Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk
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Food packaged and distributed by these mega-suppliers probably has less human handling through the supply chain than any other food, and they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.
There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it.
Bubba flipping burgers getting his dirty hands on your meal might make you sick, but Bobba inspecting the meatslop production line with constant pressure from upper management to be as efficient as possible according to whatever recent regulations were stripped back might accidentally spray the horse-meat product decontaminizer on the pig-meat product, generating a national pandemic.
Number of times the lettuce I grew at home this year made me shit a tsunami: 0
Number of times lettuce I bought at the store this year made me shit a tsunami: 1
Also, the GP doesn't read to me the way you're interpreting it. To me the GP has grown produce and purchased produce this year. The purchase hit him while the grown at home did not.
> If you're growing food to sustain yourself for a whole year, I'm assuming you're willing to sacrifice some indoor space to accommodate.
It would be unheard of for it to contain enough space to produce the family's annual supply of food. And pointless. If you're growing that much food, there's no reason to build walls around it.
I grow leafy greens in containers, and while not totally self sufficient, it provides a decent amount. I have multiple pots that I rotate through offsetting planting so new seedlings are going in as older plants are harvesting. If you're wanting head lettuce types then it's different, but if you just want leafy greens, you can totally do more than I think you're thinking you can.
1) you're taking my comment too seriously.
2) assuming I had enough space to subsistence farm for my household (I don't), I wouldn't try growing lettuce year-round. Lettuce in the cooler months, peppers and tomatoes in the warmer months.
3) the majority of the lettuce I've prepared in my home this year did come from my patio
But doesn't toxoplasmosis come from owning cats?
Nope. The correlation between cat ownership and toxoplasmosis is basically zero. Because toxoplasmosis comes from stray cats who poop in your garden and you catch them through the gardening. Something like 40% of toxoplasmosis cases come from gardening with people unaware that stray cats poop there. (The majority comes from eating undercooked food, like pork, because the pork grazed in fields where there was stray cat poop.)
So essentially doing your own gardening creates a risk vector that is significantly less present in industrial-level gardening of vegetables.
https://www.fda.gov/food/people-risk-foodborne-illness/toxop...
Like, it's not like we're scrubbing every crevice of every leaf with soap. We're spraying some water on a whole pile of it, and then like shaking it off or spinning it. It feels like theatre more than it does food safety.
And I'll confess, I don't even buy or consume fresh produce normally, besides apples and bananas.
Having looked into it, it's not clear at all how to do better at home than hosing it down with some plain water and spinning it dry-ish.
Soap ruins leafy vegetables. Dilute bleach seems strongly frowned upon. Vinegar doesn't necessarily kill enough things well-enough.
And water is just water. The efficaciousness of it reminds me of the handwashing scene from Pulp Fiction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4fDsq0k2rI
follows with wall of vibes
LOL
I’ve argued in systems reliability that once you are already high reliability you are better off lowering incident size vs total unavailability.
So facility risk seems similar or higher for the local shop, depending on specific people running it, but animal-bourne risk seems higher at the packing plant, which seems to be the more likely vector to me anyways.
No data on that. But qualitative experience shows the local farmer/butcher has much nicer/fresher looking/smelling meat than the Walmart.
There's your problem. Ground products are completely dispensable.
Supposing cows yield a better ratio of cut to ground meat (we've been breeding them for meat production and process them on an industrial scale), you'd still have to raise and kill a whole lot more cows to satisfy the world's current beef demand. I think good food safety practices and accepting a low, controlled risk of food-borne illness are justified by not having to kill as many animals.
[0] Not looking to start a discussion about the ethics of hunting. Not being in meat processing, this is an example I have first-hand knowledge of.
This is more a culinary and ethical argument than efficiency or safety. One should use the whole animal, in all its varieties, because they're delicious. Grinding otherwise edible parts of an animal killed on one's behalf because one disfavors (or is repulsed by) them seems to me much worse than the killing. Eat - and enjoy! - all of it or don't kill it.
