8 ms·

Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk

300 points by speckx 2mo ago

hns86vq0nb 2mo ago
[dead]
pstuart 2mo ago
There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers, but it comes at a serious cost. With regulations continuously eroding this will only get worse. 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.
- bix6 2mo ago
  Luckily the article includes a PDF with multiple recommendations at the end. https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Policy-Recommendations-Building-a-Competitive-Safe-and-Resilient-Produce-System.pdf https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Policy-Reco...
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - pstuart 2mo ago
    Your comment would be better served without a snarky "luckily" leading off. The recommendations don't include my suggestion about co-ops, which is a valid addition to the commentary about the OP.
- cyanydeez 2mo ago
  this sounds a lot like "vote with your wallet" and then you look in 99% of the wallets and it's like, here's a few million dollars vs trillionaires.
  - lenerdenator 2mo ago
    I don't think we're working against trillionaires here. I don't think there's anyone in this situation with that sort of net worth. We're working against the desire to get the basic needs of life (in this case, food) met for the lowest possible price.
    - cyanydeez 2mo ago
      https://www.farmaid.org/issues/corporate-power/corporate-power-in-ag/ https://www.farmaid.org/issues/corporate-power/corporate-pow...
    - arrosenberg 2mo ago
      The oligarchs are gutting the regulatory apparatus that stops this stuff from happening.
- zer00eyz 2mo ago
  > There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers 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...
  - parineum 2mo ago
    The illusion is the Whole Foods shopper thinking that the McDonalds food is crap. Great marketing from the "health food" industry making you think that it's McDonalds making you fat. Raw cane sugar (sold to you at a premium markup over the already more expensive production cost) is, by implication, less bad for you.
  - cucumber3732842 2mo ago
    >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 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.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
- yoyohello13 2mo ago
  I know this sounds crazy, but maybe we can stop eroding regulations. This obsession with 'regulations bad' is going to destroy us all.
clumsysmurf 2mo ago
"Taylor Farms’ massive operations depend on thousands of workers who process, package, and move its produce. Its workplace safety record includes serious violations and worker complaints." According to https://futurism.com/science-energy/diarrhea-lettuce-taylor-farms-prison-labor 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.
- parineum 2mo ago
  1) The work is voluntary, calling voluntary work forced labor is a bold faced lie. The people are being imprisoned, which is obviously not a good situation to be in. If doing that work didn't improve their lives in some way, they could not do it. Since they are voluntarily doing these jobs, presumably it makes their imprisonment better. 2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
  - drop_star 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  - tonetheman 2mo ago
    [dead]
  - AngryData 2mo ago
    Im not sure I would call "You can sit in a concrete box all day and then eat food that was rejected from the dog food plant" versus "Go outside for awhile doing some work, be able to buy a pack of prepackaged ramen when you are done" clearly voluntary. Have you ever ate prison food? I literally would not feed most of it to my dog.
    - strictnein 2mo ago
      Would it be better if you could only do the former then? 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-commissary-prices/ https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-c...
andy99 2mo ago
Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players? Obviously the “blast radius” is bigger when it’s a big company with a huge footprint, but are incidents rarer and quality control better? Completely anecdotal, I see lots or recalls from smaller producers I’ve never heard of, I can imagine they have less scrutiny and oversight.
- cute_boi 2mo ago
  Yes, smaller companies means there would be no monopoly and they can't bribe politician that much to prevent regulation.
- CodingJeebus 2mo ago
  > Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players? 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.
  - cryzinger 2mo ago
    IIRC that's what happened with the Boar's Head listeria outbreak. Inspectors had repeatedly documented that the facilities were nasty, but BH was allowed to continue operating for years because <reasons>. Things only came to a tipping point after multiple people died.
- aNoob7000 2mo ago
  I would personally like to see fines commensurate with the size of the organization. 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.
usern20260720 2mo ago
“The only social responsibility of Taylor Farms is to increase investor’s profits” Milton Friedman. “The only social responsibility of the government is to increase campaign sponsor’s profits”
