Food is getting so bad, you should just paste the article:
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.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was woke nonsense that’s being rightfully combated by common sense now.
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.
So let's see, in the past few years we've had the Boar's head listeria recalls, Taylor farms lettuce contamination, the McDonalds e.coli recalls in 14 states, now chicken wings...
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.
It's wild how in America at least, the people have to relearn the same lessons every generation or two. It turns out, some regulations are actually beneficial to a society. Maybe don't take a chainsaw to the groups who implement and look after these regulations.
You're missing the point. The efficacy of these regulatory bodies are not a concern for those controlling them. Those individuals have the means to isolate themselves from anything that might negatively affect the rest of us hogs, and they get to collect the spoils. They're just ripping the copper wiring out of the walls.
The destruction is the whole point. In a way we are in the shock therapy era of the US, experiencing what Russia went through post-USSR, which resulted in massive corruption, wealth inequality, and development of an authoritarian regime.
> At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. - Lincoln.
From the same speech where Lincoln then warned that a tyrant could overtake the U.S. political system from within...
This isn’t a relearning it’s a power struggle. We’ve known this the whole time but a bunch of people who value power over the health of the nation want it the other way. They have power now so the rest of us have to suffer. This is what they mean when they say empathy is weakness — without empathy they can count their money and not have to feel bad about how they came by it. They just make a proclamation, move some data on a spreadsheet, and more money starts flowing in. That poors in some backwater consequently start shitting blood is of no concern.
We don't have to relearn the concept, we just have a bunch of dumb idiots who we have to fight off every couple years and we often lose because a critical segment of people cannot remember what happened last time, don't understand anything, or are evil.
They have permanent on site inspectors, which is a contributing factor to consolidation. Whether the inspection is worth anything is a different matter.
Funny. Two of OP’s events are prior to the DOGE cuts so they could not be causative.
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.
Don't worry! They're going to relax the rules on small scale meat processing allowing it to occur at facilities that rarely if ever see an inspector, surely this will make everything better. You can be certain the people of America will be healthier than ever after this amazing initiative.
The guy in charge of all of this has eaten road kill and rotting carcasses and he appears to be completely fine. I'm sure there will not be any issues.
Isn't one of the main problems with meat factories that they're processing such an insane number of animals a day, which contributes massively to dirtiness?
Not to excuse the idea that they shouldn't be inspected, of course.
And industry is wholesale enjoying the gross drop in QA. I feel like at this point lawsuits need to happen to provide an alternative counter to the urge to drop costs in QA.
These businesses earnestly do not care until it affects their bottom line
The FDA has been failing to complete inspections on multiple types of facilities (drug and food) for a long time, since at least 2018, and it seems to have deep issues with its staff, culture, and/or management:
I’m not sure what’s worse, you expecting people to believe nonsense (“thing that happened in 2024 was caused by DOGE!”) or that people (or just bots I guess) are agreeing with you.
You are free to leave and not make a throwaway account just do tell us what you really feel. It's worthless if you try to hide your identity just to spam more noise. I am rather new and I see that only people that have nothing to say but ragebait go down that lane. What are you scared of? That you are right?
One would hope not. That would imply undocumented illness. There hasn't been a significant change in total recall numbers this year. There is an increase in total size of recalled quantities. But that may just be because the Taylor Farms outbreak in Mexico was so large. Also, two of the points OP mentioned, the Boar's Head and McDonald's e coli events happened in 2024. I am not sure what to conclude.
These problems will surface whenever they get big enough, whatever size the agency is.
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.
No this makes no sense. Like, I can see where you were thinking, but it's just wrong with the USDA because of how different problems at different points are handled.
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.
Per TFA less than one truck load of imported chicken is being recalled across 5 states that are small enough one delivery driver probably hits three of them in a single route because the importer got caught falsifying their paperwork.
Your comment and all the speculative piling on it spawned look kinda silly in light of this context.
The FSIS, a branch of the USDA (not the FDA: for the difference in jurisdiction see https://www.fda.gov/media/172542/download), found this problem, according to the original article. The food from the Shanghai Ravioli Company had false inspection marks and no country of origin, much like an earlier case of food imported from Canada.
> 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.
Is there evidence to suggest that inspections or shortage of them cause this? Why wouldn’t it be instead a need to cut corners and produce food differently, or anything else?
When I saw the EST. 18004 in the article I thought the inspection stamps were bad ai attempts, but after some research I found out the EST here is not supposed to be a year, but the id of the establishment being inspected. You can look up the number or the company and see no entries here https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/fsis-inspected-establis...
I don't wanna pretend to be some expert, but i think the contention is that they were gutted so resources are sparse for inspections, leading to higher recall numbers.
