Well, at least we can all enjoy a healthy salad instead.
inigyou
Uh, about that...
mikestorrent
If people would stop putting lettuce in Greek salads we'd be FINE
sdcfgy
That’s quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
Iolaum
What? lettuce is not part of the traditional greek salad recipe.
sdcfgy
Exactly. It's a travesty that people are putting lettuce in Greek salad.
jonathanstrange
Technically speaking, you cannot put lettuce in a Greek salad because it will by definition cease to be a Greek salad once lettuce has been added.
Edit: Wait a moment. You can put lettuce i a Greek salad. It just happens not to be a Greek salad afterwards. A subtle difference.
sdcfgy
Salad of Theseus?
tacomagick
Reminds me of the chefs that take a base soup and just change/add a single ingredient to make bunch of other soups just to fill their food schedule quotas for the month since they cannot serve the same soup every day.
stockresearcher
Yeah, North American chefs will generally call the base a mirepoix, but it’s got different names in different languages. It turns out that this soup base concept is remarkably similar across cultures and continents (though the actual vegetables used are based on what’s grown locally).
That's only about 50 cows. This isn't a big recall.
Total slaughter of cows in Texas is about 1.8 million head per year.
dlcarrier
To put it in another context, it's half of the maximum payload of a refrigerated shipping container.
cosmicgadget
You can get 30k pounds of beef from 50 cows?
blooalien
> You can get 30k pounds of beef from 50 cows?
This article [1] says you get about 500-ish pounds of beef from one cow, so 25,000-ish pounds from 50 cows? They weren't massively far off the mark there.
About 500 pounds of "take home packaged beef". At the import level it's usually "hanging weight" of a beef carcass before butchering, about 700 pounds. In this case, according to Beef Magazine [1], there had been some preliminary butchering at the sending end , with the take home packages to be made up at the local supermarket, which would result in some midrange weight per cow.
More to the point, Beef Magazine reports this as an ordinary inspection failure event.
It's a recall because, for some reason, the beef didn't go through USDA incoming inspection, and this wasn't discovered until three months later, long after the beef had been sold, and probably consumed. That's a failure of Customs and Border Protection, which is supposed to make sure that doesn't happen. Beef Magazine says that's an automatic trigger for a Class I recall. It's not a political decision.
Unlike the CBS article, the Beef Magazine article names the shipper and gives the lot numbers of the recalled beef. The Beef Magazine author has a degree in agricultural production, teaches Animal and Range Science at Montana State University, and worked their way up from cattle ranch foreman to director of Montana’s Beef Quality Assurance program. He probably knows something about beef.
The CBS author has a degree in Law and Public Policy and has given a TED talk. His LinkedIn profile says he is "one of America's leading food safety advocates." I'd go with what Beef Magazine says here.
> About 500 pounds of "take home packaged beef". At the import level it's usually "hanging weight" of a beef carcass before butchering, about 700 pounds.
I'm fine with "about 700 pounds", but that's still not too far off from the 30k pounds the original comment stated for around 50 cows (just over a bit instead of under a bit), so it still holds true that their guesstimate isn't all that far off-base.
mysterydip
“According to Beef Magazine” wasn’t a phrase I expected to read today, but I’m delighted to add it to my lexicon
glitchbot
!
Animats
Specialty sources, the ones people in the affected industry read, tend to be reasonably accurate, because their readership knows the subject and will notice errors. If you want to know which data centers in Dubai were hit by Iranian attacks, the mainstream press and Dubai influencers are useless, but there are data center status sites that have solid info. If you want to know what's getting through the Strait of Hormuz, the info from politicians is useless, but there are shipping sites that name ships and keep stats. If you want to know where GPS is being jammed, there's a tracker site run for aircraft dispatchers. If you want to know what's going on with "return to office", there are commercial real estate sites that have a good idea, including one that gets data from office building entry systems.
Hence looking at Beef Magazine for info about beef.
