Taylor Farms has rewritten its cyclospora statement four times in sixteen days
marlerblog.com
marlerblog.com
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/cdc-cyclospora-lab-doge-downsize...
For abusing democratic offices the penalty should be at least one decade in keeping up with ancient Athenian democratic traditions.
You can't reasonably expect government to protect everyone from everything.
What would they even be blamed for in the first place if there were no regulatory expectations for them to adhere to?
I don't know what to tell you, man. It's not normal for thousands of people to be sickened by foodborne illness AFTER the government knows where it's from.
Functional societies has central functions to ensure that safety of its people.
> “It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”
Democracies are pretty good at studying the failures of other countries and learning about them.
I’m not at all convinced about this part.
From wikipedia: "Fascism [...] rose to prominence primarily in Europe of the interwar period"
So what were humans doing for all the thousands of years after the advent of recorded history but before that?
It is a movement motivated by the petty grievances of cowards and fools, and the same hate and violence they project outward always turns inward at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
> Is China fascist?
What a strange and completely irrelevant question.
Republicans for decades have claimed that the government cant do anythingright/good and that we must deregulate and let the free market do everything.
Problem is the government is actually pretty good at doing somethings, so Republicans break things until they can use them as examples of government inefficiency then privatize it for there own profit.
Doge was made to break the government so Republicans could point at what was left and say "see government is broken"
But Musk ran it and he's and idiot that had no idea what he doing so istead of it slowly all going to shit so no one would remember it all working as intended it started to fall apart to soon. So we still have people that will point to the real cause.
One of the first big bullets they put into the Affordable Care Act after it became effective, was to zero out funding of its provisions that were/are mandated by law.
The “government can’t do shit” people should spend some time looking at the reasons why. Government isn’t perfect — it’s made up of the same humans that compose the rest of society — but it often isn’t half bad, and many people going into it have good-hearted and honorable intentions. Some turn bitter or disengaged at the experience — as designed — but many fight such negativity to the bitter end.
Oh, and regarding the ACA, many don’t know or have forgotten that businesses were clamoring for it or some/any solution, facing 25% year over year premium increases for their insured employees. And the ACA has and continues to provide many substantial improvements and benefits to group policy insurance holders that have no ready optics and hype like the healthcare marketplace.
Have insurance through your employer and think the ACA does nothing for you? You’re wrong.
So, thanks, gub’mint!
I hope I never have you as my manager If you think a ~70% reduction in head count isn't outrageous.
3 does seem a bit low, though.
Do you think some of them were wasting their time, by posting on various online forums only slightly related to their jobs?
You should have mentioned this up front so we all knew you were fully qualified to understand the staffing needs of critical governmental health organizations.
In the unlikely event excess ambulance drivers are needed we'll temporarily hire them on an ad hoc basis at double the normal rate. They will obviously happily jump on this opportunity, working less than 5% of the year at double pay is much better for just those hours than being paid 60% of what you'd get as an ambulance driver in another career all year round and actually being able to afford your mortgage.
Sounds like the lag time between going from 11 to 3 employees and having an outbreak was ~a year, so unless this is wrapped up fast enough and cheaply enough to cost less than 8 FTEs, we didn’t save a whole lot of money and we caused a whole lot of distress, so it’s hard to really call this a win.
When this code begins with TF (like, say, the TFRB182A11B I had on a bag in my fridge last month), it's a Taylor Farms product.
They control a huge percentage of this market. Their products can be hard to avoid, and are sold under a wide variety of different brand names. But again: They're all marked with TF.
---
It's also worth noting that there's some brand names that are never products of Taylor Farms.
Dole is the only example that I can find in stores near me (Ohio), but there may be others wherever you are. (Food distribution is often very regionalized.)
I like my salad with a mixture of leafy greens, maybe with some radicchio or red cabbage for contrast, and perhaps some snow peas, radishes, and shredded carrots. I can keep all of that stuff around at the house and keep it fresh and prep it all, and that sounds very nice in theory -- except, most of it will probably rot before it gets consumed.
Or I can just buy a bag of salad and eat some of it at my whim.
---
I'm further astounded that people bother with complaining about someone else's choice of food. It's not like I broke into your wallet and used your money to buy bagged salad that I then replaced the contents of your fridge with.
Bagged salad isn't your issue; it isn't an issue at all.
What motivates you to make fun of me in this way, fellow HN user?
