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As someone who has made sausage and smoked meats, and enjoyed them very much, and who has also been a Federal regulator (of power plants) I have some sympathy for what they are about to endure. The problem is that the viewpoint of public health authorities and individuals are incongruent and inconsistent. Public health authorities are interested in getting down the overall numbers of people who get sick or die from the activity that they regulate. They try to make the activity regular and systematic so that they can wathc how it works, and intervent whenever someone does something that they percieve to increase the overall risk to societal health.

Individuals, however, are interested in themselves, and generally do not care about overall societal health concerns. They want stuff that tastes good, and won’t kill THEM. Until some child gets sick and it gets publicized by an activist group with a computer program and a media outlet looking for ratings, and a politician looking for an issue to generate votes. Then the populace is all up in arms calling for someone to take action “to ensure that this tragedy will never happen again”. For the children. Etc.. And this is how you get regulations that don’t care whether you are just 2 guys, or as big as Hormel.

And, all the arguments that the small guys are cleaner than the big operations are just a bunch of crap, because the little guys who are working late into the night to fill orders get tired and make mistakes. They may not mix up a big batch that will get a LOT of people sick, but if you have a lot of little guys working late into the night, you are certain to have more mistakes. People who say that every grandma runs a hygenic kitchen are fooling themselves, and will likely be the first ones to call for “something to be done” when their kid gets sick.

I like local food, and personally I can deal with an occasional bout of the runs. I don’t like people who don’t know what they are talking about complain out of one side of their mouth about how we need “safe food”, but at the same time it needs to be produced locally by grannies and 2-person operations. These are incompatible goals.

yes, yes, regulation good. But, it always comes at a cost.

There have been guys coming down the street here driving a pickup. They ring the bell and say they have extra steaks and can let me have them cheap.

Last ones I told I would never buy meat off a truck.

Now when I was in Germany we bought food off the truck a lot. We lived in a rural village, no street names, just house numbers and we’d get several trucks on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, the beer truck, the bread truck, the produce truck would all come into town and we’d walk over and buy good, fresh food (sometimes the bread was still warm) without going to the store. I loved that.

Leading chef Rick Bayless has had his restaurant raided and closed down after being identified in the article as serving these hazardous meat products.