No, I'm not going to post links. Do your own work. Or get an LLM to do it for you.
toomuchtodo
This is a systemic failure indicator. This was a shipment rejected by China for safety reasons. The US beef import supply chain is compromised.
> China rejected a 22-tonne Argentine beef shipment over a banned antibiotic in March. Here's what Trump's quota actually changed, the 29,628 lb recall nobody covered, and why the package won't tell you.
> The shipment came from the ArreBeef plant in Pérez Millán, Buenos Aires province. It was roughly 22 tonnes, about 48,500 pounds, and China's General Administration of Customs rejected the whole container after detecting chloramphenicol residue, then suspended imports from that facility while it worked out what happened.
> China's standard here is zero. There's no "acceptable level" of chloramphenicol in food, so any detectable trace is grounds for refusal. That's why one positive result turns into a rejected container instead of a fine.
> The standard is zero because of what the drug does. Chloramphenicol can cause aplastic anemia, a bone-marrow failure that's rare, unpredictable, unrelated to dose, and frequently fatal. The IARC classified it as Group 2A, "probably carcinogenic to humans," in Volume 50 (1990), and the US National Toxicology Program's Report on Carcinogens lists it as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen. It's still used in human medicine for a handful of severe infections where nothing else works. It's not supposed to be anywhere near a cow.
30,000 split 50 ways is 800lbs per cow (270kg), seems not unrealistic.
Even if you halve the yield to 400lbs then it's only 100 cows
sehansen
800 lbs is 360 kg, but I think you meant 600 lbs per cow. Still seems realistic.
frogperson
can this administration just do a single thing that isn't evil and self serving? it bogles my mind that every single thing they do is just awful.
Reason077
What makes you think this is “evil and self-serving”? It affects a relatively small quantity of specific products from a specific supplier with specific use-by dates.
In any case, this is Argentinian beef, not Canadian or something. Isn’t the US administration pretty friendly with the right-wing populist Argentinian government?
They are, leads me to wonder if something was found and the limited hangout is a paperwork snafu. Considering the administration is loudly trying to bring beef prices down via imports, it would look doubly bad if tainted beef came from Trump's bff.
kotaKat
So there's some context as well with Argentina beef.
Argentina's been paying Huawei for 5G gear and services with beef direct to China, who's been selling it via Huawei stores (see https://www.huaweimossel.com/).
Earlier in March a shipment of ~22 tons of beef was rejected by China for having antibiotics in it and was 'contaminated'.
Follow the trail...
Reason077
This was back in 2024, when Argentina used to have severe restrictions on foreign exchange in an effort to (artificially) prop up the value of the Peso. This made it difficult for Argentine companies to purchase the foreign currency needed to import things like 5G equipment, hence this weird beef-for-telecoms equipment deal.
Argentina liberalised its Foreign exchange market in April 2025 so I'd imagine this sort of thing is no longer happening.
0xbadcafebee
Trump promoted the sale of the beef at a discount a week ago on Truth Social, and now the beef is recalled. Clearly it was bad beef, and he and his cronies made a mint fire-selling it, while American businesses take a loss. Pretty basic corruption.
Reason077
Except this recall was originally announced on August 7th, predating Trump’s imported beef announcement/promotion by a few weeks?
ajross
Honestly more than half of this sort of mess is incompetence rather than malice. But... yeah, sigh. Our grandkids just aren't going to believe what it was like.
deepfriedbits
Usually I'm with you. In these instances, there's a ton of malice, however, with what DOGE did and the relentless drive from conservatism to shrink government and regulations (many of which aim to protect consumers).
somenameforme
If you look at the trajectory of things since the turn of the century, let alone prior, it's more likely that we'll be recounting stories of today as the 'good ole days.' We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning. No we didn't light it, and we tried to fight it.
guywithahat
> Our grandkids just aren't going to believe what it was like
You mean reading about beef recalls? Yeah they'll be shocked
add-sub-mul-div
Which interpretation of your comment do you think makes you look better: that you're pretending not to understand the point being made, or that you truly don't understand the point being made?
guywithahat
So you think this comment:
> Our grandkids just aren't going to believe what it was like
Is appropriate for recalling ~30 cows worth of beef? There is no secret point being made, it's just average things happening while certain people overreact.
anigbrowl
It's a synecdoche for the broader pattern of ruinous self-owns.
add-sub-mul-div
You're expected to understand at a high level the incompetence and corruption that's being referenced as having led to this.
