Food Sickens Millions as Company-Paid Checks Find It Safe

[mookiemookie]

Beach was one of 33 people killed by listeria that was later traced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and state officials to contaminated cantaloupes from one Colorado farm. It was the deadliest outbreak of foodborne disease in the U.S. in almost 100 years.

***8220;He died in terror and pain,***8221; says his daughter Debbie Frederick.

About seven weeks after Beach started eating cantaloupes, a private, for-profit inspection company awarded a top safety rating to Jensen Farms, the Granada, Colorado, grower of his toxic fruit. The approval meant retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) and Wegmans Food Markets Inc. could sell Jensen melons.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-1...d-it-safe.html

Much the same as in the financial world - self regulation is the same as no regulation at all. Well on second thought, I guess the whole "free market" ideology is working in this scenario - dead consumers won't buy a shoddy product.

[the_tyrant]

How the hell did they even think they can get away with this?!

How the hell did they even think they can get away with this?!

because they do most of the time, they just got unlucky this time by getting caught.

[Platapus]

But but but we should trust corporations to do the right thing.

A corporation would never compromise safety for profit.

That's crazy talk.

Regulations and government inspections only cut profits. The other results are just the "cost of doing business".

To corporations, customers are fungible.

[August]

Originally Posted by Platapus

But but but we should trust corporations to do the right thing.

A corporation would never compromise safety for profit.

That's crazy talk.

Regulations and government inspections only cut profits. The other results are just the "cost of doing business".

To corporations, customers are fungible.

You're absolutely right Plat. Only by heaping tons of expensive and crippling regulations on domestic companies can we ensure that they'll still have bad apples that manage to get around them.

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by August

You're absolutely right Plat. Only by heaping tons of expensive and crippling regulations on domestic companies can we ensure that they'll still have bad apples that manage to get around them.

Well it is not a perfect solution but the best we can have, unfortunately.

[August]

Originally Posted by Platapus

Well it is not a perfect solution but the best we can have, unfortunately.

I don't know about that. These regulations are written and enforced by people who can't, who won't, differentiate between a shiv and a plastic butter knife in a students lunch, who will seize an old couples home because they made the mistake of turning in their pot growing grandson to the cops, or who will continue to prosecute four teenagers for rape even though he knows they didn't do it.

I trust them less than I do corporations.

[mookiemookie]

The perfect solution fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs when an argument assumes that a perfect solution exists and/or that a solution should be rejected because some part of the problem would still exist after it were implemented. This is a classic example of black and white thinking, in which a person fails to see the complex interplay between multiple component elements of a situation or problem, and as a result, reduces complex problems to a pair of binary extremes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana...lution_fallacy

[Skybird]

Trusting the cat to keep the cream is so... anti-clever.

Consumer protection is like fire protection. While fire protection laws should protect against fires, consumer protection laws should protect against consumers.

[mapuc]

About a week ago, I had a discussion about an article that was about aspartam

From all that I have read and heard, Aspartam is poison!
If that's the case why does the danish Food Administration allow that aspartam in product?

I my self do not drink or eat diet thing. Mostly I make my own food and I drink water and coffe to my homemade food.

Markus

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by mapuc

From all that I have read and heard, Aspartam is poison!

And from all that I've read most of the "studies" are incomplete.
http://www.joslin.org/info/correctin...aspartame.html

[Catfish]

How surprising.

When the german government abandoned the testing done by independent agencies to control the security of nuclear plants, and shifted control to the very energy companies which ran them (to save money), all the plants became safe basically overnight. Not one problem anymore.
As Merkel said "Only shows they know their stuff" lol

In german there's a proverb: "Den Bock zum Gaertner machen".

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

And from all that I've read most of the "studies" are incomplete.
http://www.joslin.org/info/correctin...aspartame.html

That myth was new to me.

I don't care if aspartame is safe or not, I just don't drink or eat diet stuff.

Take my little sister she drinks several liters of Pepsi Max per week, she finds a lot of stuff on the internet, that says that aspartame is very safe.

another thing that's very, yes very important:

you SHALL always see who paid the inquire. in your link a survey was made, but who ordered it and who paid for it???

Markus

[Sailor Steve]

I don't drink diet soda either, because I hate the taste. I do drink a lot of hot and iced tea, and I use aspartame almost exclusively, mainly because sucralose (Splenda) is so expensive. But wait, someone is also claiming that sucralose is dangerous! Saccharin? Hate the stuff. It has a terrible aftertaste. So what to do? Learn to like unsweetened stuff? Not gonna happen. Use sugar? Not exactly good for the diabetes, though I do still help myself to the occasional Doctor Pepper.

The article sites over 200 studies since 1965. Sure, you can ask who funded them, but the same shoe fits on the other foot. What exactly is the motive behind the claims of serious dangers? They don't exactly provide solid evidence; more like scare tactics.

There was a big saccharin scare decades ago. It caused cancer in lab rats. Then someone tried to dismiss the results by pointing out that the doses given the rats equalled drinking approximately 500 cans of diet soda per day. Silly, but of course you could take saccharin tablets equaling that amount. The bottom line came when real studies ended up showing that human and rat urinary tracts were quite different, and in the 133 years since saccharin came into use not one bladder cancer death could be directly attributed to saccharin consumption.

The real question is how many studies have shown that aspartame is a truly serious health threat? I've read a lot of the articles, pro and con, and so far it seems that the ones who claim it is are the ones with the agendas.

As to the topic at hand, I think that it's very difficult to test for this kind of thing. One batch of canteloupes were infested, and that was one batch that weren't tested. It's impossible to test everything that grows, and sometimes something slips through. I'm not sure this is anybody's fault. It may be, but not necessarily.