> like the rest of the world.
Are the motivations political? It's just a salad.
We could get rid of the modern marvel of plastic bags, or get rid of the people instead. (I'm not a big fan of eugenics.)
Maybe I'd grow it myself and avoid all packaging and distribution problems, but the climate where I live doesn't support that very well at all and I like having salad during more than one brief period per year. Sustenance farming isn't really one of my goals in life.
And no, I do not think that my want for a salad at a time of my choosing constitutes some kind of unholy elevation of decadence. It's just a salad, and people are allowed to have things.
And the bag, itself, doesn't promote cyclospora outbreaks. It persists on things like greens, but it does not grow on them. That stuff comes from literal shit, like -- you know -- the stuff that everyone makes.
This reads like C strings having not only a null terminator but carrying around a lifetime value specified in microseconds, and memory safety errors leading to weeks of explosive diarrhea.
How important is iceberg to your diet that you needed to create this YOLO lettuce header (heh)?
Including some manner of descriptive coding isn't necessarily universal, but it has nonetheless been a normal way of doing things for a very long time.
It's similar to email headers or ip:port pairs in that it's hidden in plain sight. It's also similar in that most folks just don't notice them, and wouldn't care if they did notice them.
For instance: Plain old soda cans, which my dad made countless billions of during his career. There was a time when a person could show him a random 12oz soda can and there was a very strong chance that he'd be able to identify its origin by looking at it.
And I don't mean just the company that produced it, or the specific manufacturing plant within that company.
He could deduce the date of production, the line on which it was produced, the bodymaker within that line that did the metal stamping, whether it was made during the day or night shift, and (with a calendar) which crew was working during that particular shift.
And that's just the can itself.
The origin of the contents of the can are also generally available for anyone with the right knowledge to observe, usually with videojet printing on the can's dome. He wasn't in the can-filling business so he wasn't much help with those codes, but they were present.
But again, on any normal day: No normal person ever even notices the presence of this information.
Taylor Farms isn't an outlier here with their labelling at all.
The header is the standard, which allows us to even have this conversation about tracking sources.
And in this context: On a worldly scale of foods that may be useful to demonize, eating some leafy greens like lettuce constitutes approximately nothing.
Why do you choose to behave in the way that you demonstrate? What accomplishments do you wish to achieve here? What sorts of changes might you seek to impart?
Can you lay it out for me?
If companies have a way of obscuring this info to end consumers while still meeting FDA obligations, they absolutely will, as they currently do for things like the information for companies who "Make" products right now, which are often holding companies meant to obscure business relationships.
Oh, and any human readable value will be obscured behind a QR code anyway, so all the humans who already do zero investigation to understand where their stuff comes from will continue to have no extra information.
Strict labeling laws around protected terms is an essential thing because so many people read nothing more than the packaging itself when shopping. All chicken lists "No hormones" as an advertisement despite that being law and no chicken sold will ever have those hormones.
Tons of products already have all manner of information printed on them, but only the manufacturer can readily decrypt it.
And here we are.
They (the USDA) publish cross-references betwixt the codes and the processing plants.
It's been kind of a pain in the ass when I've looked this stuff up in the past and I wish someone would take it upon themselves to make it easier, but it's do-able.
Literally the canonical example of capitalism-as-meat-grinder.
Anytime there would be a recall, they would include the lot number and manufacturer dates.
Source: I worked in meat packing and boutique butcher shops.
Edit: even things like ground beef from trimmings, we would write down every lot that went into it
And a willingness to throw both under the bus when OSHA comes knocking because they also have a large number of workplace safety incidents. Or when the workers complain about such conditions, a little call to DHS and all of a sudden ICE shows up for a raid to pick up 900 undocumented workers, but when a reporter asks officials about the fact that Tyson was giving them written instructions on how to stay under the radar for banking, tax, immigration purposes? "That's not something that's in the scope of our investigations here."
Look, i’m not some sort of a devil that hates people with allergies. Roughly 15% of my closest friends have dietary restrictions. But we kinda understand the problem and navigate it ourselves, rather than making it someone else’s problem. Really not a big deal.
They literally are, though.
Restaurants have a choice of refusing service to people with allergies (not allowed in many places; not a great idea anywhere), allowing those with restrictions to bring their own food, or just putting the bloody 2-minute effort of writing on the menu which ingredients they use.
