I’m extra freaked out because my son has a serious nut allergy and has grown up reading labels but as soon as the FDA is gutted that will no longer keep him safe.
It’s fair to say that the people of America are on our own at this point. That doesn’t scare me. I’ve been on my own my whole life, but some folks are gonna need help with this. We should all keep an eye out, her friends in trouble.
I think people forgot that we already tried deregulation—it’s the default—and *regulation* came about because it sucks to just gamble on if your food is food or poison!
When they blow it up, we’ll rebuild it better. They’ve already riddled it with holes and made it cumbersome and dumb. Let’s steal their idea of creative destruction here.
Daughter panicked reading a book about Teddy Roosevelt because they mention conditions reported in The Jungle (& how TR pushed Congress to pass Meat Inspecrion Act and Pure Food and Drug Act).
She was worried she’d eat gross food with poop and people in it. I assured her things are different now.
Yup. Due to my immune & digestive systems making some…interesting…choices about ten years ago, I literally need to eat meat in order to not get malnourished. Except my disabled ass can’t afford direct-from-local-farmers meat. So well-done shoe-leather it’ll have to be. 🙁
Ooh, good point! I know for a fact that my crockpot gets to boiling in well under 2 hours, so that should work fine for anything not frozen. (And for ground meat, I don’t mind it well-done as long as it’s not, like, a burger patty. So I can just cook the hell out of beef/sausage/etc for meat sauce.)
At this point, people will have to start seriously considering to grow their own crops somehow. Problem being of course that there's not enough soil in the middle of the city to revive the "Victory Gardens" of WWII
I love how voters explicitly got warned about that straight from the horse’s mouth and just chose not to care. Like I guess I just gotta buy fresh ingredients only and overcook everything now?
Producers/corporates know how to keep food safe. It will be chilling indeed if they abandon the standards needed because the government is no longer looking.
The same people who wants to remove fluoride from the water will gleefully destroy the EPA and allow companies to mass pollute our drinking water again.
Yeah, I was thinking of giving up chickens after these 4 age out, but not now. Back to production gardening out there in the backyard.
Fuck. Not only are they going to poison us, but they're going to kill and maim so many industrial food system workers along the way.
I was on the fence about having chickens, between the amount of animal care I already do (I have 15 pets), the challenges of wintering them in MN, and my fears about heartbreak, lifespans, and predation.
I'm leaning pretty hard towards keeping chickens now.
They're very self-sustaining. I have a town yard, and 4 is the sweet spot between ruining my yard and having eggs.
I'm in MT, my small coop is in an enclosed run, heated with an infrared heating panel. I use a big tube feeder I built from 4" plumbing pipe, and a heated base for the metal waterer.
I’m so sorry. Yeah, I’d worry. My mom’s on Medicare. Fervently supported the man, because communism. Or something. Love my mother, I just hope the buggers don’t pull all the supports out from under her.
YES. I think that is going to hurt and kill a lot more people (in this country) than the other, more flashy aspects of the coming disaster.
And Trumpists aren't gonna blame him, or themselves, or the corporate bad actors. Nope, it will be all the fault of "the gummint", can't do anything right...
If he deports even half the number of people he says he wants to, there will barely be enough food in the system to be inspected. No one will be picking our food in the fields.
The whole administrative state. We have to do something. Or at least everything we can. Old, dead weight must go. I think I am going to run for something but we need a lot more new, aggressive congresspeople. Hold hearings. Impeach justices. Sell some fucking t-shirts. https://bsky.app/profile/mythserene.bsky.social/post/3lac5m7cvav2k
I've been wondering how much of the increase in food born illness we've seen over the last four years are from the hollowing out of the agencies during Trump finally coming to fruition and the limited ability to address in the last 4 years. It will get much worse.
You gave yourself away as an Aussie when you used the word barracked. Not used in N. America. The correct word is rooted, but I know that is hilarious to you. 😂
Although I think one possible saving grace is that Trump's ego won't fit in the same room as a Kennedy. I don't see that relationship lasting a full 12 months.
Stocking seeds for my garden now. Buy up those canning and preserving books, friends. May have talked Hubs into buying a cow. Expanding the coop. Ordered ducks; the chickens will learn to cope.
Yep. Make the masses poorer and sicker. Make sure their very lives completely and thoroughly depend on the rich giving them the barest essentials. That is what the 1% want and are working towards.
An extra downside from that, on an international front is that a lot of your foods might not be able to be sold to other countries, a lot of stuff can't be sold here already cause of types of additives (colouring or preservative)
The thing to keep in mind is that Trump recognizes the value of the threat. Food safety regulation is a "barrier to entry" for large food companies - effectively locking out competitors. Trump knows that. Corporations know that. They will come to an understanding and the reg's will stay.
