Chicken products recalled in five states due to “false marks of inspection”
thehealthy.com
thehealthy.com
DOGE cuts to FDA, HHS, FSIC, FTC, EPA, and more have inevitably made this problem much worse.
Over what time period? If they can inspect 5% in a year, that's not too bad.
Keep in mind that if they inspect without notice and do it randomly, companies have a decent incentive to keep things working in order. If serious issues are found, a given plant can be shut down for months, which if you're small enough, means you go out of business.
I don't know what a "good" number is - that would involve statistics. I'd imagine it should be more than 5%, but not something like 35% - that's quite high.
As I said: 5% may be too low. But perhaps 20% would be good/great.
Thehealthy.com is not a real news outlet and this isn't real news. 25klbs of chicken is an infinitesimal amount of total consumed in the US.
I have some expired salsa in my fridge. Where is CNN when I have such noteworthy news?
Seriously though this like a single weekend sale at one Walmart. This is barely even noteworthy local news in a small town.
That's a wild combination of words there.
How many people will consume this, how many people will get sick?
How many more product will be dangerous. Are we waiting for more death to just have bare minimum safety measures?
Post a article about a C++ program and the entire world is coming at you saying Rust is better because it's safer and you are crazy to use such language is 2026.
Post about food safety. And suddenly safety is negligible because it's not that much.
Keep going guys.
This can't be inferred from the 0.00007% figure? Or are you hoping to use the rhetorical tactic of doing "huge number * small percentage = big number" to shock readers? eg. "0.0001% chance of getting stuck by lightning * all americans = 300 people per year hit by lightning. That's enough to fill an auditorium!"
[1] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/shanghai-ravioli-co...
Dayummmmm!
Defunding the FDA and forcing out 4500 staff via DOGE cuts caused this. Right now we have 400 safety inspectors covering 36,000 facilities vs the FDA's own estimates they need at least 1,500 inspectors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/health/food-safety-trump-...
There are more than you listed as well, like the raspberries https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/outbrea...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2026/08/28/food-r...
One might be tempted to wave the numbers away as "Obviously there are fewer recalls, because they don't do inspections to begin with!"
That might be true. It's hard to prove or disprove, though. Perhaps if we look at the statistics on the other end, the actual hospitalizations from tainted food?
https://www.notus.org/trump-white-house/federal-data-is-disa...
> “The status quo was, the federal government is going to collect and disseminate data and statistics,” said John Kubale, a University of Michigan professor who helps direct the world’s largest archive of social science research data, including sensitive U.S. federal government data. “That is no longer a reasonable assumption.”
But it sounds like you need more of a push than that.
The one thing they are good at, if you don't count feathering their own nests, is hiding their failures.
> “The number of recalls does not necessarily correlate with the level of surveillance,” said Robert Custard, an environmental health expert who also represents the West Virginia Association of Sanitarians. “Some years you're going to have more than others because of the luck of the draw. This year you may have less total recalls, but the cyclospora outbreak that we had this summer may have the highest number of human cases for any foodborne outbreak in recent history.”
Custard, who worked at the Virginia Department of Health for more than two decades, said cuts to public health staffing and funding can mean fewer people are available to inspect and test possible food-safety problems before they cause illness.
"When you do less testing, you're going to find less problems," Custard said. "When you find less problems, you end up with fewer recalls."
This isn't necessarily true though. Issues found by inspection only occasionally lead to recalls. Most of the time, it's minor corrective action (called a noncompliance record) like "An employee wasn't following sanitation rule X, show us that you are properly training your employees to follow sanitation rule X".
This recall is not driven by a food safety concern! It's mildly punitive, and is done to encourage trust. Just like that time costco had to throw away a truck full of butter over a labeling issue, the American food system works very hard to ensure that certain labels on food mean something, so that consumers can make informed decisions in the supermarket and therefore have a semi-functional free market experience.
Recalls happen from positive evidence of a pathogen, from reported illness, or from noncompliant product. If you have no inspections, then companies may normalization of deviance their way to less safe products, which can cause more illness, which would cause more recalls.
Fewer inspections could only lead to fewer recalls if the majority of recalls are labeling issues or otherwise never would have caused illness.
Yet almost always I hear nothing or almost nothing from the Democrats, not about Taylor Farms either. It's been that way for many years; I can't understand it.
If someone doesn't pay a political price for bad performance, they will keep doing it.
Everything about this administration is so unhinged, from DOGE to Lake Ontario to Iran to Greenland to taxes to shooting people in the streets to literally every god damned thing that we have absolutely no framework for even conceptualizing what the hell is happening.
Also, half the country lives in a bubble where Trump is anointed by god and saving the country from trans vegan child rapists.
Are you really trying to spin your own narrative here, using cherry-picked data and your own link as "evidence"?
The Boar's Head *and* McDonalds outbreaks were in 2024 under the previous admin, way before DOGE, completely undermining this sneed.
