In Reply to: Thursday comes again. posted by mh on September 10, 2026 at 09:18:59
In Monday’s New York Times, Eric Schlosser — the guy who freaked out a nation with his book Fast Food Nation a quarter century ago — published an article that kicks off with a simple observation: if you buy a T-shirt at the Gap, federal law requires a label that tells you where it was made and what it’s made of.
While the same is true for your car, your refrigerator, your television, and every apple and bag of frozen peas in the supermarket, as a result of lobbyists being able to openly buy politicians in America since 2010, beef and pork are the exceptions.
Which is why, Schlosser argues, Donald Trump could sign a one-man presidential proclamation allowing roughly 660 million pounds of foreign beef to enter America with neither inspection nor the usual 26.4 percent out-of-quota tariff.
If Americans knew where this mystery meat was coming from, they might not want to eat it, Schlosser notes, but Trump is apparently making sure we’ll never know.
Ironically, the same morning Schlosser was warning us about the incoming meat, Axios reported that the FDA just hit a record 19 simultaneous foodborne illness outbreak investigations, covering everything from infant formula to jalapeños.
A Cornell economist told them the American food safety system “has gotten hit so hard over the last year and a half.” This is quite simply what happens when you turn a nation’s food supply over to its oligarchs and shut down the regulations that protect average consumers.
Schlosser says much of the beef that’ll be coming into the US could have been frozen for years overseas, blended here with fattier American meat in massive industrial grinders.
Trump refuses to tell us where the meat is coming from, and his Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins — a former rightwing propagandist and fundamentalist Christian evangelist with no food safety background whatsoever — says she’s “not privvy” to that information.
Meanwhile, Schlosser pointed out that Uruguayan beef was recently found tainted with an outlawed antiparasitic drug, Argentine beef has repeatedly tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause nerve damage, and in 2017 Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants over allegations that inspectors and politicians had been bribed to allow rotten meat, chemically treated to mask the smell, to be sold to schools and hospitals and exported abroad.