Food safety, drug safety (there was already no supplement safety), transportation safety, workplace safety. Air, water, and soil safety. Endangered species protections. So much hard won progress in so many areas. It's scary! We shouldn't have to have these fights. But we will.
Not to imply that I would wish that to happen, but with the amount of recalls this year and some of the more alarming ones - like pesticides linked to sterility in oatmeal (can't use it here, can source from abroad) and lead in cinnamon (12 major store brands) you just wonder at the FDA:
Market utopianism is a very typical part of anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style. People will die, but conservatives, Republicans killed off hundreds of thousands during the covid pandemic and nobody really cared, so what’s a few more now?
Like, worst case scenario is that a nationwide public health disaster worse than COVID starts causing widespread deaths that the administration will happily shove under the rug. Question is, how long can Trump hide a public health disaster before people stop letting themselves lay down and die?
I used to believe you couldn't mass murder a population (at home not talking distant foreign wars where of course you can) and hide it, people would know, they would know it directly. Covid made me question all of that.
The hardest lesson gleamed from American politics these past 10 years is that there is no upper limit to what the mass public will allow to happen. They don't care about thinking, or control, or whatever.
Gonna go back to only eating meat from the farmers market (which is 90% of our purchasing anyway) and cut back way on processed foods. Deli meat? nope. Dairy? Probably only for cooking (or fermented).
Man... among all the other issues being batted around, I hadn't even thought about that. The USA infamously has one of THE WORST regulatory bodies for food and medicine in the developed world. The idea that's gonna get even worse is a nightmare scenario I didn't even think possible.
Yeah, this is one thing I'm really worried about. There will be big protests and legal challenges and refusals to comply over big visible stuff like mass deportations, but our food, water, and medicine are likely to get considerably less safe very quietly.
This is essential to know- along with the increase in bird flu. Workers often decline testing, so it is hard to track and therefore hard to stop the spread.
It already has been disappearing for years. Big corporations have been lobbying to relax standards and protocols for consumer safety that restrict endless profit with no consequences. Industry regulations and organizations that monitor & check corporations/industries are actually going to disappear.
I was just thinking about this on my way home last night. Get your hepatitis vaccines and start cooking all your fruit and veggies cuz listeria and e coil outbreaks are going to be even more common.
this being a terrible idea for the country aside for a sec, won't this ALSO wreck our food exports? No one's gonna want our sawdust bread and diseased beef.
I barely ate fast food before, but going forward, I think I will only eat at single-outlet locally owned and (where possible) locally sourced restaurants.
Grocery shopping will require vigilance. And I'm keeping my travel cipro, azythro handy. 🤢
i mean a kashrut certification doesnt mean food is safe! it just means you're following some pretty simple dietary laws -- not mixing milk with meat, no shellfish etc.
Fair point (I should have made the disclaimer that I'm not Jewish, so I'm completely ignorant beyond a base understanding) but between no label at all and a certification sticker I'd sort of trust the sticker?
I'm still worried as hell, just trying to find things to cling to.
I guess after typing that we need to keep an eye out for fake certifications, like that "America's Frontline Doctors" group that popped up during Covid.
They used to put a little formaldehyde in it to make it last. Killed a lot of small children, sickened many more. Arguably, this directly led to the creation of the FDA.
Yeah, the bird flu will be much more deadlier than SARS-CoV-2. And it’s just a matter of time. With the same ringmaster on hand at the Covid’s start, I guess we don’t need to worry about Medicare and SSI after it sweeps through. 😟
They're gonna put the children back in the mines. Alabama already has the ground work for that, and I won't be surprised if other red states follow suit
I've been deeply involved in drug development and also toxicity testing my whole career. If the regulation aspect breaks down, this is very bleak for people.
Pasteurize the milk if they don't. I use my sous vide - stick. Also great to pasteurize eggs. Don't let them tell you their eggs or raw milk is safe. It's not, no matter how clean/ organic/ nice they are.
It already has. Haven’t you seen all the food recalls? It’s like food processing facilities mandate employees must fist themselves before returning to work.
It's because he eliminated SO MANY regulations during his first term. The *moment* they were given free reign to slack on safety, they took it and ran with it.
Everything comes with a side of listeria, now. I think they have new signs in the restrooms that say: employees must anally fist themselves before returning to work.
Yes, it is. Deconstruct the administrative state is code for destroy the regulatory framework and social safety net. Nobody in the corporate media bothered to say that.