Yes, people have died from restaurants doing the last option improperly.
"In Japan, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare's vital statistics, about 50 cases of fatal anaphylaxis are reported each year.4,5 In 2020, the most frequent cause of fatal anaphylaxis was bee or wasp stings (13 cases), followed by drugs (8 cases) and foods (2 cases)".
If somebody orders, say, ribs, and mentions they are allergic to spices that are found in some barbecue sauces or spice rubs, the waiter isn't going to know (and the cook might not know) if those spices are in the dish, and especially won't know if they're present in a large enough amount to cause a reaction.
The FDA does require manufacturers to keep track of the most common allergens ( https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-food-labeling-and-critica... ), but if somebody has an uncommon allergy, they're on their own. Restaurants are regulated by state health departments instead of the USDA. California, I believe, has some allergen labeling requirements for its restaurants. Most large restaurants worry enough about liability that they disclose the information (for common allergens) voluntarily.
But if you want every restaurant to be forced into labeling, you will see the small restaurants claim all the allergens are used and they cannot protect against cross contamination.
I had an old coworker with a severe milk protein allergy. So bad that he would get a reaction if he (lip) kissed his wife after she drank milk or had ice cream. So eating out was basically impossible, because his food would pretty much need to be made in a totally separate kitchen to avoid any contamination risk.
So we are right back at my point. Do we force every restaurant to have a secondary allergen free kitchen so my coworker can eat there? Or does my coworker just deal with it and stick to vegan places (like he did)?
If your point is that cost doesn't perfectly match frequency, sure, it was off the cuff, but it doesn't change the underlying nature of "accommodating everyone".
When entering, "any allergens or intolerances" is normally asked before you're sat down. They distinguish the two to decide whether a station clean is required or if they can just point you to the menu.
If it's not already clear on the menu, most medium/large chains then hand you a tablet letting you filter by almost anything.
If you are working with food you should know about allergies. It just comes with the territory. I’m baffled by how this is somehow too hard for US folks yet we manage fine.
It's just yet another arena where the US likes to wring its hands and make excuses for why the US can't do what all manner of other countries manage to do without issue, from things like this to mass transit to Internet connectivity to gun control to ... we're just soooooo unique that solutions that work elsewhere couldn't possibly work here.
https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/campaign-2026/allergie...
> For non-prepacked foods – such as those sold in restaurants, cafés or deli counters – allergen information must be provided.
The US has it's own allergen labeling guidelines, which seem similar, but I'm not going to 1:1 check. For restaurants it's mostly up to the states with the FDA providing guidance.
USDA Organic isn't perfect but it is, largely, the only meaningful information you can be given.
Everything else is weasel wording and subterfuge.
By all means, get a license, food handler permit, etc. and know and practice good food safety, and buy ingredients from legitimate wholesalers. But at some point you don't have visibility into the supply chain and it's not reasonable to expect Joe's Taco Truck to know which specific farms produced their lettuce.
When you elect visibly corrupt people who promised to destroy that trust upstream, you double the burden for everyone downstream from them.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Anyway, all companies have lists of what they buy and who from in their accounts - and their banks and suppliers can corroborate those details.
I think I'd provide limits for micro-businesses (1-2 employees, below the VAT threshold in UK), and maybe have limited reporting for SMEs too. Only listing all suppliers, say.
But for larger businesses, they should list the goods/services they use and the origin of all inputs to a product (including energy). Down to the factory, not a trade mark, the actual inputs.
Companies already keep all this information.
Capitalism supposedly optimises markets, but it can't do anything like that without full information. I mean the psychological manipulation of 'brand marketing' also opposes the supposed optimisations of capitalism too, but that's another story.
All this information is already maintained, it's just not exposed for the public.
What farm was my chicken produced on? Then I can look at that farm to see if they bought a tonne of penicillin, or a GM feed. I can look at the farm to see if they have outside access for the birds, say.
We can also readily graph essential businesses for food security, and new companies can easily find suppliers, B2B companies can find gaps and opportunities - the whole web of production can be mapped this way.
You can also spot corruption and loss. Consumers can avoid companies that use upstream suppliers they disprove of - like if a footwear company has a factory in an area known for human rights abuses, that's now public info, I can check it out if I want.
Anyway, restaurants already have to know the origin of their goods for pubic health purposes, codifying can just mean the suppliers send them an enhanced receipt that the restaurant catenates with others and uploads to the government, that can be done as part of the same process as finance reporting.