Who are you to say that it's wrong for me to enjoy some parts of the animal ground up, versus in their original shape? Either way the entire animal is being eaten and enjoyed, so there's no reasonable moral basis on which to say it's wrong. Your position would make sense if people were throwing away the cheek, tongue, etc but we aren't.
It’s definitely better to freeze the left over bits and grind it yourself, but half the animal gets ground up regardless.
The other side of it is that many forms of contamination sporulate, so short of using a powerful surfactant to wipe it all away, the spores will survive basically forever until they hit growing conditions.
What volume brings is increased odds of one of them introducing/reinforcing a contaminant, especially if they're from a CAFO, which are horrifically unsanitary. Again, there's a reason industrial operations have apparently higher standards. When Mad Cow disease was spreading, it wasn't because a local butcher was lax wiping things down, it was because cow brains were being recycled into cow feed and sold across North America on an industrial scale.
And yes, small scale butchers slaughtering cows for a few local farmers and their customers buying whole carcasses have very different sanitary standards than an industrial meat packing plant. I sign a waiver every time.
> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means
How did you get from that to “this butcher was standing in his insufficiently cleaned butchering room”? Whatever personal bugbear you have, I want nothing to do with it.
> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means
I didn't say this and I don't know where you got it from.
It's good that that plant is so well-run. But America doesn't lack for less well-run large meatpacking plants. Remember Boar's Head? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41403919
Busting up Taylor Farms into 5 different companies would affect the food safety not one whit. In fact, it would probably improve it. If there were 6 different companies to choose from, for example, this incident would mean that one of them would go bankrupt as everybody switched to the other 5. And that would be a warning to the remaining companies not to screw up the same way.
However, since there is only a single supplier, Taylor Farms doesn't get any penalty at all. A couple of junior VPs get sacked and life rolls on for the CEO and his buddies.
Consolidation's only benefit is shifting the fiscal gain into fewer pockets, which comes with it's own perverse incentives. (See the Boeing/Airbus duopoly and the problems that causes.)
The jist is that a lot of this is from consolidation at all levels. There are fewer grocery stores and distributors which has ultimately made hard to know where food ultimately comes from.
Couple that with deregulation and the dismantling of the government regulatory agencies under DOGE and we get what we have.
(That's what makes this recent outbreak so atypical - either there was a massive screw up or someone is hiding something).
People also are not aware that the US has (or at least had) one of the most meticulous food inspection regimes in the world. Agency inspectors actually drop in and inspect facilities regularly. The EU might have more stringent food regulations, but as a reminder people were able to slip horse meat into the beef supply for decades before being caught - something like that would be inconceivable in the US.
They give farmers a 500 page document describing in detail how the produce must be grown, but then they provide little to no actual oversite, while producing enormous pricing pressure on the farmer. Any farmer who actually follows the 500 page document will not be able to make any money, so every farmer is compelled to violate the rules.
Then when product is contaminated Driscoll can say "that farmer wasn't following our policy we've cancelled our contract with them" while making no effort to actually clean up all the other farms, who are definitely violating the contract because it's impossible to follow it and make money selling to Driscolls.
The reality is that the documentation is like software T&Cs. You get to run your farm however you want and Driscolls has some CYA for later.
The reality cuts both ways. You can still sell produce directly to local grocery distributors that pay higher, but the requirements are going to be even more stringent with less guarantees.
By logic, a Driscoll or Taylor Farms set of rules needs to sit beyond the regulatory minimum (their lawyers would hate them putting a violation of the regulation in writing).
So, even if a farmer violates the contract, the existing regulation is either insufficient or was also violated.
One of the big issues with a company like Taylor Farms is that when something like cyclospora hits, we all discovered that the grocery store and restaurants really only had an illusion of choice. Nearly all the lettuce products were actually just Taylor farms. That means the only option for consumers to pressure the company is to stop eating lettuce all together. Healthy competition means these distributors will care a lot more about an outbreak like this because it'll drive people to their competitors rather than just being a blip in this quarter's budget. Markets only work when there's an actual market and not just a single player.
