Regulatory capture at work.
Inspector visits the "dirty" bigCo factory and they have an expensive binder for him showing him why everything they do he could possibly take issue is "compliant", citing relevant law, guidelines, specs, etc, etc.
Inspector visits the squeaky clean small time factory and proceeds to write out thousands of dollars of fines for petty things that could have been compliant had the owners had the money to pay to produce all the paperwork showing why their stuff is GTG.
And the inspector and everyone his organization works for say this is all great, and of course they've got self-serving metrics to prove it, because those organizations naturally fill up with people who don't question the premises of what they're doing.
Just about every industry has this going on to a large enough it's a problem degree. It's a pretty f-ed up state of affairs but it won't change because there's so many careers and even entire industries built around it.
Regulatory capture here on HN is turning into a meaningless phrase. Whenever a business does something wrong, rather than actually say what's wrong someone just claims it's regulatory capture. It's turned into it's own thought terminating cliche.
Say what the issue is, don't just blame an assumed regulatory capture. In this case state that it's insufficient regulation of the meat processing industry, infrequent inspections of processing plants, or understaffed agencies.
Say what the issues were, not a nebulous "regulatory capture" claim.
Businesses lobby to get FDA regulations weakened - state that's the problem, not a vague "regulatory capture" phase.
The conditions in TFA don't show up overnight. People were blindly doing checklists for years with no shits given about the big picture. "Hurr durr the rules don't say condensation can't be running down the moldy-ass ceiling so it's fine" and all that. Eventually people got sick, then the regulator had to cover ass so they took a reasonable big picture look at the operation and the results were so bad a Congressional committee said WTF.
Regulating minutia consistently creates these stupid exercises where the forest is lost for the trees. But we won't stop regulating minutia because there are too many jobs and careers and whatnot tied up in it and it's easy to sell to the public.
>And the inspector and everyone his organization works for say this is all great, and of course they've got self-serving metrics to prove it, because those organizations naturally fill up with people who don't question the premises of what they're doing.
I've been through dozens of FDA facility inspections (and dozens more from non-governmental inspection agencies that are regularly used in the food industry, some of which I might say are more strict than the FDA). Nothing you've said matches my experience in any way.
When there's a question of a gray area and "compliance by letter but not spirit" type things the BigCo solution that has been engineered and/or gone over by lawyers, etc, etc. almost always wins out even if their hired people have to go a few rounds with the regulator and make some minor tweak to make it happen. A lot of times this is fine and it's common sense progress that the regulator was preventing because of institutional inertia but sometimes it's sketchy slapdash stuff.
My food industry experience is on the "manufacturing the stuff in the factory" side and I assure you nobody who arrives in any of the nondescript white trucks with numbers on them regards the regulatory process as highly as you do.
I said nothing of how I regard the regulatory process. Don't be presumptuous; doing so disregards the site guidelines.
>Converse curiously
Or you could order online from this deli - https://www.zingermans.com/Product/usingers-smoked-liverwurs...
(Though I'd wait for cooler weather, and "Ships frozen" probably won't be cheap.)
bell-cot•4mo ago
potato3732842•4mo ago
Your statement is actively misleading (i.e. lying).
After a little digging. That statement was made in 2022 when the CFO, who reports to the company president, who does some of the job of CEO but who reports to some unclear structure of family personalities above him who do a lot of the more strategic bits, was being deposed in a lawsuit (and this would make him very careful about what he says) among members of that family who owned the company. So it's not like he doesn't know who's calling the shots. He doesn't know who the CEO is in the most strict legal technicality sense.
https://fortune.com/2024/10/14/boars-head-deli-company-ceo-o...
I'm sure they've got some slapdash plants and a whole bunch of stuff that needs correcting, but taking something that's tangential to that and acting like it matters is a great illustration of one of the many things wrong with modern discourse.
hollerith•4mo ago
bell-cot•4mo ago
> According to a deposition from 2022, when asked who the CEO of the company was, CFO Steve Kourelakos, a two-decade Boar’s Head veteran, answered, “I’m not sure.”
Based on the Ars article (grim problems discovered at 3 other Boar's Head plants, long after the revelations about their Jarratt facility) your "some unclear structure of family personalities above him" has no real interest in food safety. Which was my point. I did not accuse them of being Bond villains, nor selling Soylent Green.
(FWIW, "some slapdash plants and a whole bunch of stuff that needs correcting" seems a rather misleading summary of the grim details of the inspections of their facilities. Ditto of their demonstrated disinterest in correcting anything. And rather insensitive to all the people hospitalized or killed by Boar's Head's food safety failings last year.)
MeatLoverzPizza•4mo ago
You don't see this as a problem?
The corporate governance structure of a company of this magnitude should be well defined, not an array of family members filling various high level roles when it behooves them.