Food Safety: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as an overview of overlapping and underfunded food regulation.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2023 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends no_wizard · 2024-02 · on “U.S. rice exports to Haiti have unhealthy levels of arsenic, study finds”
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
Cites manquer · 2023-10 · on “Who profits most from America's baffling health-care system?”
> 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 enti
Cites tootie · 2024-01 · on “Consumer Reports finds 'widespread' presence of plastics in food”
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. [this video]
Cites soraminazuki · 2024-06 · on “Neofetch developer archives all his repositories: "Have taken up farming"”
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] [this video] Also [LINK]