If you're buying chicken out the back of a van in an alley then you're going to have extra work; if you're just using standard supply chains it should all work pretty seamlessly.
Isn't the capitalist way to help with this to build new restaurants that do openly provide the lineage for the food that they sell?
All of the consumers who are motivated by this information will then be free to reward these eateries with their business.
After that: Other restaurateurs will surely notice how unspeakably profitable these loyal consumers are and will begin to mimic the effort to try to capture a slice of the pie.
Ultimately, this snowballs into information being the norm instead of the rare exception. Everyone wins!
(Or, more likely: We'll broadly forget that we cared about any of this a few months from now, just as we have always done in the past, and the idea will die at the invisible hand of the free market.)
Some people think that certain things that are not profitable are still worthwhile to society. For example, libraries and fire departments are not designed to be profitable at all, but they're established because at least some of us think they're beneficial to have despite that. A more fitting example might be the regulation on food production introduced early on in the 20th century; by your logic, a more capitalist way of solving the problem would have been to start different food companies that produced food in the way that the regulations required. I don't have any confidence that this would have ended up making much of a difference though, and I think the century since then has shown that the economy didn't fall over because of the lost profits from the regulation.
In reality, I'm a huge fan of enabling people to find reliable information (if they want it) so they can do things like make what they feel are informed decisions (if they choose to do that).
This can happen with capitalism and food. I've known a nice lady for a very long time who has run a little food truck that serves only local, organic food.
She buys what she can directly from farmers and even the mass-produced products she uses are local-enough that she can ring up the owner on the phone and get good answers to whatever questions she has. If one of her customers wants to know where she gets her salad greens or the excellent sausage that she serves, she'll just tell them. There's no secrets in that kitchen.
It works for her in her tiny little market segment, and her usual clientele appreciate her efforts enough that this has been her sole occupation for over a decade.
But doing what she does in the way that she does it is a ton of work. And it apparently doesn't scale in a way that capitalism, alone, can support.
And by that, I mean: If the Arby's down the road from my house had enough interest in being informative in this way, then capitalist tenets suggest that they'd be doing it already. They are not.
But if they should then that means scary words like regulation come into play, and that never happens without a cost.
I'm OK with helping to pay for information to be available even though I myself don't necessarily care at all on any normal day what factory my chicken sandwich was raised in, or which particular farms that this batch of lettuce was sourced from.
And I'm OK with paying more for this because some people do care about stuff like that.
Except: Every now and then, like when there's a cyclospora outbreak, I care quite a lot about it myself. I love the cold, liquidy crunch of lettuce on a sandwich and I do miss it when it's gone.
And since shit happens (sometimes, literally) we'd collectively have a far easier time of adjusting our supply chains when it happens if tracking them was more of built-in function of food distribution. Since capitalism has so far not accomplished that, then perhaps it is time to move on to other methods.
Count me in.
Especially because it takes weeks before the infected start showing symptoms.
Isn't it reasonable to update the official statement as new information emerges?
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” -John Maynard Keynes.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/
I just wanted to say that your phrasing here is a fabulously ominous one for the first episode of an HBO show.
Anyway, if a company is being declared the source of a multi-state outbreak, that company _should_ be talking to the WH. And it's possible that some of those discussions would present evidence that _should_ result in a retraction.
For example, during heartbleed my grand-boss was in on calls with the WH (I don't work on openssl, at the time I worked on a product that _used_ openssl a couple of layers down). AIUI, official guidance changed because of those calls.
If we want to find proof of corruption, this is a place to start looking, not a place to stop.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/05/07/democra...
https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/21073697321938
https://fortune.com/2026/05/23/trump-stock-portfolio-trading...
I disagree that it makes a lot of sense for the CEO of the company to go to the Whitehouse in person to have a talk about the situation.
I do agree it on its face is necessarily a direct piece of proof of corruption, as we don't actually know what was talked about. For all we know they just talked about the weather. You're free to believe that if you want. I'm not an idiot though, and when extremely corrupt people do things that look like corruption my gut instinct is to assume corrupt actions are taking place.
The credulousness that this administration is granted by devil’s advocates and “rationalists” is exhausting.
This is, in my opinion, something that qualifies as being a long time.