But further, yeah I do think the FDA needs a more active role in doing compliance checks. Ideally this isn't the job of the FDA and instead gets rolled into the USDA or a separate agency dedicated to food products. Having one big agency in charge of both food and drugs isn't great as drugs has ended up with all the actual investment.
Big companies are good at reducing cost, but one way they do that is by making liabilities someone else's problem. The bigger they get, the more they do that. It's a key reason why companies like Walmart are constantly being found to employ slave labor through their contractors. Walmart can rehire the very same contractors (but rebranded) after the controversy blows over and rinse/repeat.
The same dynamic exists with these mega-distributors.
Why? For years, Tyson Chicken gave written instructions to its undocumented employees on how to stay under the radar for employment, insurance, immigration, tax and healthcare.
With appropriate regulation and enforcement I agree with you, but in the current regime, I’m not surprised that foodborne illness in America has 10x in 2026.
With the elevated standards of megascale agriculture you have the issue now where diseases from a lettuce farm in Mexico could affect somebody's health in NYC a month later in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in a previous era.
There's no complete solution but in this particular case it's important to remember that salads are actually pretty serious foodborne—illness vectors and they need to be heavily rinsed and ideally cleaned with a bleach or vinegar solution. It's one of the reasons that salads are traditionally on the no-eat list for pregnant women.
Tomatoes prove your point better, but I still would never eat any of the tomatoes in an NYC supermarket in the winter, as they don't taste much better than soggy cardboard.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691004129/no...
which is a book that I enjoy less now than the first time I read it. He was worried that shipping and aviation were both going to get more dangerous whereas that perception of a safety crisis in shipping in the 1970s went away and aviation got much much safer.
do we need both options? probably. but painting small scale organic farming as'the same' as the alternative is...not accurate.
I think one of the problems of our modern food system is it can be difficult for a consumer to pinpoint the source of an infection. Food-borne illnesses can take 24-48 hrs or more to become apparent, by which time you may not know what you ate. Combined with the fact that we can't know where certain ingredients were sourced (one of the topics of TFA), and you can know you're sick, but not why.
If there is an outbreak there are multiple pin points, it's also not hard to do this with local market goods either (unless you live in Texas or something where there are no regulations).
Why do you think this is the first time we've dealt with such situations? The only reason why it's happening now is because Elon Musk had his DOGE goons gut the programs that monitor our food supply.
I hope those DOGE goons have deep pockets because they are about to find out what happens when your supposed benefactors abandon you.
(I don't disagree that an administration focused on widespread carnage can be blamed for making things worse.)
Even when it's totally obvious the cause can be hard to actually prove. A restaurant near me put several people in the hospital with a certain kind of mushroom a couple years back but investigations never conclusively proved the source.
If those meals average just 2 ingredient+source combinations that are introduced during that timeframe, then there are 12 different combinations to question and I really have no idea which one of them could be the culprit.
Meanwhile, cyclospora symptoms normally take around 2 weeks to show up. That's 14 days, or 42 meals worth of ingredients. I definitely don't even come close to remembering every meal I had over the last two weeks.
> It's not difficult at all, food products all have factory + machine origin coding on all packages. If something makes you sick you can easily pin point which region and even which exact factories were used.
Speak for yourself. I'd love to have this information available, but I would still find it very difficult to pinpoint what it was that made me sick.
Small farms just don't have the pressure, or the large amount of disinterested or temporary employees that large farms have.
Same with smaller slaughter houses. Perhaps they don't have the manpower to deep clean every shift, but they also don't process nearly as much stuff, don't churn through employees as fast, more directly handle and train employees, and don't have some crap corner of the factory where people can be messing around being dumb.
Of course none of that is bullet proof, but small farms and slaughter houses know that if they fuck things up they don't just lose a bit of money and have to deal with some legal problems like Tyson or other large suppliers and distributors, they lose literally everything.
Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.
Smaller organizations means redundancies and options. Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency. Redundancy is good.
Redundancy may be inefficient, but you can also build redundant systems that looking at from a micro perspective seem inefficient but what you see is only a local inefficiency; if you distribute their effects far enough in space and time you find that they are actually at a macro scale more efficient than not having them because they prevent breakdowns that destroy all the smaller systems held within the bigger one.
