Food Safety: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
LastWeekTonight1 HN recommenders · 2023–2024
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A Last Week Tonight segment on food safety in the US. It looks at the FDA, the USDA and industry groups such as the Association for Dressings and Sauces, and how little enforcement there is.
HN cites it as an overview of overlapping and underfunded food regulation.
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4 comments from Hacker News
> The FDA doesn't have jurisdiction over "many things". The FDA has jurisdiction over tobacco[2] and various food products contributing to obesity and those are the only two examples highlighted by OP or me in the thread. > We're paying the bill but not getting the service. Don't think we are, there is very little money for Food part of FDA, in the last 5-6 years the money for food has gone from 1,037M(2018) to 1,145(2022)[1] which in real terms considering inflation means it has gone down and last 30 years it has been similar story. Last Week Tonight had a recent in depth segment on how little resource we have for food enforcement[3] sometimes as little as singe digit inspectors for an entire industry. We don't really enforce food regulations, because we don't fund the regulatory body for food safety. [1] [LINK] , compare that Drugs moved from 1,330 to 2,116M in the same time period. [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]
John Oliver did a whole bit on the FDA recently. They are very stringent and professional, but massively underresourced for the amount of ground they have to cover. And they spend most of their resources on drugs and far less on food. [VIDEO]
The bigger problem is we have a ton of regulatory overhead. The FDA and the USDA are both responsible for checking the safety of different parts of the food supply, and this causes issues. Instead of it being a clear priority for one agency it gets muddled in which agency should be looking at what. Then couple that with the fact that the FDA historically spends more time on drug safety than food safety and the USDA has conflicting priorities in many ways, combined together you end up with some real issues with catching things early and/or before they hit the market It could be solved by creating a single agency dedicated to food safety and removing the burden from two the agencies that have many other priorities on top of food safety. That in a tl;dr nutshell is the problem. There is a good overview of these dynamics done by Last Week Tonight that’s on YouTube I recommend for an overview: [VIDEO]
Unfortunately, farming isn't devoid of BS either. As is the case with many other topics, John Oliver did multiple segments on that as well. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] Also [LINK]