A few weeks ago, I talked a bit about how your grocery bills are going to be very expensive next year if Donald Trump follows through on his plans to deport millions of immigrants and impose tariffs on our trade partners. I also mentioned that there’s a good chance the food we buy is going to get more dangerous. So let’s talk about THAT: why things may get worse, whether we’ll see more recalls, and how we can protect ourselves if so.
And no, this video isn’t even going to be about Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, RFK, Jr., who drinks raw milk with bird flu in it. I’m not even going to mention him. After this. Don’t drink raw milk.
No, this video is about the inevitable dangers that come from deregulation, which is one thing the Republicans do today that they’ve been doing since Reagan. Since winning the election, Trump and his team have made it very obvious that they were lying about not knowing anything about Project 2025–wow, if only someone had known–and a major part of that blueprint is the (further) defunding of the Department of Agriculture, particularly targeting the enforcement of food safety.
For instance, they specifically recommend changing the current law that says that meat sold across state lines must come from facilities that have been approved by federal inspectors. Instead, they think it should be up to, say, Alabama to decide how many grams of human fecal matter are allowed on the drumsticks that will be sold in New Jersey. Sorry Alabama, I don’t mean to pick on you, it’s just that you tend to rank near the bottom of every list of states in things like education, health, maternal mortality, cancer, murder, stuff like that so I just assume general hygiene and safety regulations are also pretty grim over there.
But the fact is, any state could have a lapse in oversight, and without federal oversight, there will be more outbreaks of food-borne illness and the response will be much slower considering that state inspectors have no standing to recall products sold in other states.
Of course, there’s always the chance that Trump will do all those other Project 2025 things he has promised to do but skip this one. That would be great! But with a historical perspective, I’m not exactly filled with optimism. You see, I was actually alive eight years ago when Trump first became president, back when no one, not even Trump himself, thought he would win.
Despite his lack of preparation, Trump was quickly able to limit the FDA’s impact on companies producing potentially tainted food, with a 33% drop in the number of warning letters they sent out in the first 2 years of his administration, and a 26% drop in official injunctions.
In 2020, when a little coronavirus started zooming around the world killing a bunch of people, Trump’s FDA stopped inspecting foreign and domestic food processing facilities, dairy farms, and animal feed processors. The administration also started imposing permanent measures, like “deregulating meat inspections, revising the methods for assessing pesticide risks, and overhauling one of the country’s eminent environmental statues.”
Also in 2020, Trump issued an executive order that was basically written by the meatpacking industry, according to an investigation by ProPublica. This order allowed meatpacking plants to remain open despite the pandemic, leading to at least 59,000 workers contracting coronavirus and at least 269 workers dying in 2020 alone due to the plants insisting workers come into the plant regardless of symptoms, according to a 2021 report from a Congressional subcommittee.
That’s a bit disturbing considering that experts are currently closely monitoring the spread of bird flu in poultry, dairy cows, and other farm animals, like the first pig that contracted it in Oregon in October. The current mutation of bird flu is unlikely to cause a pandemic, but the fact that it can hop into pigs doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture for us humans, who share a lot of biological similarities with pigs. I’m not saying you should panic but I am saying that if I were a cop in Oregon I’d go vegan just to be sure.
So if you’ve been enjoying the frequent high profile food recalls this year, get ready for more fun over the next four years and longer, as these kinds of deregulation can take years or even decades to rectify. As the Washington Post reported, the amount of tainted food in our supply is about the same as it has been the past few years, but you’re seeing more alerts about it in part because the FDA is actually doing their job, and companies are often voluntarily issuing recalls before there’s a huge problem. But it still speaks to a serious issue at the source: they quote Frank Yiannas, a former FDA deputy commissioner for food policy and response, who says “Sure, if a contaminated food product is on the market, we need modern recall systems to retrieve it and prevent additional illnesses, but we should be clear that having to execute a food recall is a ‘failure’ in the primary order. It’s a sign that a food production system was not under control.”
That’s all a lot of bad news, but what can we, the consumer, do about it other than just, you know, make a sandwich and hope we don’t die?
I’ve seen a number of people advocate for growing your own food at home, and this is actually something I can weigh in on because I do that very thing. I know, my apologies to the conservatives in the comments on my Trad Farm Wife video who wanted to believe I would never hack it on the farm. Thoughts and prayers.
Ever since I was lucky enough to buy a house with a yard in 2020, I’ve been experimenting with growing food. I started with tomatoes, then beans, cucumbers, herbs, onions, eggplants, carrots, lettuce, broccoli, and now I’m trying out more greens and brussels sprouts and beets and radishes for winter. And I agree that everyone should try to grow their own food, even if you are in a small apartment and can only have a little herb garden in your kitchen window. A lot of cities have community gardens where you can get a plot and do what you’d like, and I think there are many benefits. For instance, there’s a real sense of accomplishment in growing food you can eat. You also get a better perspective on what kind of work goes into the food we scoop up without thinking at the grocery store. You can also grow much more delicious food than what you can find at the grocery store, often at a cheaper price depending on the food.
Those are the benefits. Here’s the drawback: you absolutely will not grow enough food to survive. You just won’t. You aren’t that guy in the Martian growing enough potatoes to live with just math and poop. Growing stuff is fun, but farming is fucking hard. You need a ton of space. You need to repel pests like gophers and birds and squirrels and deer. You need to repel disease with crop rotation and careful inspections. You need to figure out exactly how much water each thing needs. What kind of soil each thing needs. What kind of nutrients, what kind of acidity each thing needs. You need to figure out what can grow next to what, and what will kill what. Unless you have a greenhouse or a grow room you can only grow things in season, and too much rain or too little rain or too much sun or too little sun could mean you’re not going to be harvesting shit next month.
All that is fun if you are like me and have a bit of space, like learning new things, and, you know, won’t go hungry if it all goes wrong. Which it will for the first several years, if you’re anything like me.
So what do we do? Well, for a start, learn to cook. Follow the current FDA’s food handling standards: wash your hands, keep raw food away from cooked food, cook everything to the correct temperature (which varies by food item), and refrigerate your food immediately. If you do all that and do it religiously, you will not get sick from cooked food.
It’s uncooked or precooked food like lunch meat and raw food like sushi and fruits and vegetables where there will always be a danger. That’s why vegetables account for more food poisoning than any other food type: remember that McDonald’s recall that happened a few months back? It wasn’t the beef, but the raw onion on top of it that caused the problems.
It’s great that you wash your veggies, but it won’t necessarily get rid of E.coli, salmonella, and other dangerous pathogens. You can wash your lettuce in bleach and it still could have pathogens in it if it was harvested in such a way that introduces those pathogens into the very tissue of the vegetable. The FDA has regulations to try to prevent that from happening. They might not, next year.
So yeah, that’s what we’re looking at for food safety in 2025. If you can grow your own food, that’s great and definitely worth doing. But it’s also worth writing or calling your state representatives to ask for strict state-level food safety regulations, and if you get them, shop locally for your produce through things like CSAs, which can deliver local produce to your door. And consider switching from fresh to roasted vegetables, or feel free to swing by my place if you need some lettuce on your sandwich! Actually don’t do that, that’s weird. Just hit me up if you need gardening advice. Oh, only for the dozen things I’ve learned to grow so far. Uh, and only in Zone 10b. Sorry like I said, it’s tough.
