This is a sort of “meta news” post. Product recalls happen all the time but I’ve noticed lately that my feed is just filled with more and more and more and more of them happening sometimes multiple times a day. Everything from ground pepper to every type of chicken you can imagine to ice cream to whatever else am I crazy or does it seem like practically every category of food product is suddenly getting recalled lately due to dangerous contamination?
A lot of medicines have started to be produced in India in an effort to move pharma manufacturing away from China, resulting in substandard manufacturing practices since the factories never had to conform to those standards before.
I just checked the numbers and there’s only been 21 one recalls of pharmaceuticals, compared to a little over 50 over all of 2023, so since we’re halfway through the year it seems about on par.
Almost 150 recalls in grocery items so far in 2024, versus 300 total 2023, so not much more then last year anyway.
That does include the drug recalls I mentioned in the other comment.
Huh, i guess the algorithm just decided it was my time to see them all. Made it feel much more frequent
Nope, you were right, it was just from 5 years ago rather than last year or 2 years ago that this increased happened.
I just left another comment explaining that there are high increases grocery recalls specifically because so much more of our food is coming from other countries with substandard manufacturing practices according to the FDA.
So looking through 2024 recalls, 50 of them, little over 30% are due to undeclared allergens, about 35 are due to salmonella or motocytogenes infections.
2022-2023 and 2024 all have 300 or so yearly grocery recalls.
2021 only has 111 listed
2020 only has 61 listed
2019 only has 21 listed
So… You’re right, It’s basically a 3x increase since a few years ago and a 15x increase since 5 years ago.
Okay, so I’ve downloaded data back to 2018, which is what the FDA provides on recalls, sorted by date (which they don’t do, what the heck),
OKAY!
It’s because more food is coming in from other countries, that have substandard regulation compared to the FDA.
It looks like that’s the main reason.
So the same reason as the drugs, foreign factories just aren’t up to the FDA standards.