You can disagree with the take, but being ignorant of it doesn't make sense.
guywithahat
This is a post about beef being recalled.
Broadly though, the belief that "current X politician from Y party is the worst, most corrupt politician ever" is a childish belief. I've heard it said about every president and high-ranking politician in my lifetime and it is not remarkable. Frankly the Biden scandals where his son was cutting him into foreign payments seemed worse, and there's no reason to think this beef import had anything to do with corruption, and certainly not at the presidential level.
usefulcat
"Since Trump’s announcement, Detwiler said, online discussion has fueled confusion about what is happening with beef imports and the recall."
Articles like this one aren't exactly helping either.
anevst
Am I the only one that finds the ”30 kilo pounds” quite entertaining?
pfix
No, I looked at that quizzically as well :D
vel0city
My friends don't like it when I use terms like "kilomiles"
malshe
Personally I prefer kiloyards but kilomiles is nice too
anigbrowl
Centifurlongs or go home
tclancy
What? I have that much beef for breakfast with a couple of Brawndos.
burnt-resistor
So about this quota* of imported beef of secret origin(s) that won't meet regulations: I guess it will be a gamble which will contain e. coli, s. aureus, salmonella, listeria, or mad cow, given that country of origin (CoO) labeling nor lot codes aren't required for retail, processed food, or restaurant sale for ground beef. It can be produced with absolutely zero standards.
* Quota amount of ground beef is 6.7% of yearly consumption: 330k short tons / 660M lbs / 300M kg
US ground beef consumption per year: 4.89M short tons / 9.77B lbs / 4.43B kg
inemesitaffia
It hasn't been inspected
burnt-resistor
So it could be horse, UK style.
JohnTHaller
Meanwhile, the administration is planning to import 661,000,000 lbs of beef to try to reduce record high prices but refuses to say where it will come from.
inigyou
Would those be the high prices he created by importing millions of invasive foreign screw worm flies?
testdelacc1
Of all the many things he did, I argue that this is the stupidest, most pointless and damaging thing he did. There was no upside to doing it. He went out of his way to destroy a program that had been running successfully out of sheer stupidity. He mainly hurt his voters (cattle farmers in rural areas), not democrats. It hurt him on the biggest issue he ran on - inflation.
It was a massive unforced error that he’s been scrambling for months to fix.
He could literally have done nothing and it would have been better.
Almost all of his other missteps and mistakes can be rationalised - there was some benefit to himself or someone who bribed him or voted for him. But this screwworm thing just perfectly encapsulates him as a person and his presidency as a whole - something works well for 70 years to protect Americans and he destroys it through malicious incompetence.
> He could literally have done nothing and it would have been better.
Struggling to find a policy where that doesn't apply.
If he'd gotten elected and then gone and lived on the golf course for four years it's hard to argue things would be worse on the other side of the pond.
blitzar
Remember he ended the brutal unsolvable war between Azerbaijan and Albania - when you are operating on that level you get a pass for these minor oversights.
testdelacc1
Poor Albania, drawn into a war they didn’t even know they were a part of until Trump mentioned it.
blitzar
Fortunately for them, it felt like it was over before it even began.
athrowaway3z
Did you just forget about Iran?
testdelacc1
I think Iran was an enormous blunder that hurt everyone around the world, and will for a long time. But at least I can see what he was aiming for - the acclaim for winning a war and bringing a long time foe to heel. He was sold an easy war by Netanyanhu and being gullible he was easily convinced.
There was a reasonable, desirable goal he was aiming for.
