Americans have been reeling from an extraordinary volume of food recalls of late, and nobody is quite sure why our nation's food production and distribution systems are collapsing. It began after Elon Musk sent vans of precocious teen vibecoders to ransack government offices and fire all the people who knew things. It accelerated after Donald Trump put barely sentient sack of rancid whale meat Robert Kennedy Jr. in charge of "health." It probably has at least something to do with Trump stuffing the government with people mostly there to collect bribes rather than do their day jobs.
See, if you didn't click that link you'd assume that was a link to the guy caught taking $50,000 in bribe cash stuffed into a fast food bag during an FBI sting operation, but no, that's a completely different guy. This one was shaking down Middle East royalty while working as a "personal aide, wink wink" to former Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, the one who got canned before she was able to get much use out of the custom private jets with nice big beds that she and Mr. Wink Wink demanded the government provide her with. Yeah, that Lewandowski guy. Yeah, he tried to shake down the governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and somehow hasn't yet been found chopped to pieces and buried in seven different states, go figure.
Wait, what were we talking about? Right, the food supply. Despite there being any number of reasons why our food supplies might have suddenly gotten much less safe under the leadership of Bribe Boy, Raccoon Penis Guy and Ketamine Rocket Nazi, nobody has been able to narrow down where, exactly, the process has been breaking down.
It might be that companies feel confident that this White House will never hold them accountable for ignoring regulations, so executives are feeling more free to cut corners and pass those risks on to consumers.
It might be that sharply elevated temperatures we've seen this summer have supercharged bacteria and parasite growth, so places that might not have had such problems before are having them now.
Or it's 120% possible that somebody in the current Trump cabinet desecrated the tomb of a particularly important Egyptian mummy, thus dooming the whole country to the resulting mummy curse. Looking in your direction, Mr. Miller.
Whatever the reason, this summer has been a very bad one if you're the sort of person who likes eating food but not a fan of slow and agonizing death. When things started out, you just had to avoid lettuce. Then lettuce and peppers. Then a lot more things.
No problem, said some Kennedy enthusiasts. Real Americans should be eating meat anyway! And then these stories started piling up:
The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced Friday that Corte Argentino ā a company based in Aventura, Florida ā recalled nearly 30,000 pounds of raw beef products produced in May that have use or freeze-by dates between Sept. 15, 2026, and Sept. 20, 2026.
And we learned that the Trump push to lower beef prices by importing mystery meat was predicated on importing beef that failed European Union safety standards:
Brazilian beef exporters, who are usually subject to a 26.4% tariff, recently found themselves with a large backstock of beef after the European Union announced it would no longer accept imports from the country because it wasnāt meeting safety standards around the use of antibiotics.
Wow, don't let Robert Kennedy know you're flooding the market with antibiotics-injected meat. He'll probably be so upset he'll start vomiting raccoon penises.
But between the prices, the screwworms, the recalls and the Meat Of Dubious Origins consumers could reasonably decide to just cut down on the beef right now. Maybe go for a nice pulled pork sandāah, crap:
More than 15,000 pounds of ready-to-eat guanciale pork was recalled over concerns it could be contaminated with listeria, according to the U.S. Department of Agricultureās Food Safety and Inspection Service.
Fine. What about dairy. Maybe we can all survive on dairy for a OH COME ON
FactPost
Alright, fine, got it. All food is now contaminated. All fruit, vegetables, cheeses, meats, condiments, eggs, egg byproducts, all of it. We've lost the entire food supply because reasons. Nobody knows the reasons, just reasons.
At this point it's time to start thinking of contingency plans.
Start working through those old cans of food?
Every kitchen is the same. There's the shelves of food that you actually eat, and then tucked away either behind the stuff you eat or in completely different cabinets there is the stash of food that was bought many years ago for one particular purpose aaaaaand just sort of got left there. I can already hear a few of you saying "well I don't have a shelf like that" and you're lying. You're lying to me. To us. Trying to be a big shot, pretending you don't have a shelf of Shopping Regrets.
You know what? Maybe it's time to start making a dent in those old cans and jars. Check the expiration dates, obviously, but quite a few of the supplies in your kitchen's phantom zone are probably still good.
So how about it? Maybe you can make a dinner or two out of (checks cabinet) creamed corn and pimentos. There's a bottle of soy sauce, I don't think that stuff can go bad, right? Mmm, pimentos and soy sauce, that sounds pretty gourmet.
Please note that there's a rice recall, though. If you're going to put the soy sauce on something, stick with the pimentos.
The goal of this plan is to limit your exposure to Trump-era food supplies by finding stuff packaged during the Biden administration. And hasn't expired. And hasn't turned any unusual colors.
This will feed you for a week, if you've got an average sized kitchen phantom zone. After that you're on your own again.
Form collectives!
This is where knowing your neighbors can come in handy: What if you formed a food collective? Not to trade Biden-era food you found in your cabinets, nobody's going to have anything but the pimentos and creamed corn anyway.