No, they were using llm prompts to make decisions.
- NLRB which was investigating employees fired as retaliation for criticizing Musk's actions
- OFCCP which was auditing Tesla for workplace discrimination
- EEOC which had sued Tesla for racial harassment and discrimination
- Five separate Inspectors General who were investigating Musk's companies
- NHTSA which has forced Tesla to perform recalls
- CFPB which had proposed rules that would cover Musk's planned payment product
- USDA (specifically the person investigating Neuralink)
- FDA - also the people investigating Neuralink
- SEC, FTC, and NOAA - again, those with Musk related business were cut
I am not saying that Musk bribed his way into killing nearly all of the regulatory actions he was facing ... but I am not NOT saying that either.
It's pretty clear that DOGE had a lot to do with consolidation of power, and very little to do with cost cutting.
“Your own link”? Do you think the poster you’re replying to is The New York Times?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boars-head-listeria-recall-bug-...
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/boars-head-provisio...
Let's not let facts and real data get in the way though. Every post is being massively downvoted.
Say what you will about the overall regulatory environment of Canada and the EU—you can buy meat there and know that you will not get salmonella, because it’s been tested for salmonella, and it won’t be sold for consumption if that test is positive. Stateside we’re just told: well, cook it properly or it’s on you.
Where can I locate this Salmonella-immune Bizarro Canada and Bizarro EU on a map?
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/04/ongoing-salmonella-ou...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/90-confirmed-salmonell...
https://www.foodpoisoningnews.com/salmonella-outbreak-in-can...
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/08/polish-eggs-linked-to...
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2025/10/salmonella-sickens-50...
https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/04/one-dead-in-german-sa...
What gets me about your linked cases is that, with one exception, they're all to foods that you'd consume without further preparation or cooking. Not sure what to make of that--but it's not what you'd expect for a salmonella source.
That's why you should thoroughly cook your food, especially if you have a weakened immune system.
Eggs get recalled for Salmonella because we like them sunny side-up.
Salmonella in ready-to-eat foods, introduced by cross-contamination, is a different story.
I'm not proud of this stupid fucking bullshit, at all.
This infection on the body politic can and has jumped to infect others, and does not require an abnormally weak host to attack, and overconfidence is a kind of weakness.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2207547-fast-food-nati...
Definitely feels very ironic
From the same speech where Lincoln then warned that a tyrant could overtake the U.S. political system from within...
Not American but some of your 19th century politicians where spectacular orators.
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
Could gone to some great parties.
Did that instead.
— Elon Musk
Another word for "regulations" is "protections".
This is great news because it means time travel is possible.
But these panics are so amusing. Pete’s breaking the trains. Hegseth (was it him?) is crashing the planes. RFK’s eating the infected meat. The Haitians are eating the cats and dogs. We need a prediction market for the next panic.
Naturally. Only the strong survive!
I couldn't possibly be the statistical outcome of like chicken with regular bacteria, oh no...
Essentially Ron Swanson minus the satire
Yup, looks fine, sounds fine... wait
Not to excuse the idea that they shouldn't be inspected, of course.
These businesses earnestly do not care until it affects their bottom line
https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/01/14/as-foodborne-illne...
https://medshadow.org/investigating-generics/fda-fails-in-la...
As an extreme, if there was one single guy in charge you'd still get recalls every time a problem reaches national levels, and you could get a lot of them.
Increasing inspectors and making the agency do more will help deal with issues before they reach that level (that's also assuming regulations are favorable to their job...), potentially lowering the number of wide range recalls they have to call for.
When an inspector in a plant notices a problem, like an employee not following hygiene rules, that doesn't trigger a recall, because that's not enough evidence of unsafe product. They usually issue a "Noncompliance Record", which the plant is required to resolve.
Inspections aren't usually the trigger for a recall! If an inspection surfaces evidence of an active health hazard, like some biological test comes back with a pathogen, that could trigger a recall.
Here, the facility was flagrantly violating the law in it's entirety. Unless they were somehow doing this on accident, they have been operating fraudulently. This recall is because this product was not inspected at all, and so via the precautionary principle, and also as a somewhat punitive action, the product has to be recalled.
More frequent inspections could only have caught this earlier. More frequent inspections will cause more problems to be Noncompliance that gets fixed rather than a problem persisting until it makes someone sick and that actually triggers a recall.
Inspections prevent recalls. Few inspections allow problems to escalate to recalls.
Your comment and all the speculative piling on it spawned look kinda silly in light of this context.
> The products apparently have “false marks of inspection” with “EST. 18004.”
Nothing in the article suggests that budget cuts had anything to do with this. USDA safety inspectors doing their job found yet another foreign company failing to protect American health. DOGE and the FDA had nothing to do with this story, but the parent poster felt obliged to make political statements without reading the article, which happens frequently here.
Are we not interested in science and reason here?
