Total slaughter of cows in Texas is about 1.8 million head per year.
This article [1] says you get about 500-ish pounds of beef from one cow, so 25,000-ish pounds from 50 cows? They weren't massively far off the mark there.
[1]: https://cattledaily.com/how-much-meat-do-you-get-from-one-co...
Even if you halve the yield to 400lbs then it's only 100 cows
* Quota amount of ground beef is 6.7% of yearly consumption: 330k short tons / 660M lbs / 300M kg
US ground beef consumption per year: 4.89M short tons / 9.77B lbs / 4.43B kg
It was a massive unforced error that he’s been scrambling for months to fix.
He could literally have done nothing and it would have been better.
Almost all of his other missteps and mistakes can be rationalised - there was some benefit to himself or someone who bribed him or voted for him. But this screwworm thing just perfectly encapsulates him as a person and his presidency as a whole - something works well for 70 years to protect Americans and he destroys it through malicious incompetence.
More info about how the program worked - America’s never ending battle against flesh eating worms (2020) - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...
Articles like this one aren't exactly helping either.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/project-2025-plan...
In any case, this is Argentinian beef, not Canadian or something. Isn’t the US administration pretty friendly with the right-wing populist Argentinian government?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ra...
Argentina's been paying Huawei for 5G gear and services with beef direct to China, who's been selling it via Huawei stores (see https://www.huaweimossel.com/).
Earlier in March a shipment of ~22 tons of beef was rejected by China for having antibiotics in it and was 'contaminated'.
Follow the trail...
You mean reading about beef recalls? Yeah they'll be shocked
I remember that
Argentina liberalised its Foreign exchange market in April 2025 so I'd imagine this sort of thing is no longer happening.
More to the point, Beef Magazine reports this as an ordinary inspection failure event. It's a recall because, for some reason, the beef didn't go through USDA incoming inspection, and this wasn't discovered until three months later, long after the beef had been sold, and probably consumed. That's a failure of Customs and Border Protection, which is supposed to make sure that doesn't happen. Beef Magazine says that's an automatic trigger for a Class I recall. It's not a political decision.
Unlike the CBS article, the Beef Magazine article names the shipper and gives the lot numbers of the recalled beef. The Beef Magazine author has a degree in agricultural production, teaches Animal and Range Science at Montana State University, and worked their way up from cattle ranch foreman to director of Montana’s Beef Quality Assurance program. He probably knows something about beef.
The CBS author has a degree in Law and Public Policy and has given a TED talk. His LinkedIn profile says he is "one of America's leading food safety advocates." I'd go with what Beef Magazine says here.
[1] https://www.beefmagazine.com/market-news/argentine-beef-reca...
I'm fine with "about 700 pounds", but that's still not too far off from the 30k pounds the original comment stated for around 50 cows (just over a bit instead of under a bit), so it still holds true that their guesstimate isn't all that far off-base.
> China rejected a 22-tonne Argentine beef shipment over a banned antibiotic in March. Here's what Trump's quota actually changed, the 29,628 lb recall nobody covered, and why the package won't tell you.
> The shipment came from the ArreBeef plant in Pérez Millán, Buenos Aires province. It was roughly 22 tonnes, about 48,500 pounds, and China's General Administration of Customs rejected the whole container after detecting chloramphenicol residue, then suspended imports from that facility while it worked out what happened.
> China's standard here is zero. There's no "acceptable level" of chloramphenicol in food, so any detectable trace is grounds for refusal. That's why one positive result turns into a rejected container instead of a fine.
> The standard is zero because of what the drug does. Chloramphenicol can cause aplastic anemia, a bone-marrow failure that's rare, unpredictable, unrelated to dose, and frequently fatal. The IARC classified it as Group 2A, "probably carcinogenic to humans," in Volume 50 (1990), and the US National Toxicology Program's Report on Carcinogens lists it as reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen. It's still used in human medicine for a handful of severe infections where nothing else works. It's not supposed to be anywhere near a cow.
https://tallow.app/blog/china-rejected-argentina-beef-chlora...
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-beef-import-plan-backlash-18...
> Our grandkids just aren't going to believe what it was like
Is appropriate for recalling ~30 cows worth of beef? There is no secret point being made, it's just average things happening while certain people overreact.
You can disagree with the take, but being ignorant of it doesn't make sense.
Hence looking at Beef Magazine for info about beef.
No, I'm not going to post links. Do your own work. Or get an LLM to do it for you.
Broadly though, the belief that "current X politician from Y party is the worst, most corrupt politician ever" is a childish belief. I've heard it said about every president and high-ranking politician in my lifetime and it is not remarkable. Frankly the Biden scandals where his son was cutting him into foreign payments seemed worse, and there's no reason to think this beef import had anything to do with corruption, and certainly not at the presidential level.
Edit: Wait a moment. You can put lettuce i a Greek salad. It just happens not to be a Greek salad afterwards. A subtle difference.
Struggling to find a policy where that doesn't apply.
If he'd gotten elected and then gone and lived on the golf course for four years it's hard to argue things would be worse on the other side of the pond.
There was a reasonable, desirable goal he was aiming for.
But this screwworm thing is so stupid simply because there was no upside to it. It just hurt Americans, especially Trump voters. No one benefited other than screwworms now feasting on American cattle.
And then he was re-elected.
Unfortunately, it would seem that stupid, unnecessary, self-own changes are not a red line for a significant fraction of the voting public.
Both parties of capital interests have lots of blood on their hands for the intentional mishandling of the pandemic (which has not ended) in the name of propping up our archaic consumption-first economies.
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
The pandemic did end, because it turned into an endemic, meaning it is now an endemic and not a pandemic, meaning the pandemic part of it went away. Endemic is another word for "like a pandemic, but never ends".
I remember looking into it when it happened.
It's believed the vector is smuggled cows/beef.
Mirepoix is a French-origin fragrant soup base. It’s more correct to say that most cultures have a default fragrant base (holy trinity, sofrito, soffrito, zazharka, Cantonese base, South Asian base, et cetera).