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Chicken products recalled in five states due to “false marks of inspection”
- downrightmike 2mo agoFood 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.
- loloquwowndueo 2mo agoI wonder who they’re going to blame and tariff for this.
- IncreasePosts 2mo agoA chicken in every pot and china is going to pay for it!
- lovich 2mo agoThe 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.
- randycupertino 2mo agoSo 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/health/food-safety-trump-fda-cutbacks-deadly-outbreaks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/health/food-safety-trump-...
- xyzelement 2mo agoThe USDA was the one to issue this recall. Inadequate number of inspectors would make recalls go down not up.
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- thenayr 2mo ago[dead]
- makeitdouble 2mo agoThese 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.
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- mrguyorama 2mo agoNo 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.
- andrethegiant 2mo ago> Boston-based Shanghai Ravioli Corporation lol
- avalys 2mo ago“They could be involved in importing”
- michael_michael 2mo agoI don't recall signing up to live in a Neal Stephenson novel.
- bakies 2mo agoI like mine with New York City based Philadelphia Cream Cheese
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- bradly 2mo agoWhen 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-establishments https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/fsis-inspected-establis...
- cute_boi 2mo ago[flagged]
- slicktux 2mo agoWe do have regulation on food and safety and the recall is because of those parameters.
- sidrag22 2mo agoI 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.
- tstrimple 2mo agoThe party of "personal responsibility" literally never hold themselves accountable for anything. It's always someone else's fault.
- strathmeyer 2mo ago[dead]
- seany 2mo agoThe 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
- xboxnolifes 2mo agoIts 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.
- exe34 2mo agoIt'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.
- dmschulman 2mo agoThe 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.
- BeetleB 2mo ago> 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.
- mypetlion 2mo agoEach facility expecting to be inspected, on average, once every 20 years is really not great.
- BeetleB 2mo agoIf you're a company that has 20 facilities, all run in more or less the same way, it means you expect to be checked every year. As I said: 5% may be too low. But perhaps 20% would be good/great.
- nba456_ 2mo ago25,000 lbs is .0000007% of the 35,000,000,000 lbs of chicken consumed in the US each year.
- computershit 2mo agoYeah came here to say this. Drop in the bucket.
- ElProlactin 2mo agoYou mean drop in the clucket.
- blitzar 2mo agoMight be a family bucket.
- kreco 2mo agoCan we stop pretending people health is insignificant because it is statistically insignificant? 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?
- tjwebbnorfolk 2mo agoLet us know when you've completed construction of your perfect world.
- kreco 2mo agoYou people are crazy. 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.
- gruez 2mo ago
- imzadi 2mo agoThere'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.
- Hrundi 2mo ago13 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.
- altruios 2mo agoThe Boston-based "Shanghai Ravioli Corporation, Inc." selling buffalo wild chicken wings... That's a wild combination of words there.
- legastenigga 2mo ago[dead]
- ilaksh 2mo agoWhy 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.
- antonymoose 2mo agoI’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.
- arjie 2mo agoThat 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.
- mrguyorama 2mo agoBecause 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. Chicken thigh won't develop that striping.
- chasd00 2mo agothat's not very much chicken at all.
- jakzurr 2mo agoYou import it illegally, you eat it.
- LetsGetTechnicl 2mo agoElon Musk has so much blood on his hands for this and USAID
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- dayyan 2mo ago[flagged]
- eastof 2mo agoMaybe eating ultra processed frozen meat products wasn't such a good idea in the first place. Sad that some may have to learn the hard way.
- vict7 2mo agoAh yes, blame the victim for their decision while also attempting to moralize the consumption of frozen food. It’s not unreasonable for people to expect their food not to poison them. Have you considered being less sociopathic?
- eastof 2mo agoThe 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?
- claaams 2mo agoI feel safer eating food in a central American country than I do in the united states right now.
- johnnyApplePRNG 2mo agoI spent a week in Cancun, ate everything I could find that was busy on the side of the road where the locals were eating, and was absolutely fine. No running water and no toilets were fairly common in a lot of the smaller places. Never got sick once.
- golem14 2mo agoGeorge Carlin: you are all diseased …
- thataccount 2mo agoSpeaking of supply chain security breaches...
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- nsxwolf 2mo agoInteresting comments here. I've never lived in a time when there weren't news stories about food recalls. I don't think they can be used as data, though. They don't tell me anything about wether the US food supply is worse than it was last year, or 10 years ago, or if its standing in the world is rising or falling. Are we not interested in science and reason here?
- arjie 2mo agoThe site is fairly politically polarized. However it is not a very large subset participating. Strategically blocking users using a Chrome extension can help you maintain epistemic hygiene. The comments section I see is much sparser and much less prone (though not immune) to human impersonation of robots.
- vict7 2mo agoi.e. create a personal bubble to avoid being exposed to alternative points of view. We’ve seen how well that has been working out.
- xboxnolifes 2mo agoCurating your news is part of healthy media consumption. You literally connect consume all news. There is too much, and once you find an unreliable source, its generally best avoided.
- vict7 2mo agoI agree with you. I simply took umbrage with the characterization of other human beings with different points of view as “bots”. 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.
- arjie 2mo ago
- mwkaufma 2mo agoAwkward prose of GenAI.
- josefritzishere 2mo ago[flagged]
- zdragnar 2mo agoYou mean the year of the Taylor's Farms tainted supply of onions to McDonald's, and the Boar's head recall?
- krapp 2mo agoThis adds nothing of intellectual merit to the conversation but Pearlmania500 has become my spirit animal in this regard: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GlXFO6Wfcic https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GlXFO6Wfcic
- roger_ 2mo ago~5000 chickens if anyone cares :(
- khriss 2mo agoOh no! Surely under capitalism the competition from other producers would ensure that such a thing could never happen. Surely this is a freak event /s 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.
- edoceo 2mo agoIt's like when your enemy undermines your logistics in a game. It's an attack, but not a direct attack. If you attack directly you might get called the aggressor.
- thundercleeze 2mo agoThis post is not of sufficient quality for this board and I hope it's not emblematic of a trend. 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.
- alansaber 2mo agoWhen it comes to food contamination, even an infinitesimal quantity is noteworthy. Tbh many posts on this board are relatively low quality (and/or AI generated) but still spark interesting discussion.
- tjwebbnorfolk 2mo ago> infinitesimal quantity 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.
- xbar 2mo agoTime to break up Big Food.
- tmaly 2mo agoI recall there was a farmer trying to sue over the USDA Organic rating. From what I recall, if something is produced outside the US and they apply the label, the USDA takes them at their word and does not actually test it.
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- tjwebbnorfolk 2mo agoThis is the dumbest article on the front page of HN I've seen in awhile. Are there bots on here now upvoting stupid nonsense?