But this screwworm thing is so stupid simply because there was no upside to it. It just hurt Americans, especially Trump voters. No one benefited other than screwworms now feasting on American cattle.
inigyou
It reduced government spending and gave billionaires more poor people tears to drink.
atmavatar
That's almost like disbanding the CDC's pandemic response team mere months before a once in a lifetime global pandemic.
And then he was re-elected.
Unfortunately, it would seem that stupid, unnecessary, self-own changes are not a red line for a significant fraction of the voting public.
swed420
> That's almost like disbanding the CDC's pandemic response team mere months before a once in a lifetime global pandemic.
Both parties of capital interests have lots of blood on their hands for the intentional mishandling of the pandemic (which has not ended) in the name of propping up our archaic consumption-first economies.
Only one of them fired the pandemic response team right before a global pandemic.
The pandemic did end, because it turned into an endemic, meaning it is now an endemic and not a pandemic, meaning the pandemic part of it went away. Endemic is another word for "like a pandemic, but never ends".
Loudergood
Doge was full of these, just in areas that you don't understand.
testdelacc1
Yeah ok, that’s very plausible. I’m limited my by knowledge, so this screwworm thing is the worst, most pointless blunder that I know of.
inemesitaffia
The screwworm thing is straight up misinformation end to end.
I remember looking into it when it happened.
It's believed the vector is smuggled cows/beef.
jawilson2
You also have to remember that he probably also pocketed a massive bribe. Follow the grift.
ButlerianJihad
Cows, hopefully
mech422
green cows ?
goshx
On an unrelated note, the government is rounding up protected wild horses and sending them to slaughterhouses.
beloch
The imported beef will most likely come from all the usual suppliers. Australia. New Zealand. Argentina, right after a recall of Argentinian beef. Canada, just as Trump is renaming bodies of water and raising taxes on his own citizens to spite. etc..
expedition32
Wait I thought the US was a free market economy? The government doesn't import anything that's what supermarkets do.
throwaway173738
The government controls imports by tariffs and inspections and so on.
TranquilMarmot
No better time to consider going vegetarian or cutting out red meat, even one day a week can make a huge difference.
King-Aaron
Just remember that a big part of project 2025 was to reduce oversight in the food industry to disrupt trust in the system.
Edit: Wait a moment. You can put lettuce i a Greek salad. It just happens not to be a Greek salad afterwards. A subtle difference.
Total slaughter of cows in Texas is about 1.8 million head per year.
This article [1] says you get about 500-ish pounds of beef from one cow, so 25,000-ish pounds from 50 cows? They weren't massively far off the mark there.
[1]: https://cattledaily.com/how-much-meat-do-you-get-from-one-co...
More to the point, Beef Magazine reports this as an ordinary inspection failure event. It's a recall because, for some reason, the beef didn't go through USDA incoming inspection, and this wasn't discovered until three months later, long after the beef had been sold, and probably consumed. That's a failure of Customs and Border Protection, which is supposed to make sure that doesn't happen. Beef Magazine says that's an automatic trigger for a Class I recall. It's not a political decision.
Unlike the CBS article, the Beef Magazine article names the shipper and gives the lot numbers of the recalled beef. The Beef Magazine author has a degree in agricultural production, teaches Animal and Range Science at Montana State University, and worked their way up from cattle ranch foreman to director of Montana’s Beef Quality Assurance program. He probably knows something about beef.
The CBS author has a degree in Law and Public Policy and has given a TED talk. His LinkedIn profile says he is "one of America's leading food safety advocates." I'd go with what Beef Magazine says here.
[1] https://www.beefmagazine.com/market-news/argentine-beef-reca...
I'm fine with "about 700 pounds", but that's still not too far off from the 30k pounds the original comment stated for around 50 cows (just over a bit instead of under a bit), so it still holds true that their guesstimate isn't all that far off-base.
Hence looking at Beef Magazine for info about beef.
No, I'm not going to post links. Do your own work. Or get an LLM to do it for you.
> China rejected a 22-tonne Argentine beef shipment over a banned antibiotic in March. Here's what Trump's quota actually changed, the 29,628 lb recall nobody covered, and why the package won't tell you.
