The authoritarian regime in America is shifting food inspection travel to a brutally inefficient schedule under a strategy of ballooning overhead to undermine safety inspections.
…current and former FDA officials said they were perplexed by [the new travel policy], given the push for longer trips in the past had been an efficiency measure intended to result in the agency being able to complete more inspections. Instead of spending money and wearing down staff to fly in and out of a country to do each inspection, officials said, the agency would combine multiple inspections into a single trip. “So they’re going to double or triple the foreign inspection flight costs and keep my people in a perpetual state of jet lag,” one FDA official told CBS News.
Auditors know well that commuting is the least productive time of any inspection, and now they will be expected to triple transit times or even worse.
The objectives are anti-regulatory and anti-science, removing measurement of outcomes and replacing it with empty performances. The regime passively will prevent inspections getting done by running inspectors around constantly keeping them fatigued and distracted. Money will be wasted on the appearance of being busy while getting less and less done, exactly what the corrupt regime wants.
Remember how the boss at work used to bring a pack of cigarettes and put it on the table to get everyone smoking? That’s what should be on your mind when the deadly donut box inevitably opens in a meeting room.
It’s estimated that as much as 70% of the US food supply is ultraprocessed.
“Two-thirds of the calories children consume in the US are ultraprocessed, while about 60% of adult diets are ultraprocessed,” Fang Fang Zhang, associate professor and chair of the division of nutrition epidemiology and data science at Tufts University in Boston, told CNN in an earlier interview. Zhang was not involved in the new research.
[…]
The United States has the highest level of ultraprocessed food consumption in the world — nearly 55% of the average American’s diet, according to the study. Researchers estimated reducing the use of those ultraprocessed foods to zero would have prevented over 124,000 deaths in the US in 2017.
It’s a dire warning, under the headline “Every bite of ultraprocessed food will increase your chance of an early death”.
The professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard isn’t mincing words about the threat to America:
“To me, slashing funding and people from science in the United States is like burning your seed corn. It’s not even eating your seed corn. It’s just destroying it,” he says. “What can be more human than wanting to use all of our knowledge, all of our effort, all of our resources, to try to make the lives of our kids safer and better than our own lives? A huge part of that aspiration requires, and is indeed driven by, science.”
In related news, air quality experts warned Iowa families during the 2024 winter against burning cheap seed corn because it would emit mustard gas and kill them.
Brian Button, an air quality specialist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources …says the concern is the chemicals used to treat seed corn, when burned, emit powerful toxins like mustard gas [and because safer options exist] there’s no reason to burn seed corn. Button says unfortunately, folks with expired seed corn are trying to give it away to homeowners who have a corn-burning stove.
Unfortunately? Lack of fortune? That’s a weird way to describe predictable harms driven by extreme short-sighted financial greed.
Like it’s unfortunate that Americans are encouraged to burn seed corn despite the effect of being a literal weapon that will kill them?
Oh, wait, it gets even worse. Do these chemical weapons polluting seed corn carry any rationalization? Alas, science says there’s no benefit, just harms.
…the researchers found no evidence that neonicotinoids increased yield in corn.
America poisons its seed corn, dyeing it red, for no apparent good reason and many bad ones. Source: GLP
So while it’s shocking to hear a top scientist say America is now stupidly destroying seed corn, on the other hand there’s evidence that is exactly the thoughtless harm that some Americans have been trying to cause for generations. Trump is clearly the worst of the worst, yet not the only one.
One thing I remember clearly as a country boy is the farmers’ warnings in the 1980s about Ronald Reagan—they saw through the façade and predicted disastrous consequences for rural America.
The economic devastation by the GOP enabled corporate consolidation as banks seized family farms. Simultaneously, technology corporations pushed farmers into dangerous centralized platform dependencies through proprietary equipment and modified seeds. Local farmers recognized they were losing autonomy to corporate interests hiding behind Reagan’s policies, the same executives who surveyed farmland from helicopters, eagerly anticipating how a “golden age” of 1980s technology would replace generations of agricultural knowledge.
Thus, the push into pesticides represented something more insidious than mere agricultural tools. It was akin to how today certain social media platforms are manipulated to suppress beneficial content while amplifying harmful elements. Consider how a privileged heir of South Africa’s apartheid system, a man who openly discusses his plans to distance himself from ordinary citizens on Earth, has methodically undermined valuable online discourse while allowing destructive content to flourish for the benefit of the GOP. Should we be surprised that this individual self-describes himself as a dangerous threat to any American institutions setup to provide sustainability, while also claiming to embody American values more authentically than native-born citizens who work the land?
The historical record clearly shows how agricultural chemicals originated from American warfare technology and (like a Tesla) were known to be unsafe for deployment in or around communities, yet were dropped onto Americans anyway. Even during Reagan’s administration the New York Times was reporting on these connections, as if the exposure didn’t matter.