These are two unrelated events though.
Other consolidated suppliers have had events in the past, and they did not 'wipe out' our food supply because they identified the root cause and the impacted supplies, initiated a recall, and the rest of their redundant, distributed systems remained intact.
The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility.
If we had 20 'local' distributors who were all bought by Taylor farms and one of those locations had a significant health issue, there wouldn't be a large issue if Taylor identified which one had the failing and then distributed their other 19 location's product to the area facing the shortage due to it's location's product being recalled.
Right, and the issue with the King of England wasn't the consolidation of all power in his hands, but rather him not taking responsibility for everyone's welfare.
Not to diminish this for anyone affected, but the safety of driving cars is far worse than that and most of us do that daily.
I never stopped buying or eating lettuce.
This is not a data exercise, this is real life and 1 person getting sick from this stuff is too much.
You may not wish to hear this, but real life is very much a data exercise:
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-cdc-food-net-monitorin...
But it does cripple our ability to ask if this was a one-off, or if we're seeing long term trends that should be worrisome.
You are almost certainly not reflected in those numbers.
this "whattabout"ism is brought up during every safety discussion. can we please accept that 1/ everyone knows about the car issue, and 2/ the car issue being a problem does not mean we should stop talking about other issues that exist.
In any case, it's a good barometer for judging personal risk. I don't stress about the danger when I get into my car, so I probably shouldn't stress about the danger from something substantially less likely to take me out. It contextualizes a number by comparing it to something most of us do every day.
People are very prone to overweight the risk of things that are prominent in the media.
We do hold food safety to a high standard. We have some of the highest standards on the planet.
A few lucky people live in the densest urban areas where car non-ownership is totally fine, nice even. For the rest, it's horrible and no one would choose it. A trip to the grocery store in the suburbs could take 30-45 minutes each way in 90º heat (and in half the country, with humidity too) is terrible - and think how many times you'll have to go to the store if you're buying only what you can carry 3 miles. Also many school districts provide no buses, so now you're walking kids to and from school in all weather. Bikes are a thing, but the roads aren't always safe and it still sucks in weather.
For all animals on earth, you can't really get by without food. This is jus a fact.
I have a car (and a license) anyway for comfort reasons, but I keep the scooter in the back for situations like distant parking. Works pretty well for me.
I'm shocked to hear many school districts provide no busses though... I guess I always assumed that was some legal requirement? Like you have to send your kid to school, so we have to provide transportation if you're outside of a certain range.
Example: The assigned school for my neighborhood is 1.5 miles away by the shortest possible route, and requires crossing a 7-lane arterial.
Our dependency on food is not a choice.
i guarantee you that first number is wildly non-illustrative of the reach of this outbreak.
We also stopped buying lettuce.
I say this as someone who gets most of my veg from a local CSA. It's not because I think it's safer. It probably isn't.
1) Why? The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier.
2) Why only now? Bagged leafy greens are notorious for outbreaks. The extra processing steps means greater opportunity for introducing contamination (more people handling the produce), and greater opportunity for cross-contamination.
This food safety expert/activist/litigator has explained both of those points many times: https://www.marlerblog.com/ Though, being middle-aged and perhaps with better-than-average recollection, I connected the dots to bagged leafy greens years ago, across many news cycles, and to the risk of food poisoning from vegetables generally, through hard, personal experience.
The mixed messaging certainly didn’t help.
One day it’s Taylor Farms and the next the FDA was apologizing.
And even once it was found to be Taylor Farms, you can’t control every Taco Bell or anything else.
Mostly it just killed any consumer confidence in greens
Restaurants and fast-food outlets generally can't/don't avoid their staff making sketchy health decisions.
Don't eat at them if you're worried.
Read anything about back-kitchens and staff's interesting attitudes towards health risks.
I highly recommend Kitchen Confidential - amazing novel writing.
Although my intro to the genre was 1933's Down and Out in Paris and London (an upper-middle class хорошо horrorshow). An all-time favorite book.
