply chain.

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