Chemicals like parathion and malathion were known to scientists as essentially diluted versions of the First World War nerve agents. When the EPA raised alarms (PDF) about careless use of militarized chemicals decimating honeybee populations, government officials remained inactive for decades. Honeybee colonies collapsed (let alone many other species) as direct WWI-era chemical weapons saturated the American landscape.
The effects were real for those of us in the front row. I grew up on the wide open Konza prairie fishing with a string tied to a stick, bringing home enough healthy catch to feed a family. By the time I was an adult, our healthy waterways and lakes, hundreds of miles from any big city, were showing up in tests as too poisoned from chemical weapons (carelessly sprayed pesticides).
One of my best fishing spots ever was the small creek and watering hole just to the left of this old photo… which feels like I took it a million years ago.
The shortsighted policies of dumping chemical weapons for profit reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what truly builds national strength and security. When I was invited to personally meet with Senator Bob Dole in the early 1990s, he unapologetically lectured me with a troubling mindset behind this GOP strategy, lamenting how the foreign war-torn nations I had experience in wouldn’t allow wealthy Americans like him to acquire cheap land for future development. He perfectly encapsulated the problem: treating essential resources—whether agricultural land, scientific knowledge, or literal seed corn—not as foundations for sustainable prosperity, but as commodities to be devastated and then exploited for quick remote profits regardless of long-term local consequences.
American peace and prosperity has always depended on planting seeds for future generations, not poisoning them or selling them to the highest bidder. President Grant perhaps understood this better than any other leader, as he created the Department of Justice and National Parks, using federal troops to protect and preserve ecological and human rights. The destruction of our metaphorical and literal seed corn isn’t unfortunate, it’s the very predictable result of policies that prioritize short-term gains for a very few over national resilience.
America has strayed from valuing long-term sustainability. And as any wise farmer knows, once the stupid flamethrowers of the angry oligarchs burn your seed corn, you can’t just plant fantasy coins to grow next season’s crops.
Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie’s 1988 anti-smoking campaigns had made her a target of very powerful tobacco and agriculture lobbyists. They pushed the Prime Minister to sack her when she tried to warn the public about egg safety.
Edwina Currie uttered a sentence in December 1988 that would rapidly end her ministerial career and send Britain’s egg industry into an alleged “crisis“:
Most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella.
Was she entirely accurate? No. She should have said “much” or left out the word “most”. That wordplay doesn’t sound like a crisis, though. Was there a genuine health concern that needed addressing? Absolutely. Egg production in the UK was affected with salmonella and she was correctly saying they could do better.
Government data showed concerning links between infections and egg consumption. Cases in Britain had more than doubled between 1982 and 1988. She brought to public attention that there was a real problem. Currie’s assessment was correct, despite an imperfect delivery by including a vague word “most”.
Most of the time we shouldn’t say most.
What followed was a textbook case of self-serving defensive semantics as tactics, trying to avoid bad news, rushing to shoot the messenger to undermine the message. Notably, egg sales were suddenly reported by the industry to plummet overnight and they demanded the government give them handouts (penalty payments) while they slaughtered millions of their hens. The industry reported it lost tens of millions, demanding even further government handouts. How convenient for the salmonella spreaders they could so immediately demand victim status compensation.
The industry reaction’s effect on Currie? They forced her to resign in disgrace. The industry effectively capitalized on her report; a political moment was seized to secure government subsidies while deflecting attention from evidence of neglect in safety practices. The government provided £20 million in compensation without first establishing an independent investigation into the actual scale and cause of the problem being subsidized. Talk about ironic evidence of corruption in the food industry that had led to the poisonings in the first place. Who were the victims again? Did the 27,000 sick get any of those millions in compensation, ever?
The business tactic of explosive anti-accountability was perhaps as predictable as it was unfortunate. Public health warnings in England must be nuanced or they could naturally trigger fear responses known to “plague” them, if you get my drift.
…human ectoparasites, like body lice and human fleas, might be more likely than rats to have caused the rapidly developing epidemics in pre-Industrial Europe. Such an alternative transmission route explains many of the notable epidemiological differences between historical and modern plague epidemics.
Scientists keep trying to figure out what caused the plague, while cynical and cruel businesses always seem to have another model in mind…
There was an emergence of a social narrative that Jews had caused the Black Death [by] people who noticed that, in fact, getting rid of Jews was a way of getting rid of debt, as well as taking possession of their wealth. The eruption of the plague had simply given an external reason for this to occur.
Thus, consider how a proud “keep calm and carry on crowd” somehow was pivoted into excited self-serving behavior like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off at the very mention of a potential risk that needed thoughtful response. Instead of a measured action and patience about investigating a “most” eggs claim through scientific clarifications, somehow the egg industry was allowed to leverage mass panic to their favor, ginning up a hunt for…a very convenient scapegoat, a trusted source of concern.