It really, really is not. They are massive and are a supplier for a huge number of restaurants.
Exactly. I never saw a reason to even get started.
If you go back not that many decades, consumers had never bought tightly-bagged vegetables because they were not available.
If you were accustomed to never having bagged lettuce growing up it mainly just seems like false convenience to begin with.
>Bagged leafy greens are notorious for outbreaks.
Naturally without data this was not well-established nor completely confirmed like it is now.
Everybody and their grandmother had just instinctively known better for centuries.
When homemakers did cut or shred lettuce it was usually intended to be eaten within the hour. Nobody would do this very far in advance at home, and only after discarding the outer leaves, then thoroughly washing the remaining part that was going to be carefully "processed" by hand, then eaten by their loving family. With clean hands after washing with soap.
Back when government regulators were actually recognized having stronger interest in food safety than today, you still couldn't expect their standards to be the very highest.
It was just better than nothing.
That same hard personal experience goes way back before the advent pf plastics.
And in any case, a preventative measure, like thoroughly washing the lettuce is a good form of insurance for home made foods, regardless of what's reported on the news.
No; you can't have redundancy without inefficiency, but you can have inefficiency without redundancy.
Except AWS doesn't fall over, regions do. The problem isn't using one provider, it's that everyone uses one region of that provider. When that region goes down, so many people report outages that it seems like AWS as a whole went down, but it didn't.
Same basic deal with Taylor Farms. It was only lettuce sourced from Central Mexico, and it was distributed to the east coast and some central states. Page 18 of this PDF (https://www.taylorfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Taylo...) shows all the growing regions. Of all 22, only 1 sent out bad lettuce. But popular opinion is that the all of it was bad.
So the risk wasn't their scale. If anything, the risk was their customers (the walmarts, costcos, krogers, etc) not labeling where it came from or more stringently tracking these things or planning for an "incident". None of this is new, everybody knows leafy greens are the most likely source of food poisoning.
Just like AWS isn't to blame when customer sites we depend on go down from one bad service in one region, we shouldn't be blaming Taylor Farms. We should be blaming the customer-companies we all use who didn't plan for a very predictable failure.
2020 Kinesis outage has entered the chat
Really? At least here (Canada), you absolutely do need food safe certifications to sell any food at farmers markets.
Sure, but you still have many more human hands on your head of lettuce on a farmers market (plus all the contamination from potential buyers sneezing, grabbing produce to check it out or from the environment in general aka flying birds, mice, rats, ...) than there will be on the mass produced lettuce that maybe saw a human hand at picking and everything since then is automated.
IIRC outbreaks in mass-produced green stuff usually end up tied to farmers or their neighbors spraying fecal based fertilizer at the wrong time. Unfortunately... that makes the blast radius of such a thing much, much worse.
1) how big is the fallout,
2) how insulated from repercussions are you?
if a small local farms food is making people sick, it will only be a few people and word will spread.
a small local farm could more easily go out of business from just a few sick people. the market functions correctly at that scale. if a major corporation does it, the market does not function anywhere close to the same efficiency and the fallout is 1000s and 1000s of people sick or worse.
i think what many are arguing is that the responsibility should scale along with the possible impacts.
A farmers market stand may not have perfect food safety either, but their outbreak would be limited to the few people who bought something on the farmers market (or maybe a cafe/restaurant or two that they supply).
Most likely, any harm wouldn't even be traced back to any individual salad because the sample wouldn't be big enough to form a pattern people would notice.
But because they supply so many salads to everywhere, it's a major issue that affects the whole food system.
I guess it's similar to an AWS outage. Companies constantly have outages, but an AWS one takes down half the internet.
There are many sensible places between Taylor Farms and backyard agriculture.
Direct-from-farm delivery boxes are a better bet, at least the mainstay ones, but they’re certainly more expensive and the variety is more obviously seasonal (as you would expect).
Neither of these is a solution to nutrition at scale. It’s difficult to balance the economies of scale that consolidated distribution brings against the corruption that comes along with increased supplier leverage. Monopsony is just as pernicious as Monopoly (and they tend to feed each other, with large grocery and restaurant chains preferring large distributors).
