What Trump just approved is already hiding in your grocery cart

In Monday’s New York Times, Eric Schlosser — the guy who freaked out a nation with his book Fast Food Nation a quarter century ago — published an article that kicks off with a simple observation: if you buy a T-shirt at the Gap, federal law requires a label that tells you where it was made and what it’s made of.

While the same is true for your car, your refrigerator, your television, and every apple and bag of frozen peas in the supermarket, as a result of lobbyists being able to openly buy politicians in America since 2010, beef and pork are the exceptions.

Which is why, Schlosser argues, Donald Trump could sign a one-man presidential proclamation allowing roughly 660 million pounds of foreign beef to enter America with neither inspection nor the usual 26.4 percent out-of-quota tariff.

If Americans knew where this mystery meat was coming from, they might not want to eat it, Schlosser notes, but Trump is apparently making sure we’ll never know.

Ironically, the same morning Schlosser was warning us about the incoming meat, Axios reported that the FDA just hit a record 19 simultaneous foodborne illness outbreak investigations, covering everything from infant formula to jalapeños.

A Cornell economist told them the American food safety system “has gotten hit so hard over the last year and a half.” This is quite simply what happens when you turn a nation’s food supply over to its oligarchs and shut down the regulations that protect average consumers.

Schlosser says much of the beef that’ll be coming into the US could have been frozen for years overseas, blended here with fattier American meat in massive industrial grinders.

Trump refuses to tell us where the meat is coming from, and his Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins — a former rightwing propagandist and fundamentalist Christian evangelist with no food safety background whatsoever — says she’s “not privvy” to that information.

Meanwhile, Schlosser pointed out that Uruguayan beef was recently found tainted with an outlawed antiparasitic drug, Argentine beef has repeatedly tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause nerve damage, and in 2017 Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants over allegations that inspectors and politicians had been bribed to allow rotten meat, chemically treated to mask the smell, to be sold to schools and hospitals and exported abroad.

Will your next burger come from one of those countries? We have some clues.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that on August 20, Joesley Batista, the Brazilian billionaire who co-controls JBS, the largest meatpacker on Earth, met privately with Trump in the Oval Office and made the case for dropping the tariff on Brazilian beef. (Haberman and Swan reported in their book that Batista’s longtime friendship with Melania Trump helped make Trump’s meetings with Batista happen.)

The next day Trump announced his “bring in the meat” plan on his Nazi-infested social media site. His proclamation dropped the entire 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef into the “other countries” quota category, which Brazil dominates.

This is the same guy who, along with his brother in 2017, confessed to bribing roughly 1,800 Brazilian officials to not examine their meat products. Trump’s own first-term SEC and Justice Department fined them and their companies $280 million under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, in part for using bribes here in America to grease their takeover of the American chicken giant Pilgrim’s Pride.

The SEC called their conduct a “profound failure” of corporate governance and had blocked JBS from listing on the New York Stock Exchange for nearly a decade.

Then Pilgrim’s Pride wrote a $5 million check to Trump’s 2025 inauguration — the single largest corporate donation, five times what Amazon or Meta gave — and Trump suspended enforcement against JBS of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Two days after the donation became public, Trump’s SEC also approved the stock market listing, and JBS began trading on the NYSE last June. Now the company’s co-owner walks into the Oval Office and walks out with a tariff holiday on the product his company sells. Senator Elizabeth Warren has been asking pointed questions about the entire sordid deal for over a year.

I spent a couple of decades doing international relief work, living and working in some of the roughest and poorest parts of the world. I was rarely worried about crime; very poor communities tend to police themselves, and they’re especially protective of the relief workers who show up to help.

What I worried about constantly, though, was that I’d eat something that would rip apart my guts or leave me with a brain-worm. That worry was foreign to me most of my life because I’d grown up in an America that had been so horrified by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle in 1906 that we built an entire system to keep our food clean, and every president from Teddy Roosevelt to FDR to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden took care to keep running smoothly and efficiently.