1988 egg “crisis” used shameless tactics to avoid admitting scale of safety errors in egg production
Certainly, Currie’s delivery included a word that needed clarification. Who was more imperfect, the salmonella spreaders or the politician? Her use of “most” instead of very specific percentages transformed a targeted warning into an industry-wide condemnation. And in retrospect her job raising attention to a rising problem was effective. She was invoking the point that food poisoning from eggs jumped from 12,500 in 1982 to about 27,000 in 1988. That’s a lot of bad eggs, even if not most!
The “most” significant communication failure actually came after Currie had made her point. Industry representatives, media outlets, and government officials rushed into “don’t keep calm, don’t carry on” outrage instead of proper education. Rather than accept the criticism, contextualizing the risk, rather than providing leadership through the criticism and feedback, rather than providing consumers with practical safety guidance and goals, the egg industrialists under fire focused heavy return fire on destroying Currie herself.
How dare she say something was imperfect? How dare she focus on the bad things and bring attention on a worsening problem that had made 27,000 people sick?
The aftermath of the scandal presents a troubling paradox: the messenger who raised a very legitimate concern faced career destruction for a LOW imperfection in her delivery, while those who allowed salmonella to spread in the first place faced minimal scrutiny for CRITICAL imperfection in their delivery.
The egg producers who had failed to maintain adequate safety standards somehow emerged as the only victims of their own imperfections, while decrying any amount of imperfection as unacceptable in others. The industry stepped back in horror instead of forward into being potential contributors to resolving the real public health issue.
The British Egg Industry Council said it was seeking legal advice on whether it could sue Mrs Currie over “factually incorrect and highly irresponsible” remarks. A spokesman said the risk of an egg being infected with salmonella was less than 200 million to one. The National Farmers’ Union said it might seek legal damages.
The doubling of salmonella cases in five years to 27,000 people was effectively sidelined by industry representatives’ focus on defending their economic interests. Their claim of “200 million to one” odds of infection were foul, as it contradicted reliable government data showing rapidly increasing illness rates.
This pattern repeats itself regularly in public discourse to this day, and especially in security discussions with regard to technology such as the unsafe Tesla designs. We still see efforts to punish those who highlight uncomfortable truths, while counter-attacks are unleashed by those responsible for creating problems to avoid taking any accountability.
From whistleblowers to scientists warning about climate change, a tendency to attack messengers remains one of the most counterproductive social habits in risk management.
Currie’s egg scandal was about a collective inability to process warnings without feeling personally attacked, and trying to throw everything at the source to disarm the warnings. It highlighted a social response, if not a cultural one, where a panic instinct was to curate a simple villain story to avoid thinking hard about complex solutions.
The irony? The Lion Quality mark introduced after her scandalous “more” has made British eggs among the safest in the world. Currie’s warning, imperfect as any warning, ultimately is what led to very needed significant improvements in food safety.
…the industry did have a problem and was giving too many people food poisoning. Farms tried to clean up but the real breakthrough came in 1998 when the vaccination of hens for salmonella was introduced at farms backing the new British Lion mark. All the big egg producers put the marks on their eggs. From 1998 there have been falls almost every year in the number of human cases of Salmonella enteritidis. In 1997, there were 22,254 cases. In 2005, there were 6,677.
Perhaps it’s time we recognized someone who took the fall for speaking uncomfortable truths in British society, for her imperfectly delivered message bringing everyone a more perfect world.
She deserved “more” thoughtful responses than the unfair and imperfect panic and persecution in the place that prides itself on a decorum of perfection. In retrospect, all the claims of harm by the egg industry were targeted political propaganda that evaporated the power of a person whose job it was to improve health. Currie explained it herself later:
…the numbers of confirmed cases continued to run at about 30,000 a year for the next decade, with about 60 deaths a year. […] There really was a problem with eggs. The hens’ oviducts had become contaminated with a new variant of salmonella, which did not kill the birds, but showed up in infected eggs, and caused a particularly virulent food poisoning in humans. It resulted from laying stocks being fed “protein” that turned out to be ground-up dead chickens. Similar insane feeding practices led to BSE in cattle in the 1980s and 90s. […] Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food were equivalent to a bunch of lunatics. They’d appointed themselves apologists for the farming industry – not their role, as public regulators and advisers. They were unscientific and incompetent. […] I hadn’t made a mistake – not in the substance. I was public health minister. If something wasn’t done during the winter of 1988, I could foresee that we would have an epidemic on our hands…
The egg industry’s response went beyond mere defensiveness, employing legal threats, contestable statistics, and claims of catastrophic financial harm to undermine a health official raising legitimate concerns. The subsequent events raise questions about whether public panic was unfairly manipulated and leveraged to secure financial benefits by the very industry that should instead have focused on its obviously flawed safety standards.
One final thing to consider is just how much Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie had the support of the public, yet this wasn’t enough to keep her in office. That’s important context for how certain powerful businesses conspired to remove a servant of the public, even against the public’s wishes.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