Much of the consolidation locations of food production is how illnesses spread among farm animals. I could get eggs from a local farmer because their birds don't socialize around birds with the flu.
Just my take on the matter. It is important to balance the sources.
The high efficiency gains and safety disregard the environmental impact caused by pesticides and agrochemicals in general. These are much less of a concern in small farms when they have much less pressure to increase food yield per area.
They most certainly do at my farmer's market, and every vendor has their certification posted for all to see, along with a health inspector rating underneath it.
Did they actually do this? All the reporting I saw basically amounted to “we have no friggin’ idea, shrug”. Unless you mean “Taylor Farms”, but that’s not a farm.
Edit: here’s the FDA page about it: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...
They certainly haven’t “pinpointed the farm”. In fact, they have no idea which farm might have been the source. As such, this claim is completely false:
> “they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.”
Deregulation and the evisceration of enforcement mechanisms isn't what makes food handling at scale efficient and safe. That's just nonsensical. The reason it isn't worse still is the inertia of his system that used to be better run.
I don’t think they have the oversight corporate farmers do. But I also don’t think they put immigrants into the field for 12 hour days with no breaks and no bathroom.
There’s something to be said for a farmer who doesn’t pass explosive diarrhea onto the crops he sells me as food….
When I buy from a local farmer I expect to wash my produce thoroughly, and if his product makes me sick I can come back later and complain to his face. If that doesn't fix the problem I can probably get him excluded from market participation in the future.
When I buy salad in a bag* at the supermarket, I assume it's been cleaned. If not, a lot more people than me will get sick and we have little power to make the faceless company change their ways.
*Just an example. I don't buy salad in plastic bags because I think that stuff tastes like cardboard.
Nope, quite the contrary. By necessity consolidation means fewer individual processing facilities, which in turn means any single facility services a larger percentage of the market. Given fixed odds of any given single processing facility being cross-contaminated by a dirty shipment, by necessity that contamination event will impact a larger volume of product due to bulk mixing. Additionally this cross-contamination event will impact a larger portion of the market due to now-commonplace multi-state product distribution.
I frequently hear "efficiency" touted in the context of the agriculture industry, always by individuals who have no involvement with it, and have to wonder what, exactly, they believe they are cheerleading. A loaf of bread is not significantly cheaper now than it was 50 years ago, so no obvious benefits to the consume accrue from this notional efficiency. What has changed is rural bankruptcy and suicide rates have both skyrocketed, with the consolidation of the AG industry consistently implicated as the primary driver of both.
> but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't.
FUD. While we know the mega farms don't because they kill every year through corner cutting. But keep spraying your salads late in the season with human waste water, keep bleaching your chicken and keep telling yourselves that they follow best practices.
Got any documentation for that? The most precise location I can find is "Mexico".
What I've heard is that the lettuce from many farms goes through the same industrial lettuce shredders. The shredders were contaminated by at least one farm's produce, and then the shredders spread the Cyclospora to lettuce from other farms.
There's a good podcast covering this event: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-natural-causes-340763248...
If an individual farm has an outbreak they can (usually) source it, eliminate it from the supply chain, and switch to an alternative without any interruption to service. That also means you want as large of a geographic distribution of your farm network as possible. (I'm looking at you, Yuma Valley - a semi-regular source of e.coli outbreaks).
As a bonus, the supply chain is much more efficient at this scale. Small farms can have their salads packed in nitrogen filled bags for longer shelf life and less waste.
Fresh leafy greens are naturally just one of the toughest and most vulnerable supply chains. The disappointing answer (like in a lot of these situations) is that being bigger and more massive company is what makes the product better.
- Lobbying and specialist groups can and do hamstringing America's ability to make better, safer food at scale. This isn't about big vs small producers. It's a regulatory resourcing problem.
- The FDA / USDA split is something those groups _love_ to take advantage of to further hamstring America's food supply.
The conclusion I've come to is that this gives profit-driven-corporations or foreign adversaries an excellent way to harm America's food chain through these specialist groups.
