Or we could just goddamn safely irradiate the food and be done with this altogether.
But then you’ll just give everyone cancer!!!
Want to fix it? Make them legally liable for it. You send contaminated food to market, we fine you a $100k+ per incident or more. Someone dies? $20 million fine that goes to the family. Also it follows student loan rules, so no bankruptcy to avoid it.
You’d magically see these issues disappear overnight.
That solution doesn’t enrich enough of the Right people. Pass.
Yeah, it is pretty simple. If there are no regulations, people aren’t going to test for it.
But also, farms that sell contaminated materials tend not to stay open, because companies will begin to drop them from their list of suppliers.
Then the outbreaks just happen in schools and prisons, where the cheapest sourcing happens.
And fast-food restaurants.
Nope. We have all kinds of laws and penalties for wrong-doing and people/companies still willfully take the risks for perceived gains.
But this doesn’t get rid of toxins already produced by the bacteria.
This I frankly don’t believe. Is there a list somewhere of farms that have closed because food companies stopped sourcing them because they sold some bad lettuce? Because otherwise it sounds like magical market stuff.
Believe it. A lot of this stuff doesn’t end up making as big of a splash, but these companies close. You sell contaminated goods, you lose wal-mart, you lose trader-joes, you lose a lot.
Believe it, it does happen
Jensen Farms, 2011 Deadly Cantaloupe Listeria outbreak 33 died.
They ain’t farming anymore.
Wholesome Soy
https://www.cdc.gov/listeria/outbreaks/bean-sprouts-11-14/index.html
Closed
CRF Frozen Foods
Closed and now re-opening under new management and under a new name.
And I am not saying that this is a good way of managing this. People getting sick, and then punishing those who sold the unsafe product, but it is the way things have been working.
People just don’t get away with selling contaminated materials.
Are you suggesting that a company would continue to source food from a farm suspected of selling contaminated material?
It’s not like there is scarcity of farms. If your local grocery sold you salmonella laced tomatoes, would you go back? Maybe? Now, imagine if whoever you served those tomatoes to was likely to sue you. Does that help focus your decision?
Those assholes got no prison time and are still doing business. They literally killed 33 people because they tried to save a buck. This is what sucks in this country. People caught with marijuana get more serious penalties than this.
I’d like to, but in two of your three examples, it was the CDC that shut the farms down, not suppliers abandoning them. In the third, the food plant was shut down by CDC and is now reopening under a different name. It is still owned by the original owners, and they’re making investments to improve the plant, and of course they’re changing the name, but it doesn’t seem to me that the owners have been driven out of the food production business by the unwillingness of customers to buy from them.
I’m suggesting that some companies would and do. In your example, Chipotle changed suppliers even without knowing which of the 60 suppliers were the problem. Yet surely other people continue to buy from one or more of those 60 suppliers, or Chipotle wouldn’t have to make that choice because they would not longer exist.
Companies make bad decisions to save money all the time, and the smaller their margins, the greater is the pressure to save money. Restaurants and supermarkets have very small margins. If car makers can continue to knowingly make and sell cars that explode and kill people (which happened), and if tire makers can continue to knowingly make tires that disintegrate and kill people (which happened), and if coal companies can continue to knowingly use practices that poison entire communities of people (which happens), it isn’t a stretch to think that, once the initial contamination problem is identified and ostensibly solved, food companies will go back to those suppliers. They only don’t if government regulators have effectively killed those suppliers.
To be fair, and I am not defending a company for having lax food safety controls, but we didn’t find evidence of them doing this on purpose. There is a difference between making a poor assessment of food safety requirements in your plant, and actively being knowledgeable about contamination and continuing anyway. This is why they didn’t get any jail time, because this was an unfortunate accident that could have been prevented if they had spent more time validating their cleaning methods, but is was not as if they knew their products were contaminated and sold them anyway. They were under the assumption that they were cleaning their produce sufficiently, albeit with little scientific evidence they were doing so.
Also, someone caught with marijuana rarely ends up paying a $150,000 dollar fine.
I am not saying that the system is perfect, but there are repercussions. And I say that being intimately knowledgeable about how sourcing decisions get made for food production. Companies like this lose business, it is cut-throat out there, when there are so many more suppliers to choose from.
Another thing, the FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act) is actively being implemented industry-wide.
https://www.fda.gov/food/guidanceregulation/fsma/
And it specifically deals with a lot of the issues that have caused recalls in the past. It is a massive change for a lot of companies, and will continue to make food safer in the U.S.
And of course that assumes the current administration doesn’t continue to remove regulations, which I wouldn’t put my money on.
I know it is fun to hate on the government, but non-political institutions like the FDA deserve our scrutiny, but also our support as well.
Not to derail, but how much jail or prison time would be the dollar equivalent, you think? Also, how significant was that fine to their bottom line? An ongoing problem with fines levied against businesses for breaking the rules is that on a cost/benefit analysis, its often cheaper to pay the fine (assuming you even get caught!) than forgo the money that could be made by breaking the rules. See: financial institutions.
Just to be clear the 150,000 dollar fine was levied directly against each of the 2 brothers involved in this issue, and not to their company.
From the linked USA Today article.
Each received five years probation and six months home detention. Each also was ordered to pay $150,000 in restitution and perform 100 hours of community service.
Sorry, hadn’t read the article. I was more opining on the general state of regulatory enforcement.
I’ve read it now and am astonished they even faced criminal charges. I would still call it a slap on the wrist relative to the likely outcome for a (black) dude nabbed for pot possession.
Anyway, back to commiserating 'bout the Mango Mussolini and his followers.
In 2007, despite ample physical evidence and multiple witnesses corroborating the girls’ stories, federal prosecutors and Epstein’s lawyers quietly put together a remarkable deal for Epstein, then 54. He agreed to plead guilty to two felony prostitution charges in state court, and in exchange, he and his accomplices received immunity from federal sex-trafficking charges that could have sent him to prison for life.
He served 13 months in a private wing of the Palm Beach County stockade. His alleged co-conspirators, who helped schedule his sex sessions, were never prosecuted.
A guy who helps the filthy rich avoid the consequences of their clearly illegal actions? No wonder Trump likes him!
Only the best people!
Edit: Let me add that defending scum is something that does need to happen for our legal system to work. I can’t fault a lawyer for defending this guy and working to get the best deal – that’s the lawyer’s job. What we can fault is the system in place that lets money buy unjust resolutions to criminal acts.
I hope this guy had to register as a sex offender. Was that mentioned in the article?