I’d spent my whole life simply assuming that the food on my plate wouldn’t hurt me. Now — much the way I used to look at a plate of food in South Sudan or in the barrios of Bogotá — I can no longer make that assumption. And neither can you.

When Upton Sinclair’s novel exposed the Chicago packinghouses in 1906, Teddy Roosevelt sent in his own investigators with much fanfare from the newspapers. They found that Sinclair’s descriptions were, if anything, conservative, and TR used his inspectors’ report as a moral bludgeon to force the packers to accept federal meat inspectors on the killing floor.

The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, both signed by him the same day, gave us the USDA inspection system and eventually the FDA.

Exactly a century and two years later, in 2008, Congress added mandatory country-of-origin labels for meat.

Then in 2010 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery of our national politicians and judges, the meatpackers’ lobbyists swarmed DC, and in December 2015 Congress quietly repealed the labels for beef and pork by tucking that repeal into a 2,000-page omnibus spending bill.

Chicken and lamb still carry the label, but your hamburger doesn’t. The “mystery” in mystery meat was purchased by the industry a decade ago, setting up Trump’s desperate effort to lower beef costs (and screw our ranchers) before the election.

And then there’s Bob Kennedy, the onetime heroin addicted lawyer with no medical or scientific training whatsoever who promised to Make America Healthy Again. In April of last year he announced 10,000 layoffs across federal health agencies, including 3,500 at the FDA.

The Associated Press reported that the fired staff included both the lab scientists who test food samples for contamination and the communications specialists whose job is to alert us, the public, to food safety recalls.

Now, Bob’s FDA budget wants to shift routine food inspections away from the feds and onto the states, all while cutting the agency’s field laboratory operations by more than half. And he’s trying to pull this off at the same time that— under a Republican congress — the federal grants that pay for state inspections today are facing cuts approaching 60 percent.

The results of all this Reaganesque deregulation are already measurable: while in Biden’s 2024 the FDA identified the source of 77 percent of the outbreaks it investigated, in Trump’s 2025 that fell to a shocking 36 percent. This was an agency that had only 443 food inspectors for 36,600 facilities before the cuts began.

And then there’s the rule that would have made it possible for the remaining federal regulators to trace contaminated lettuce or eggs back to their source in hours instead of weeks. Congress wrote it into law in 2011, the FDA finished it as a rule to be implemented in 2022, and it was set to automatically take effect this past January.

But after the grocery lobby complained (and presumably made some well-placed donations to Republican politicians), Kennedy’s FDA pushed that rule back 30 months to July 2028 and Republicans in Congress then threw in a rider that barred the agency from spending even a single a dollar to enforce it before then.

You can see the consequences in the official numbers, which are certainly an undercount as they only represent “reported” cases. As of last week, the Cyclospora outbreak I wrote about in July has grown to more than 18,000 confirmed cases in 49 states, with 990 hospitalizations and two deaths.

And it’s not just pathogens — living organisms — that the FDA and EPA are supposed to be monitoring to keep our food supply safe.

Last week the AP reported that Trump has stalled for nearly two years an EPA investigation into which industries are dumping toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” into our rivers and streams, and how much of the treated sewage sludge containing PFAS’ ends up spread as fertilizer on our farms and thus gets into our food supply.

Welcome to the result of 45 years of Republican deregulation, based on claims that “government is the problem” and “the market knows best.”

When your TV fails, you buy another television, but, under Trump and Kennedy, when the system that keeps your food clean fails, your kid simply ends up in the hospital.

People living in the richest country in the history of the world should be confident their food is safe, and for most of the last century we were. Every president, of both parties, starting with Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, understood that and worked to make it real.

But now it appears that Trump and Kennedy have decided that the Batista brothers’ profits and Republicans’ ability to claim lower grocery prices in time for the election matter more than our kids’ health.

So it’s time to call our senators and representative at 202-224-3121 and tell them to restore mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef and pork, reverse the FDA’s food safety cuts, and fund the “traceability rule” now rather than in 2028.