Fixing the FDA/USDA split is probably a good idea, but it will take a political earthquake to do so, and I'm absolutely willing to vote for people who pledge to make my food both safer and more delicious.
Completely anecdotal, I see lots or recalls from smaller producers I’ve never heard of, I can imagine they have less scrutiny and oversight.
Not only is the blast radius smaller, but small businesses are less incentivized to cut corners since serious violations pose a greater risk to their business than large businesses. Corruption is essentially legalized in America via lobbying, but only big companies can really afford to lobby and make huge campaign contributions to sway the government in their favor.
Government is meant to be a check on businesses, but that completely falls down once business is big enough to buy the government. It wouldn't surprise me if quality control at large companies is worse for the simple fact that they know who to pay off if they get caught, as Taylor Farms has here.
The United States has allowed many industries to consolidate, but the fines they face when they mess up are infinitely small compared to their size.
In the former example, there's far more pressure on the smaller companies, which is why in such a regime people expect more consistent quality from the big guys, and the smaller guys are often boutique in some way (=offering something unique in their service/product in order to be able to compete). Small guys have a hard time standing up to big guys.
On the other hand, in a regime where no one becomes that huge, like the latter example, there's still pressure, but the competition is fair, just like if all the companies were similarly big (except that you can't have that many big companies in a single industry, by proportion definitions).
Realizing this drove home why inconsistent antitrust enforcement appears to produce bad results. Because it leaves us in the state of the former example. It's also unfortunately the intermediate state of getting serious with antitrust enforcement.
Like.. before? When we didn't have nationwide food recalls that had seeped into nationwide fast food chains and bagged products distributed into every commercial food selling outlet, under a myriad of different names?
According to https://futurism.com/science-energy/diarrhea-lettuce-taylor-...
Taylor Farms is "heavily involved in modern-day forced labor."
They contract labor out from AZ Dept of Corrections for $4.75 / hr (but inmates are capped at $1.50 / hr in AZ)
Some of the incarcerated workers were here as non-citizens, detained by ICE, and only then eligible for work / slavery.
2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
Have you ever ate prison food? I literally would not feed most of it to my dog.
Also, if you worked 8 hours you'd be able to buy a lot more than a single pack of ramen.
> While ramen costs about 35 cents at Target, prison commissaries charge between 24 cents to $1.06 nationwide.
https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-c...
Prison is not voluntary.
Isn't that not the actual choice though?
Like for a prison with monetary advantages to the inmates working don't they actually send you to solitary for refusing work detail?
Good time means you get to exit the prison for things like visiting family.
The prisoners are coerced to work for sub-human wages because, if they don’t, they stay in prison longer and can’t see their loved ones.
It's definitely an extremely exploitative situation and overall icky, but the people who jump in to compare it to slave labor are kind of embarrassing themselves in unnecessary hyperbole.
This is because many states are full of people who are both weirdly "Free market" brain, to the point that they believe it's a good idea to tell the warden "Any dollar from this budget that you do not spend feeding inmates, you get to personally keep" is a good idea because they have no knowledge of systems design or perverse incentives, and more importantly, because they genuinely want prisoners to suffer. No, this is not a joke. In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.
When people joke about "I should go to jail, at least I will get three square meals a day", that's just false. Most prisons are only required to serve two meals a day. The quality of those meals varies from "Okay for a middle school lunch if you put a gun to my head" to "Fyre festival had better food, and this is not a joke"
This is an incredible claim, so I'm trying to find out where you got that from. Seems like maybe that was just in Alabama and they changed the law already?
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alabama-prison-meals-la...
https://law.justia.com/codes/alabama/2024/title-14/chapter-6...
These are all right within the USDA's general population daily calorie guidance of 2-3 thousand per day for males.
But I can't source what I said.
What I can source is that prisoners largely report going hungry. That's a completely different problem though.
I cannot remove or edit my comment. Thank you for the push back.
"Food must be of sufficient nutritional value and provide a minimum of 1,800 to 2,000 calories for adults"
Which is one of the worst written statutes I've ever seen. How do you have a range for a minimum? Of course, the jails aim for the lower end, which in theory should be sufficient for a sedentary population, but protein is highly expensive and most of those calories are cheap carbs which don't satiate the prisoners.