- strictnein 2mo ago
  While the first made up quote is inline with what Friedman said over 45 years ago [0], I'm not seeing anything that resembles the second one? In fact, he warned against the influence that large corporations can have on the government [1]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_T0WF-uCWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_T0WF-uCWg
  - shimman 2mo ago
    Well it's more about our lived reality, I can't remember the last time any current US politician successfully campaigned then enacted legislation that benefits workers; it's always been forms of corporate welfare and more corporate welfare for like the last 60 years. 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.
    - bruce511 2mo ago
      Around 85 members of the current congress are over 70. 13 are over 80. You've got some weird looking hands :)
      - shimman 2mo ago
        How many of those are new deal democratic politicians now? That is the distinction that matters because old neoliberals do exist and have outnumbered new dealers for decades now.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
SoftTalker 2mo ago
Food is being produced at a scale, efficiency, and level of safety unheard of generations ago. One of the recommendations in this article is to buy "through farmers markets, community-supported agriculture programs, farm stands, and direct online sales." That's a fine way to get fresh food, 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. And online sales? Who knows. 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.
- throwup238 2mo ago
  I’ve seen where a local butcher slaughters the cows for local farmers, and it’s definitely nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for. It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means but he just doesn’t have the man power to wash every surface several times a day whereas the plant shuts down one line at a time to do a full daily cleaning with power washers and this foam stuff that gets into every nook and cranny and then gets washed down a central drain. My limited experience with fresh produce isn’t much better (omg the flies).
  - notnaut 2mo ago
    I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes. Efficiency means things move quicker and cheaper, and a few people get richer. It does not by any means inherently increase safety. The effects of a fuckup in a hugely efficientized industry often scale directly with just how much efficiency was mined away from caution and human-interaction. 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.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
legitster 2mo ago
This analysis is a bit shallow. Massive GSPs grew as a solution to deal with the massive problems that come with greens sourcing. 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.
- Laurel1234 2mo ago
  [dead]
moomoo11 2mo ago
stop eating meat lol 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
- engcoach 2mo ago
  TFA is about contaminated lettuce my meatless friend
- kristjansson 2mo ago
  I don't know if you're a bit out of the loop, but ... meat is very much not at issue in this case.
  - moomoo11 2mo ago
    my bad i replied to the root instead of the comment about meat grinders
brewcejener 2mo ago
[dead]
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
ck2 2mo ago
There will be a next time and it will be even worse. 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
schainks 2mo ago
A few things were made clear from this Last Week Tonight episode related to food: https://youtu.be/Za45bT41sXg https://youtu.be/Za45bT41sXg - 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.
- hydrogen7800 2mo ago
  I think the 2 Trump administrations have shown that (multiple) political earthquakes are very possible.
baggachipz 2mo ago
> Taylor Farms and its CEO, Bruce Taylor, have donated millions to Republican and Trump Administration-associated political action committees (PACs) since 2025. This includes a $1 million contribution to both MAGA Inc. and a super PAC dedicated to electing House Republicans. > ...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.
xbar 2mo ago
Time to break up Big Food.
fblp 2mo ago
This is a helpful industry article with clear recommendations. Many critiques on competition or consumer issues don't have such precision on their recommendations. I'd donate to them if I was in the US.
jongjong 2mo ago
A lot of people would be willing to take a significant pay cuts if only they could run their own businesses. But that's not an option for them. This gap isn't accounted for in calculations about economic efficiency. The system removes this option completely. Economists forget that citizens are more producers than they are consumers in terms of how they spend their time.
BeenishMurtaza 2mo ago
[flagged]
gla67890543 2mo ago
You teach and play the game of monopoly to your kids. Then this is the outcome. Anyone who try to reason with this arrangement or discussion on monopolies or oligarchy are simply branded as communists and socialists. I don't know if Americans even know meaning or basics of communism or socialism.