It’s really no different than the cringy characterization of other humans as “NPCs” often spouted by children. That thinking indicates a sort of complex that is very off-putting.
Given that, this person would likely benefit from exposure to alternative viewpoints instead of further insulating themselves.
I was primarily motivated to do this by repetitive commentary which is indistinguishable from bot content, and I continue to be motivated by this.
I’ll leave the rest as an exercise to you.
inb4 correlation is not causation.
Is it reasonable to trust statistics provided by the current administration?
But yeah, good god people are being absurd.
However, there was similar absurdity a couple years ago, when an article about Costco having to dump a truckload of butter because it was mislabled, with everyone coming out of the woodwork to decry it as obvious government waste making us all poorer.
Which was insane of course. It was one truckload, just like here, and improperly labeled, just like here.
The US system takes the sanctity of product labeling extremely seriously, because the intent is that you can trust the label, and therefore make informed free market decisions! Strictly regulated labeling is a great way to reduce the information asymmetry between producer and consumer, and help keep a market competitive!
The reality is that nobody here is any better or worse than the average on any website that doesn't make you take a test before you can post. That was always true, but it's getting a little noisy. Notice how there is in fact pushback in this comments section to those running wild with assertions and bullshit, and those comments are getting downvoted to oblivion.
That is new and utterly toxic.
How many in this comment section even noticed that this is not safety related?
The reason echoes a recent issue the USDA has been following—one that's becoming peculiarly common.
If you’re wondering what has been going on with our food, you’re one of millions. Now, on Wednesday, August 26, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a recall notice on 24,900 pounds of chicken.
The event reportedly impacts foodservice businesses in New England—namely, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) says two separate frozen, not-ready-to-eat Buffalo chicken-flavored products from Boston-based Shanghai Ravioli Corporation, Inc. are being pulled. Why is the recall happening?
FSIS surveillance reportedly found that products named as “Buffalo chicken rangoon” and “Benedetto’s Buffalo chicken mozzarella sticks.” The products apparently have “false marks of inspection” with “EST. 18004.”
The cited reason suggests the matter may follow a recent trend, in which the USDA is suddenly clamping down on imported foods. An industry trade site refers to Shanghai Ravioli Corporation as a “distributor of pasta and other goods,” which means they could be involved in importing.
The FSIS’s image of the products does not show a country of origin.
Sources have explained that animal-sourced foods brought in from foreign countries need to be inspected once they reach the U.S. side. Other recent USDA recalls for the same reason affected soup and bacon, both from Canada. What’s the risk?
Wednesday’s FSIS announcement states, “Food produced without inspection may contain undeclared allergens, harmful bacteria, or other contaminants that put consumer health and safety at risk.”
The FSIS lists the recall as a Class I, which they deem as a high or medium risk. This ranking is used when “there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.”
The agency says it urges businesses not to serve the product and to discard or return them to the place of purchase.
In any case organics seem to be both less brined (aka not paying for salt water) and well prepared, everytime.
Tyson and Purdue have the occasional problem that causes a recall, like everyone else. In a system like this, some background noise of recalls is expected and normal and not indicative of a problem. For example, this recall is about a labeling issue, and while the USDA is calling this a high risk recall, that's because recalling improperly labeled food is done to encourage trust in food labels, which America does really well, except for all the bullshit terms companies put on food that have no legal definition.
You are supposed to be able to buy from a different company if you think Tyson chicken is shitty, which it is, but for some reason the people who say that's how it's supposed to work keep letting Tyson buy all the other companies that sell chicken products.
Step one is basically just never buy chicken breast. Chicken breast often has some white stripes on it, which is a result of chicken breast essentially being forced to grow bigger than it naturally would. This is known to make the chicken taste bad and have a bad texture, but Americans are bad at paying attention to anything that can't be turned into a simple numerical metric, like price per pound.
Chicken thigh won't develop that striping.
No running water and no toilets were fairly common in a lot of the smaller places.
Never got sick once.
It’s not unreasonable for people to expect their food not to poison them. Have you considered being less sociopathic?
This is important, I'm glad some one caught it... it's also kind of a nothing burger
Are there bots on here now upvoting stupid nonsense?
Anyone complaining about all the food safety issues popping up actually hates capitalism and shouldn’t be allowed to participate in government. This is just capitalism at work and the market will sort out who is or is not willing to pay less for chronic diarrhea vs those willing to pay a premium for clean food.
Don’t take away the people’s choice in how much diarrhea they want.
lol
Many commenters have pointed it out, but it's such an important point that it needs to be repeated every time. Capitalism without effective regulation has never worked out in all of human history. In the absence of an entity with a big enough stick (aka the government), overt or covert methods of collusion always emerge which leads to a race to the bottom.
Sadly for the Americans, approximately a third are so far down the path of 'govt bad' indoctrination that they need to relearn the lesson every couple of generations. Unfortunately for the rest of us, that third holds outsized political power due to the voting system.