Also, the Jail Standards are not enforceable by the courts as Illinois courts can only enforce laws which have a punishment for non-compliance and are therefore deemed mandatory. Otherwise they are just directory. People see the word "shall" in statutes and assume that government officials must comply, but that is not the case in many states.[2]
Food for prisoners is really back-stopped by the 8th and 14th Amendments and their requirement is simply that you don't die of malnutrition.
[1] https://www.ilga.gov/ftp/JCAR/AdminCode/020/020007010001100R...
[2] https://www.isba.org/committees/governmentlawyers/newsletter...
That still is massively undercutting regular wages, it's government price dumping. The ethics of prison labor aside, whoever buys prison labor should be forced to pay fair market wages to the prison.
But, again, that's not a Taylor Farms issue, that's a government issue.
Personally, I think it's a very good thing to let prisoners work as long as the working conditions are the same standards as free people, including any wage laws.
“The only social responsibility of the government is to increase campaign sponsor’s profits”
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
The new dealers can be counted on one hand (they're the ones 70+) while the neoliberals have been at the helm for 40 years.
You've got some weird looking hands :)
> "In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his 'social responsibility' reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.
> The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct 'social responsibility,' rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it.
> But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other."
His point wasn't that businesses can't act ethically or with responsibility, it's that they shouldn't act to become welfare centers and corporate philanthropies (which was a trend at the time). And I think even the most anti-capitalist person would agree that corporation acting "charitably" should be treated with a huge eye of skepticism.
That whole "he is in effect imposing taxes" thing is ridiculous. Taxes are forcibly collected by the government, not voluntarily spent by a business. Businesses are not the military, executives are not obligated to follow orders. If the stockholders don't like what an executive does, they can fire the executive and hire someone else. An executive who wants to keep their job therefore might be wise to stick to what the stockholders will like. But they aren't doing anything wrong if they don't, any more than an employee is doing something wrong if they disobey their manager.
It also misses the idea that a lot of misbehavior by companies is stuff that's bad for the company, but they do it anyway because of stupidity, shortsightedness, coordination problems, or the incentives of decisionmakers not lining up with the consequences for the company they work for. Or rather, it doesn't miss the idea but explicitly dismisses it; anything that is actually good for the company is defined by Friedman as not being "social responsibility."
My armchair assessment is the best way to push back is for farmers to join together into co-ops and find a middle ground between the efficiency of scale and the concerns of food safety and ethical working conditions.
The recommendations don't include my suggestion about co-ops, which is a valid addition to the commentary about the OP.
We're working against the desire to get the basic needs of life (in this case, food) met for the lowest possible price.
Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I think most Americans would be shocked as to where their food comes from.
I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a macdonalds burger.
Everyone is invested in maintaining the illusion. And that collision is rampant across all of food: Pepsi price fixing with Walmart, the price of beef at retail being long decoupled from wholesale / Agri Stats...
I would fully support such a mandate, for meat products too.
It would be interesting, giving consumers more information is nearly always better, it opens the door for open source analysis, the 2nd and 3rd order effects would probably be mostly harmless and highly entertaining.
>I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a McDonalds burger.
They're be too busy being angry that "BNSF Alliance Intermodal Facility, Haslet Texas" is in fact not an avocado farm.
> ...on July 16, the same day the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced their investigation into the multistate Cyclospora outbreak, Taylor Farms executives met with White House and FDA officials
Ah, well, there it is. Good for them that they're able to get away with it. Corporate protection is bought and sold out in the open.
I mean we just let over 2,000,000 people die from covid in this country and most people wouldn't even mask to spare anyone or themselves
All we did was make vaccines taboo or difficult to access
Then we put the worse possible people in charge, again
There is zero care for health or safety anymore
There will most definitely be a next time
we're living in 2026
otherwise i don't really give a shit. not my problem, and i don't really care.
edit: meant to reply to the meat grinder comment, not root lol
point still stands