300 points by speckx 2mo ago

[dead]

There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers, but it comes at a serious cost. With regulations continuously eroding this will only get worse. 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.

bix6 2mo ago
Luckily the article includes a PDF with multiple recommendations at the end. https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Policy-Recommendations-Building-a-Competitive-Safe-and-Resilient-Produce-System.pdf https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Policy-Reco...
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- pstuart 2mo ago
  Your comment would be better served without a snarky "luckily" leading off. The recommendations don't include my suggestion about co-ops, which is a valid addition to the commentary about the OP.
cyanydeez 2mo ago
this sounds a lot like "vote with your wallet" and then you look in 99% of the wallets and it's like, here's a few million dollars vs trillionaires.
- lenerdenator 2mo ago
  I don't think we're working against trillionaires here. I don't think there's anyone in this situation with that sort of net worth. We're working against the desire to get the basic needs of life (in this case, food) met for the lowest possible price.
  - cyanydeez 2mo ago
    https://www.farmaid.org/issues/corporate-power/corporate-power-in-ag/ https://www.farmaid.org/issues/corporate-power/corporate-pow...
  - arrosenberg 2mo ago
    The oligarchs are gutting the regulatory apparatus that stops this stuff from happening.
zer00eyz 2mo ago
> There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers 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...
- parineum 2mo ago
  The illusion is the Whole Foods shopper thinking that the McDonalds food is crap. Great marketing from the "health food" industry making you think that it's McDonalds making you fat. Raw cane sugar (sold to you at a premium markup over the already more expensive production cost) is, by implication, less bad for you.
- cucumber3732842 2mo ago
  >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 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.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
yoyohello13 2mo ago
I know this sounds crazy, but maybe we can stop eroding regulations. This obsession with 'regulations bad' is going to destroy us all.

clumsysmurf 2mo ago

"Taylor Farms’ massive operations depend on thousands of workers who process, package, and move its produce. Its workplace safety record includes serious violations and worker complaints." According to https://futurism.com/science-energy/diarrhea-lettuce-taylor-farms-prison-labor 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.

parineum 2mo ago
1) The work is voluntary, calling voluntary work forced labor is a bold faced lie. The people are being imprisoned, which is obviously not a good situation to be in. If doing that work didn't improve their lives in some way, they could not do it. Since they are voluntarily doing these jobs, presumably it makes their imprisonment better. 2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
- drop_star 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- tonetheman 2mo ago
  [dead]
- AngryData 2mo ago
  Im not sure I would call "You can sit in a concrete box all day and then eat food that was rejected from the dog food plant" versus "Go outside for awhile doing some work, be able to buy a pack of prepackaged ramen when you are done" clearly voluntary. Have you ever ate prison food? I literally would not feed most of it to my dog.
  - strictnein 2mo ago
    Would it be better if you could only do the former then? 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-commissary-prices/ https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-c...

andy99 2mo ago

Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players? Obviously the “blast radius” is bigger when it’s a big company with a huge footprint, but are incidents rarer and quality control better? Completely anecdotal, I see lots or recalls from smaller producers I’ve never heard of, I can imagine they have less scrutiny and oversight.

cute_boi 2mo ago
Yes, smaller companies means there would be no monopoly and they can't bribe politician that much to prevent regulation.
CodingJeebus 2mo ago
> Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players? 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.
- cryzinger 2mo ago
  IIRC that's what happened with the Boar's Head listeria outbreak. Inspectors had repeatedly documented that the facilities were nasty, but BH was allowed to continue operating for years because <reasons>. Things only came to a tipping point after multiple people died.
aNoob7000 2mo ago
I would personally like to see fines commensurate with the size of the organization. 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.

