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Unpopular opinion: that 60% number in the egg recall stories is way off and I checked
I got mad reading the coverage of that big egg recall out of Wisconsin because every headline kept saying 60% of the cartons were tainted, so I pulled the actual FDA notice at 11pm on my phone. Turns out that 60% figure was just the share of one plant's output shipped to two states, not a national number at all, and the real count was under 3 million eggs. Nobody in the stories bothered to mention that the plant had already passed its last two inspections, which seems kind of important if you're trying to figure out how it happened. I'm not saying the recall was nothing, but this is the third time this month I've found a scary stat that fell apart once I read the source document. Where do you all go to find the actual filing when the news just keeps recycling the same number?
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the_sean4d ago
Heard a food safety reporter on a podcast last year say the same thing, that recalls get boiled down to one scary number and everyone downstream just copies it. The actual FDA enforcement reports are public, you can search them on the FDA site under the recall notices, and they list the real counts and the plants involved. Your point about the prior inspections is the part that bugs me most, because that context is usually sitting right there in the same document nobody links to. Local news does this a lot too, they grab the wire copy and never check the source. Honestly the whole thing makes me wonder how many other numbers I've repeated that were never real to begin with. Good on you for actually pulling the notice instead of just getting mad at the headline.
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