That was the first thing we talked about this morning. I have a hydroponic garden and use a local butcher. We're probably going to start using a farmer's market for other produce. Not sure about eggs yet but it's definitely going to be a huge change.
I mean for eggs if you know any backyard chicken owners they often get more eggs than they know what to do with. And you can also hang out in their yard to see if you trust their setup
Eggs are specifically hard bc I'm extremely aware of the H5N1 spread in livestock and wild birds. I don't trust unpasteurized eggs bc of this. However, I don't know how long eggs are going to be actually pasteurized in the stores going forward which is where the dilemma comes in.
That's sensible. You can actually pasteurize eggs at home w/ a sous vide or pot at consistent heat, but i understand why you might prefer better vetted suppliers that do it for you (presumably w/ more precise equipment)
Fresh vegetables and fruit, washed very well or cooked very thoroughly. Little meat, as unprocessed as possible and cooked through, or from a butcher with known sourcing if you can. Flour and baked goods only from producers you can trust to self regulate (KA and Bob’s Red Mill). Dairy… I don’t know.
It’s going to be choices between expensive and potentially unsafe, if it gets bad. I hope the USDA and FDA will hold on - at least the people doing outbreak tracing if not the inspectors. If investigations still work, producers will be leery of being associated with outbreaks and may self-regulate.
But we’re going to be riding the line between companies’ desire to squeeze out every penny of profit with cut corners and skipped maintenance vs. their worry at potential lost sales if word gets out.
I also wouldn’t put it past the worst offenders to repackage things until no one can tell.
The CDC currently has good resources on “safer” foods, and how to prepare things as safely as possible. The hazard will show up most/first where processing controls have previously kept us safe (inspections, disinfections, pasteurization, contamination checks) - like the recent listeria cases.
Your freakout isn't justified. It's not going to vanish, it's going to improve. US regulations allow to much garbage to be used that other countries banned long ago.
It will be worse than people realize. I expect food exports and international travel by Americans will be curtailed as health and safety programs disappear. Safe imports to replace domestic food will become more expensive or vanish due to tariffs and trade wars.
Evidence based medicine is less that 100 years old as well, and we're gonna throw it out for a healthy earing and exercising that was first proposed by racist eugenicists and isn't evidence based.
I would encourage people to get into pressure canning. It’s actually pretty easy. I started with soups and chilis. I make a huge batch in the crockpot, set enough aside for a few meals, then can the rest.
Also, aerogardens are fun & easy for yr-round greens & herbs. Lettuce towers for families.
One extra nice thing about canned homemade soups and chilis, because they’re shelf-stable and require no refrigeration, I keep a few cans in my desk for days when I forget to bring a lunch to work. It’s much cheaper than eating out or delivery. & you reuse the jars and rings, very low trash impact.
I just had Campylobacter. Since I don't interact with farm animals, it was certainly food borne. It's already falling apart and is only going to get worse.
It depends on how they handle it. Other nations have better food due to updates that were suggested, but getting to that point likely will be a struggle especially if they go overboard.
That one of the hundreds of things I am worried about. The worst may be the thought that a lot of the people who voted for him want to mock and taunt the people who didn't.
If Trump actually lets RFK Jr. loose, there's going to be a whole lot of preventable sickness, injury, and death. We'll see how much America enjoys watching kids die of preventable stuff (in addition to school shootings) in exchange for less red tape.
Yes, it will get worse. To be fair, it’s been a problem for some time because Congress underfunds the agencies (USDA and FDA) that regulate it. John Oliver did a good piece on food safety. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg
So I'm rather confused. What exactly is the point of getting rid of all of these health and food regulation organizations if people are just going to die?
Wring out as much money as you can from each customer before they kick the bucket. Capitalism and its corporate masters are inherently short sighted. Money now, who cares if there are customers later.
The thing that might prevent the elimination of this infrastructure is the fact that all of our trade partners have their own food safety regs and nobody is going to just "take our word for it" that our products meet those regs.
Or maybe we just export entirely different food than we get to eat.
They're literally getting rid of science and disaster relieve organizations? What's next the CDC. Can't find a deadly virus if there's no scientist to do it. Ahh, NIH is sooo important for research funding. I hate this 😮💨
Like, Boar's Head will surely cease to exist, right? Why would anyone believe that they actually cleaned up their act and stopped killing people with toxic food if there isn't a third party inspection?
It might be directly affected or demonetized, but that's why we organize, regroup, and fight back. We took a lot of simple things for granted, and now it's time to fight for them again.
