USDA locks barn door after Listeria escapes

I suppose because he cut spending on government work in general, that is not police and army related?

(But I lack insights into whether he cut any budgets related to this)

I would generally expect the latter to be accomplished by regulatory fines; it's simpler and cleaner than an array of individual civil suits.

The greater issue is that I'd be very surprised if many of those civil suits were effective, and especially so for being cost effective (for either side).

Citizens will need to prove beyond a preponderance of evidence that their relative's infection was due to Boar's Head, which is going to be very difficult. Everyone is exposed to dozens of potential Listeria sources every day; it's hard to prove it was Boar's Head and not Chipotle or McDonald's or whatever else they've eaten/touched.

It genuinely probably makes more sense to do a regulatory fine on Boar's Head, and then distribute the fine to affected people via a mechanism with a lower bar. Maybe everyone who had a Listeria infection around that time, which is much easier to prove than the source of the infection.

Food doesn't work this way - each jar has a low chance of contamination, so spot testing won't catch the problem. Small changes in manufacturing procedure can result in big changes in safety.

source: worked in the wholesale food industry, across 300+ categories.

That seems like a likely factor, but insurance against product liability suits can be very expensive in some (litigious) industries, and is also a factor in total cost analysis.

Standard product liability law already has joint and several liability for manufacturing defects on all parties in the chain of commerce, so each of the retailer, distributor, importer, and manufacturer already bear full liability.

These parties do carry extensive liabilities when there's a product defect or fault, as was the case in the cited case. The issue is that manufacturers usually produce larger volumes, and are thus vulnerable to more of these lawsuits, as well as class-actions. Class-action cases are often extremely and expensive, even when there was no clear fault.

you can read about it in more depth here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_hormone_controversy

That is about the beef. There is a different controversy about poultry meat. There the controversy is that under EU law, cold air and water are the only substances that can be used to decontaminate poultry. In the US chlorine rinses are also permitted.

In other words artificial beef growth hormones and chlorine rinsed chicken are the two points which is what we mean by 'substandard' in this conversation.

Below the legal standard.

We need to energize people to actually fix these problems.

In practice the example I like to use is soil loss. Farming isn't sustainable because the soil literally blows and washes away and cannot be regenerated. The solution is to have forest patches to reduce the wind speed and marshes to hold the rain. All of this takes valuable land which cannot be used 'productively' but is vital to make agriculture sustainable.