The lesson I've had to keep learning (at least over the past few years) is the value of "trust". I've been able to go into any supermarket and not have to think

The lesson I've had to keep learning (at least over the past few years) is the value of "trust". I've been able to go into any supermarket and not have to think too much about the safety of each individual product because I've trusted a mixture of * capitalism (to leverage the profit motive to pressure companies to keep quality high enough that a competitor can't take their market share), * government (to fund centralized agencies that develop subject matter experts who act as OSS maintainers of vital public infrastructure and OSINT researchers who are authorized to explore a lot of ~~CSS~~ close sourced situations and enforce quality requirements for the American project), and * journalism (to listen for problems and sound the alarm when appropriate) to liberate myself from the need to evaluate the safety of each product. If even a small fraction of US consumers lost that trust and had to think about the safety of every product before putting it in their cart, it would shake up at least tens of billions of dollars of annual food spending (a ~$1.7 trillion per year sector), redirecting spending towards less processed foods. The added fear and decision fatigue could even cause consumers to simply end up buying less. Empirically, the capitalism mechanism works pretty well most of the time, but when it fails, ideally a government agency would be sufficiently empowered to A) accurately identify such situation and B) intervene in time to prevent harm to people or markets, but even there, there has to be some level of trust, because the cost of regulations strong enough to overcome the most skillfully engineered fraud would be paralyzing to productivity and starve consumers. In this case, the FDA was notified of the issues and audited but the facility's management was actively hostile to oversight and falsified records to conceal their dangerous failures. From here, there are two reasonable ways to proceed, and a sad and unreasonable way I fear we'll go: Reasonable way 1. Treat these deaths as negligent homicides, open very well resourced federal investigations into the situation, federally fund criminal prosecutions at whichever level is most painful (municipal or federal), pierce the corporate veil if there's even a whiff of C-level culpability, and generally make a loud and public example of the consequences for evading oversight through fraudulent means. Reasonable way 2. Significantly expand the resources available to federal agencies and rework incentive structures so that failures like this will taint involved bureaucrats (thereby impeding their career progression both within their agency and as a lobbyist). Politicians who starve agencies of resources or authority will also be held to account for the impacts of their actions in a sufficiently public way that it will stain their wikipedia page forever. Sad and unreasonable way: news coverage of this topic will focus on shortages, angry consumers, and Joe Biden's poll numbers, while coverage of the crimes at the root of the shortage go unmentioned in major reporting.