I actually remember watching the travel channel show about building it and I tweeted at the time, "This is hilarious, this ride looks so unsafe, but they're just ramping up drama because reality TV"
Civil litigation. Holding your local representative responsible for a complete dereliction of duty to their constitutes. Suing any and all businesses associated with said products. Class action lawsuits. Boycotting producers who think it's cheaper to pay for automation than real live spot checkers.
Living in Marin, a lot of my neighbors and acquaintences think they can just put their head down, and they'll be fine. Food safety, drug safety, hospital staffing and funding - we are all at risk. It's just a matter of how much.
I'm afraid they can and will. The Heritage Foundation is still going to be writing Trump's policy. Trump isn't a policy nerd. And he's promised to gut the federal government. Normal people don't know or care about the details, he just said it'll make things cheaper.
Well, I'm not trying to make you panic, but I'm not sure your dad knows how these things work. It's not a single piece of legislation, it's a road map. Last time Trump was president he implemented 60% of their stuff. So a lot of it could still happen.
My only glimmer of hope is that the brain-worm guy seems to actually care about the highly-processed shit in our food. So maybe he'll do something about that...while also gutting every regulation elsewhere lol
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She was worried she’d eat gross food with poop and people in it. I assured her things are different now.
Cholera is a choice.
everything you buy at the grocery store will be unreliable and potentially tainted.
access to weather information is going to consolidate and be false.
The same people who wants to remove fluoride from the water will gleefully destroy the EPA and allow companies to mass pollute our drinking water again.
Listeria? It's what's for dinner.
Fuck. Not only are they going to poison us, but they're going to kill and maim so many industrial food system workers along the way.
I'm leaning pretty hard towards keeping chickens now.
I'm in MT, my small coop is in an enclosed run, heated with an infrared heating panel. I use a big tube feeder I built from 4" plumbing pipe, and a heated base for the metal waterer.
And Trumpists aren't gonna blame him, or themselves, or the corporate bad actors. Nope, it will be all the fault of "the gummint", can't do anything right...
Going back to Victorian times, when brands really came into existence, so you could assume the can you opened wouldn't kill you.
https://bsky.app/profile/mythserene.bsky.social/post/3lac5m7cvav2k
Corporations and billionaires bought this result for a reason
Voters didn’t think that through - just swallowed their lies and silence all while they were buying the country
A template the extreme right have already exported
I see Kennedy thinking he’s bargaining with Trump - what a fool he is
Musk will over-reach at some point and become a threat
Yes, I agree. There’s a fragility here that will be interesting to watch
Revolutions never benefit the original winners!
Companies still have a basic motivation to make their food safe.
Things will get worse, but I don't think it'll be apocalyptic.
The hardest lesson gleamed from American politics these past 10 years is that there is no upper limit to what the mass public will allow to happen. They don't care about thinking, or control, or whatever.
sorry for the caps lock moment, I'm just. feeling a lot of things. none good.
Anything other then that I'm not sure how else to help.
Grocery shopping will require vigilance. And I'm keeping my travel cipro, azythro handy. 🤢
Tens of thousands of Americans died.
We'll see that again.
Start farming in your backyard, and beware of commercialized roadkill.
RFKJr wants everyone to be assimilated with brain worms
TL;DR: the FDA might wind up gutted, but certifications for organic, kosher, and halal aren't part of the FDA. They're more likely to be safe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1gl7nef/comment/lvs475x/
I'm still worried as hell, just trying to find things to cling to.
https://www.epi.org/blog/iowa-governor-signs-one-of-the-most-dangerous-rollbacks-of-child-labor-laws-in-the-country-14-states-have-now-introduced-bills-putting-children-at-risk/
It's going to get so much worse
I work with teachers every day. They know what the DeVos plan was, and how much worse it will be with a loon like RFK in charge.
I also wouldn’t put it past the worst offenders to repackage things until no one can tell.
People in Phoenix on the other hand. . .
Also they’d better not come for my fluoridated water!
All safety regulations put in place to protect the average citizen and curb the evil impulses of rich people are on the chopping block.
they didnt exactly protect a whole lot, and people who broke the rules didnt actually face any repercussions from it
its still gonna suck though. yeah.
But saying that I genuinely have no idea if he hasn't already had one.
Also, aerogardens are fun & easy for yr-round greens & herbs. Lettuce towers for families.
especially after they remove LGBTQ anti-discrimation laws...
Americans already eat shit every day.
Or maybe we just export entirely different food than we get to eat.
That's not me "preaching". Without regulation, even beer may as well be rat poison.
(Spongebob voice) TWO YEARS LATER
oh nooooo
watch rivers turn to literal shit
It was so despicable even conservatives disapproved of it.