usern20260720 2mo ago

“The only social responsibility of Taylor Farms is to increase investor’s profits” Milton Friedman. “The only social responsibility of the government is to increase campaign sponsor’s profits”

strictnein 2mo ago
While the first made up quote is inline with what Friedman said over 45 years ago [0], I'm not seeing anything that resembles the second one? In fact, he warned against the influence that large corporations can have on the government [1]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_T0WF-uCWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_T0WF-uCWg
- shimman 2mo ago
  Well it's more about our lived reality, I can't remember the last time any current US politician successfully campaigned then enacted legislation that benefits workers; it's always been forms of corporate welfare and more corporate welfare for like the last 60 years. 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.
  - bruce511 2mo ago
    Around 85 members of the current congress are over 70. 13 are over 80. You've got some weird looking hands :)
    - shimman 2mo ago
      How many of those are new deal democratic politicians now? That is the distinction that matters because old neoliberals do exist and have outnumbered new dealers for decades now.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

SoftTalker 2mo ago

Food is being produced at a scale, efficiency, and level of safety unheard of generations ago. One of the recommendations in this article is to buy "through farmers markets, community-supported agriculture programs, farm stands, and direct online sales." That's a fine way to get fresh food, 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. And online sales? Who knows. 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.

throwup238 2mo ago
I’ve seen where a local butcher slaughters the cows for local farmers, and it’s definitely nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for. It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means but he just doesn’t have the man power to wash every surface several times a day whereas the plant shuts down one line at a time to do a full daily cleaning with power washers and this foam stuff that gets into every nook and cranny and then gets washed down a central drain. My limited experience with fresh produce isn’t much better (omg the flies).
- notnaut 2mo ago
  I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes. Efficiency means things move quicker and cheaper, and a few people get richer. It does not by any means inherently increase safety. The effects of a fuckup in a hugely efficientized industry often scale directly with just how much efficiency was mined away from caution and human-interaction. 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.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

legitster 2mo ago

This analysis is a bit shallow. Massive GSPs grew as a solution to deal with the massive problems that come with greens sourcing. 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.

Laurel1234 2mo ago
[dead]

moomoo11 2mo ago

stop eating meat lol 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

engcoach 2mo ago
TFA is about contaminated lettuce my meatless friend
kristjansson 2mo ago
I don't know if you're a bit out of the loop, but ... meat is very much not at issue in this case.
- moomoo11 2mo ago
  my bad i replied to the root instead of the comment about meat grinders

brewcejener 2mo ago

[dead]

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

ck2 2mo ago

There will be a next time and it will be even worse. 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

schainks 2mo ago

A few things were made clear from this Last Week Tonight episode related to food: https://youtu.be/Za45bT41sXg https://youtu.be/Za45bT41sXg - 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.

hydrogen7800 2mo ago
I think the 2 Trump administrations have shown that (multiple) political earthquakes are very possible.

baggachipz 2mo ago

> Taylor Farms and its CEO, Bruce Taylor, have donated millions to Republican and Trump Administration-associated political action committees (PACs) since 2025. This includes a $1 million contribution to both MAGA Inc. and a super PAC dedicated to electing House Republicans. > ...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.

xbar 2mo ago

Time to break up Big Food.

fblp 2mo ago

This is a helpful industry article with clear recommendations. Many critiques on competition or consumer issues don't have such precision on their recommendations. I'd donate to them if I was in the US.

jongjong 2mo ago

A lot of people would be willing to take a significant pay cuts if only they could run their own businesses. But that's not an option for them. This gap isn't accounted for in calculations about economic efficiency. The system removes this option completely. Economists forget that citizens are more producers than they are consumers in terms of how they spend their time.

BeenishMurtaza 2mo ago

[flagged]

gla67890543 2mo ago

You teach and play the game of monopoly to your kids. Then this is the outcome. Anyone who try to reason with this arrangement or discussion on monopolies or oligarchy are simply branded as communists and socialists. I don't know if Americans even know meaning or basics of communism or socialism.