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Food Safety: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

LastWeekTonight · 5M views · 2023-10-16 · 20:23

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Overview

A Last Week Tonight segment on food safety in the US. It looks at the FDA, the USDA and industry groups such as the Association for Dressings and Sauces, and how little enforcement there is.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as an overview of overlapping and underfunded food regulation.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2023–2024

Topics

Law, policing & justiceMedia, journalism & propagandaNutrition & diet science
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fdausdafood safetyjohn oliverregulation

What people said

no_wizard · 2024-02 · Recommendation

The bigger problem is we have a ton of regulatory overhead. The FDA and the USDA are both responsible for checking the safety of different parts of the food supply, and this causes issues. Instead of it being a clear priority for one agency it gets muddled in which agency should be looking at what. Then couple that with the fact that the FDA historically spends more time on drug safety than food safety and the USDA has conflicting priorities in many ways, combined together you end up with some real issues with catching things early and/or before they hit the market It could be solved by creating a single agency dedicated to food safety and removing the burden from two the agencies that have many other priorities on top of food safety. That in a tl;dr nutshell is the problem. There is a good overview of these dynamics done by Last Week Tonight that’s on YouTube I recommend for an overview: [VIDEO]

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soraminazuki · 2024-06 · Reference

Unfortunately, farming isn't devoid of BS either. As is the case with many other topics, John Oliver did multiple segments on that as well. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] Also [LINK]

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tootie · 2024-01 · Reference

John Oliver did a whole bit on the FDA recently. They are very stringent and professional, but massively underresourced for the amount of ground they have to cover. And they spend most of their resources on drugs and far less on food. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by LastWeekTonight, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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