I am also hesitant to really invest feelings into anything i see posted over and over like this though, and assume its intentionally being pumped, so I'd wanna see more actual numbers to prove its actually an uptick compared to normal. I remember having to get rid of some carrots just a few years ago personally, Chipotle seems to have some sort of e coli lettuce issue every couple years, none of these single events shock me.
The scale of modern industrial food is really hard to comprehend. in the US the per-capita lbs for chicken in 104 annually. That's 36 _billion_ lbs annually.
This is important, I'm glad some one caught it... it's also kind of a nothing burger
Its only a nothing burger if its a benign reason for the recall. Otherwise, 25,000lb is enough chicken to make a lot of people sick. People might eat a lot of chicken every year, but it only takes 1 bad meal.
It's a good thing Elon cut out all those useless bureaucrats and boosted the economy! The dow is doing great! People should learn to eat the dow instead of chicken.
The FDA was already in bad shape as far as inspections go. In 'The Secret Life of Groceries' (published in 2020) I believe the statistic was that the people responsible for keeping our food system safe only have the capacity to inspect around 5% of domestic agricultural and food processing operations nation-wide. That speaks more to the amount and size of agri-business in the United States than the FDA's capacity, but it also doesn't mean great things for the federal government's ability to preemptively intervene in most cases.
DOGE cuts to FDA, HHS, FSIC, FTC, EPA, and more have inevitably made this problem much worse.
> I believe the statistic was that the people responsible for keeping our food system safe only have the capacity to inspect around 5% of domestic agricultural and food processing operations nation-wide.
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.
Thank you! This was the very first question that popped into my head. My gut said it had to be a fraction. I did not realize just how small a fraction.
Comparing it to the amount of chicken consumed in a year seems disingenuous. How long does chicken last after it's slaughtered? The meaningful number you could have provided is what % of the current chicken stock is contaminated.
OP really should have just shared the USDA website annoucment[1]. Regardless this comment reminds me of a fictitious but expositiory scene from a Theodore Roosvelt Documentry. Where he served a steak dinner to a bunch of food lobbyist and read the excepts from the Jungle. It might be a shockingly small amount but for the 20K people eating bad meat it matters, and having tainted/uninspected meat floating about is bad. These are not computers that are facing downtime they are people. People who could be subjected to crippling food born illiness. I commend the adminstration (a rare occurrence but earned)
Fun story: for my final project in my high school junior-year history+literature class, I did the same: my friends and I grilled and served hotdogs to our class, and then proceeded to read the chapter of The Jungle that describes all manner of foul material falling into the sausage machinery. The reactions of my classmates still makes me grin 30 years on.
There's also currently a recall of 30,000 pounds of Argentina beef at the same time Trump announced they would be increasing the allowed imports of Argentina beef and are relaxing beef import regulations so that they can undercut American ranchers.
13 tons out of the expected 100k didn't get reinspected due to an administrative error with the importing company. You'll be fine, enjoy the quality meat.
Why do they keep letting Tyson's frozen garbage through? The processed chicken "honey tenders" are great but most of the supposedly less processed frozen chicken I have bought from them recently has been nasty.
I’ve purchased entire packs of “boneless skinless thigh” from Tyson which after opening had all the bones and all the skin. I cannot for a minute understand how that passed inspection.
In any case organics seem to be both less brined (aka not paying for salt water) and well prepared, everytime.
That seems like process error rate. Inspection, as far as I know, samples output and checks processes. But inspected processes also have error rates. That’s how it goes. So the pack you got probably was not “inspected” in the sense that no human laid critical eyes on it and its contents till you.
Because low quality food or bad tasting food is not a health hazard (well, not a health hazard under the USDA's purview. The population being too fat is HHS's job)
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.
The primary victims are the cattle that suffer the fate of being born into a frozen slop company torture house and the people turned into sociopaths by working there in horrible conditions. How many cattle have you personally slautered? Or do you avoid that because of your conscience?
This is the system working as it is designed to do. Manufacturers are periodically inspected to confirm their procedures, systems, and facilities meet FDA guidelines. This is an instance of a manufacturer trying to circumvent protocols and the FDA catching the malfeasance and taking standard recall actions.
119 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 11.1 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
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-...
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2207547-fast-food-nati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Food_Nation
Definitely feels very ironic
From the same speech where Lincoln then warned that a tyrant could overtake the U.S. political system from within...
“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.
https://news.google.com/search?q=usa+meat+processing
Naturally. Only the strong survive!
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...
HN is so worthless now.
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.
lol
It's the one in the pink tub or GTFO.
Instead government is focused on banning name on vegan burgers and other stupid things.
This is important, I'm glad some one caught it... it's also kind of a nothing burger
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.
[1] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/shanghai-ravioli-co...
Dayummmmm!
That's a wild combination of words there.
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.
It’s not unreasonable for people to expect their food not to poison them. Have you considered being less sociopathic?