Honestly, I really have come to loathe headlines like this. You should generally distrust any political argument made on anecdote and one-off examples. That after all is the exact tool most favored by Republicans to demonize minority groups. Want to make people hate a group? No need to lie. Just obsessively report every time one member of that group commits a crime. Don’t focus on meaningful measures like crime rates and statistics. Instead just scream about one incident after another until your audience has become convinced that the minority group is a bunch of Devils. This was the playbook used by the Nazis against the Jews and their other enemies, and it’s the playbook used by Republicans against immigrants and trans people (both some of the Nazi’s enemies as well.)

When I see repeated posts highlighting individual instances of food poisoning, I can’t help but feel I’m being misled. It’s certainly possible the rate of food recalls have gone up. In fact, I would find that quite likely given the reasons people cite in this very thread. But when conclusions match your gut feelings is precisely when you should be wary of accepting things noncritically.

It makes me really uneasy when I see left leaning folks sharing and uncritically accepting messages like this. If we don’t just want to be blue MAGA (Democrats who share the practices of Republicans), we shouldn’t be accepting conservative-style argument from anecdote. I can’t help feel misled, because my instincts are to immediately distrust anyone that tries to argue from one-off examples rather than citing actual rates and statistics. In this case, what matters is obviously not whether food born illnesses and recalls are occurring, but whether the rate has substantially increased when compared to a few years ago.