> The shipment came from the ArreBeef plant in Pérez Millán, Buenos Aires province. It was roughly 22 tonnes, about 48,500 pounds, and China's General Administration of Customs rejected the whole container after detecting chloramphenicol residue, then suspended imports from that facility while it worked out what happened.
> China's standard here is zero. There's no "acceptable level" of chloramphenicol in food, so any detectable trace is grounds for refusal. That's why one positive result turns into a rejected container instead of a fine.
> The standard is zero because of what the drug does. Chloramphenicol can cause aplastic anemia, a bone-marrow failure that's rare, unpredictable, unrelated to dose, and frequently fatal. The IARC classified it as Group 2A, "probably carcinogenic to humans," in Volume 50 (1990), and the US National Toxicology Program's Report on Carcinogens lists it as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen. It's still used in human medicine for a handful of severe infections where nothing else works. It's not supposed to be anywhere near a cow.
https://tallow.app/blog/china-rejected-argentina-beef-chlora...
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-beef-import-plan-backlash-18...
Even if you halve the yield to 400lbs then it's only 100 cows
In any case, this is Argentinian beef, not Canadian or something. Isn’t the US administration pretty friendly with the right-wing populist Argentinian government?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ra...
Argentina's been paying Huawei for 5G gear and services with beef direct to China, who's been selling it via Huawei stores (see https://www.huaweimossel.com/).
Earlier in March a shipment of ~22 tons of beef was rejected by China for having antibiotics in it and was 'contaminated'.
Follow the trail...
Argentina liberalised its Foreign exchange market in April 2025 so I'd imagine this sort of thing is no longer happening.
You mean reading about beef recalls? Yeah they'll be shocked
> Our grandkids just aren't going to believe what it was like
Is appropriate for recalling ~30 cows worth of beef? There is no secret point being made, it's just average things happening while certain people overreact.
You can disagree with the take, but being ignorant of it doesn't make sense.
Broadly though, the belief that "current X politician from Y party is the worst, most corrupt politician ever" is a childish belief. I've heard it said about every president and high-ranking politician in my lifetime and it is not remarkable. Frankly the Biden scandals where his son was cutting him into foreign payments seemed worse, and there's no reason to think this beef import had anything to do with corruption, and certainly not at the presidential level.
Articles like this one aren't exactly helping either.
* Quota amount of ground beef is 6.7% of yearly consumption: 330k short tons / 660M lbs / 300M kg
US ground beef consumption per year: 4.89M short tons / 9.77B lbs / 4.43B kg
It was a massive unforced error that he’s been scrambling for months to fix.
He could literally have done nothing and it would have been better.
Almost all of his other missteps and mistakes can be rationalised - there was some benefit to himself or someone who bribed him or voted for him. But this screwworm thing just perfectly encapsulates him as a person and his presidency as a whole - something works well for 70 years to protect Americans and he destroys it through malicious incompetence.
More info about how the program worked - America’s never ending battle against flesh eating worms (2020) - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...
Struggling to find a policy where that doesn't apply.
If he'd gotten elected and then gone and lived on the golf course for four years it's hard to argue things would be worse on the other side of the pond.
There was a reasonable, desirable goal he was aiming for.
But this screwworm thing is so stupid simply because there was no upside to it. It just hurt Americans, especially Trump voters. No one benefited other than screwworms now feasting on American cattle.
And then he was re-elected.
Unfortunately, it would seem that stupid, unnecessary, self-own changes are not a red line for a significant fraction of the voting public.
Both parties of capital interests have lots of blood on their hands for the intentional mishandling of the pandemic (which has not ended) in the name of propping up our archaic consumption-first economies.
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
The pandemic did end, because it turned into an endemic, meaning it is now an endemic and not a pandemic, meaning the pandemic part of it went away. Endemic is another word for "like a pandemic, but never ends".
I remember looking into it when it happened.
It's believed the vector is smuggled cows/beef.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/project-2025-plan...