You responded to a post quite literally about identifying sources, which is exactly what a response team does. Maybe you respondrd to the wrong post?
Isn't all diarrhea explosive? Has anyone had "unexplosive" diarrhea? Or what aspect of the ordinance renders it "explosive"? And the cause is essentially exposure of the foodstuffs (in this case, likely leafy greens) to feces?
So poop causes poop.
Who pooped in my salad :(
Not all diarrhea is "explosive". This is worse than your average food poisoning from everything i've read (luckily, no personal experience so far).
Hmm I had not heard this, that is concerning. Thank you for sharing. No more salad for me, thanks.
(Bob's Burgers)
If that's your normal poop maybe seek medical advice.
Global weather changes means more tropical pests and pathogens are migrating north. People are literally on fire, and shitting their pants in excitement. =3
There's nothing wrong with "engaging with" the identity of someone when their identity is both reprehensible and negates any impartiality.
A family owned company does have shareholders. The shareholders are the people who own the company.
There’s nothing all that special about a family owned business in this regard, even though they want you to believe it’s completely different. Family owned is a loose term anyway. Large companies are large companies.
For example, my brother and I co-own a smallish (~$5 million/year revenue) software business. We do care about money to some extent, but we regularly agree to do things that work against shareholder value because we also care about things other than money. With two people, it's easy for our values to be aligned on those other things.
With dozens or more shareholders, that's basically impossible. A publicly traded company couldn't realistically be like "hey shareholders, can we agree that we care a lot about this niche local political issue in the town the company was founded?" The more shareholders you have, the more the only commonality between them is "we want more money".
There are many family-owned businesses that are only in it for the money, but "family-owned" can be a proxy for "not very many shareholders" which at least opens the door for the company to have non-financial priorities.
Even the things you named (brand reputation, goodwill, etc.) are prioritized by companies because they're upstream of shareholder value. Many companies have a float in the Pride parade, an employee volunteer day and post on social media about how they're reducing their carbon footprint. Most of those companies are doing those things because they believe they ultimately increase shareholder value, not because shareholders have decided to sacrifice money because they care more about other things.
publicly traded/vc funded companies have always paid me the most because the money isn’t really theirs.
>Brian Thure served as president of Taylor Farms Tennessee from about 2012 until March 2026 and allegedly used his authority over finances, payroll, vendors and accounting to divert company money for personal benefit. >Taylor Farms claims the alleged fraud came to light during an IRS audit
There's a tendency to want to be nice to farmers who own "family owned farms" because it evokes imagery steeped in quaint classical Americana. It is mostly from misinformation that this impression arises. Don't feel bad for a family owned farm that isn't going well. They get special bankruptcy rules, they can sell off their very valuable land as a backstop, and most of all they are probably not as small and quaint and cute as you think they are.
At the core, "Family-owned" just means nepotism is preferred over merit.
(The mob is also "Family-owned")
I'm so confused how to feel about these articles. this one is clearly AI written. But blessed by a lawyer so we think the stuff in here is accurate with facts?
I've accidentally posted an AI article before that seemed just as this was, and the community flagged that to oblivion. Rightfully so I think?
Does Hacker News need a "report AI" and we can then hide the AI articles as a filter?
So the next question is, how much of this is true at all, versus just being hallucinations.
* https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michigan-d...
Stopped reading immediately. If we’re just going to delegate writing to Claude, I won’t bother reading this. And maybe I’ll just delegate my decisions to Claude directly.
Not quoting it though since someone said they’re ambulance chasers, they’ll have to hire out a smellchecker.
I’m okay with it either way - as long as prison time isn’t unjust.
Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Slavery still exists in the USA. This isn't the same as job programs for reinsertion like in other countries - this is openly described as slavery.
And if you doubt it, see these:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/inmates-at-louisianas-an...
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/06/22/prison-slavery...
Why let people out of jail when you can pay them pennies on the dollar and make millions of their forced labor? People are denied parole so prisons don't lose their labor. These prisons have no problem starving their prisoners when they strike to get them back out making money for their owners.
Slave still exists in the USA. I hope for the day it no longer does.
This was related to an Arizona Correctional Industries prison labor contract. In Arizona, labor is mandatory. They either work in these corporate-tied programs or they have to work some other kind of job at the prison. Is that really a choice?
And have minimum wages, and have workplace safety standards, have recourse for injuries while working, etc. They don't get that, they're not "employees".