Instead, form an information collective. Assign a different food group to every family on your block. One family can be tasked with knowing which vegetables are risky and which are safe; another can do the same for berries. The Johnsons can build the list of safe tree nuts. The Barkleys are Team Condiment. Frank on the corner has a model train collection, so you know he's into fine details. Give him the frozen food section, he won't let you down.
No one person can keep up with all these summer recalls; the pork announcement and the cream cheese announcement came within hours of each other. What you can do is establish a neighborhood "grocery buddy" system.
Nobody goes to the store alone. We go together, we leave together. This is Magnolia Street, we won't leave anyone behind. But this only works while grocery stores have something that hasn't already been recalled, and given the current trend of things, that seems optimistic.
Be willing to make... ugh... tradeoffs
Presuming you're not going to be foraging off the landāvery bad idea if you're trying to, you know, not die of thingsāyou're probably also going to be dubious of the above two plans. You're right, you should be. Eating through the entire non-expired contents of your Mystery Shelf will not feed you for more than a week. And you're not going to talk to your neighbors, because this is America. In 2026. And even if you were the sort of person to talk to your neighbors, the odds that you're going to trust any of those neighbors with your life or your bowels are vanishingly low.
Which brings us to the only real way to deal with a future in which All Food Is Poison: We may need to make some hard decisions about which parasites and diseases we're willing to risk and which we aren't. If all food is contaminated, then we're going to have to grit our teeth and ... allow for some grit.
Draw up a list, then. Which recalled foods are you still willing to eat, once we've reached the point where all food is under recall warnings? Which things will you meekly hand back to the store clerk for a refund, when the FDA tells you that whoops, it turns out you probably don't want to eat this one either, and which will you jealously hoard because it's either going to be this or the pimentos?
Everyone's list will be different. Myself, I'm going to put listeria and that diarrhea lettuce thing right up at the top of the Do Not Eat list. You don't want those, you really don't.
What about the popsicles that might contain broken glass, though? Well, maybe that one is a Code Yellow, not a Code Red. Maybe popsicles that have a small chance of slicing my tongue in half do still count as better than pimentos with soy sauce.
The same goes for the 37 million pounds of frozen meals recalled last May. I mean yes, it sucks that people kept finding broken glass in their meals, but if it came down to personal survival I'd rather try my luck against broken glass than against diarrhea lettuce. If it was between just those two, there's a clear winner.
See, the way I figure it is a matter of odds. If there's a bacterial or parasite infestation in a given food processing plant, that stuff is going to stick to things. It's going to get mixed thoroughly into whatever's being processed, it's going to stick to the vats and the hoses and taint whole big batches of food until the problem is discovered or they send one of the part timers in for some halfhearted but federally mandated scrubbing. The food that has listeria on it is going to contaminate the food that didn't have any listeria, so now you've got twice as much listeria, and then four times as much, and so on. Pretty soon it's Whoops! All Listeria!
But if some broken glass falls in the popsicle mix, okay, well, that's a limited problem. Somebody probably broke one glass jar or bottle, right? It's not like "oh no, this truck full of broken glass crashed into our popsicle factory, well let's ship all these popsicles out anyway."
No, it's going to be one screw up. There's going to be one jar's worth of broken glass in any given batch popsicles, at most, and when you put it that way it's beginning to look like there's pretty good odds of getting a glass-free popsicle. Not that I'm encouraging anyone to try that, mind you, I'm just saying if you held me at gunpoint and told me to choose between a batch of risky popsicles and a bowl of diarrhea lettuce I'm going to pick the one that doesn't undergo cell division. I'm going to pick the one with the stable amount of deadly contamination, not the exponential curve one. That's just me.
The same goes for metal shards. I'd put that in the same group as the glass shards, maybe even a little bit safer because if I tape a rare earth magnet to my nose before I eat a lot of that stuff might get picked out on its way from my plate to my mouth. (NOTE TO SELF: USE A PLASTIC FORK. That's not a mistake you make twice.)
Plastic shards? Eh. I'm not worried about at all. All the science says human beings are now mostly plastic anyway, another credit card's worth isn't going to make much difference. At this rate it's only going to be a few years before I can wave my arm over a store's tap-to-pay system and bill my purchase to whatever chip is floating through my bloodstream that day.
I'm not saying this would be an easy way to live our lives. I would rather, if the choice was mine and not up to 70+ million voters who can't tell their ass from their elbow and thought the diarrhea lettuce adjudicated rapist insurrection-attempting dementia patient deserved a second chance, not have our food supplies shredded to bits by bribe-seeking grifters, amateur roadkill genitalia inspectors, or ancient mummy curses.
But I don't like that we're only at the end of the second Trump summer and already All The Things are being tainted with diseases and substances and the pace keeps accelerating. It took them only a year to bring back measles! And screwworms! Not feeling real good about what comes next!
What if we ... hmm. What if we all drew straws and the loser has to go to Canada and buy enough food to keep the rest of us stocked until Trump leaves? Would that work? We just hand that person a few million of our credit cards, everyone give them a grocery list, and they head to Ontario to do some shopping?
No? Drat. All right, I'll keep thinking.
Comments
We want Uncharted Blue to be a welcoming and progressive space.
Before commenting, make sure you've read our Community Guidelines.