Well if you have read the previous blogs about listeriosis, you should remember that I saw the cheese issue was a knee-jerk reaction. As in when the meat infection spread was known to have been caused by a slow response time based upon the existing evidence.... the cheese infection was a super quick response time based upon non-existing evidence. For the meat, we "knew" that X products were infected and we slowly had a recall. For the cheese, we "assumed" that X products were infected and we promptly destroyed the whole batch.
The retail store owners are upset and have lost quite a bit of money. They are not requesting compensation, they are demanding it. Their argument? The inspectors were told that 3 brands out of several dozens were infected, so the inspectors decided to destroy all the brands of cheeses without verification. The store owners pleaded to place the other brands in a special refrigerator so that they could each be tested for the infection. If the infection was there, then they would agree to destroy it (common sense). The government inspectors, from a bureaucratic mindset, could not understand the request.... they had one task: do a show of force to eliminate public fears; forget evidence, forget common sense, just do something, anything to demonstrate that they have controlled the listeriosis infection in the cheese. Avoid a repeat of the meat infection. No thinking, just reaction.
Naturally, the store owners want compensation for destroying cheeses that were not proven to be infected. How does the government bureaucracy respond to this? They make a statement that the government is not in the habit of providing insurance when the merchants lose products through a disaster, in this case, a listeriosis infection. That would be like a firefighter who decides to fight a house fire accross the street from your house, decides to run accross the street towards your house, busts down your door, sprays your entire house down with water ruining your furniture and electronic devices. When you point out to him that your house did not have a fire and that you demand compensation for his act of vandalism, he answers: "Fire departments do not compensate a person who has water damage from fighting a fire." Can you be any more brain dead than that as a bureaucracy? This proves that they are not listening to the complaint. The merchants do not want to be compensated for the listeriosis infected cheeses that were destroyed, they want to be compensated for the perfectly intact cheeses that were not infected but were destroyed nonetheless.
The government bureaucracy would then say "how do you know they were not infected?" To which the merchant would say: "how do you know that they were?" The merchant offered a proposal to verify but the inspectors rejected the proposal.... probably because it would have cost the government too much money to inspect, instead they stole from the store owners and now they don't want to admit their crime. As much as it is interesting to know that there is an independent judicial branch in the government to arbitrate between the brainless bureaucracy and the unfortunate merchant.... I find it sad that it even reaches that stage. Its pretty obvious who is at fault, we don't need to spend more money in the courts to deal with this.
Alternative argument: if the cleaning and cutting areas were not properly controlled environments, then the solution was to fine the owners and publicly state that the store did not proceed in the proper procedures. Destroying the cheeses was not the solution, at least not until the verification was made to prove an infection. If the merchant did in fact have improper storage or improper cleaning methods, inform the public and fine the merchant. Remember, use proper judgment and punish harshly deliberate incompetence. If the merchant is at fault, destroy his reputation and explain why he is at fault. If the bureaucratic machine is at fault, then they bloody well must compensate such a foolish act, moreso if they wasted the time of the courts. Human judgment should prevail, not written regulations that can never see the entire issue. If humans can err, how much more can rules written by humans err? There is no way you can cover every possibility imaginable with a written rule. The rule can only be a mnemonic device to help point you in the right direction of where you should go in any given situation.
Exercise for my readers: Try to write a training manual on how to ride a bicycle. Try to cover as many possible outcomes as you can. Then ask someone if they can read your manual and have acquired the skill of riding a bicycle from just reading your instructions. (If you succeed, submit your brilliance to scientific journals as you will have been the first human ever to succeed such a task).
Rules guide, they do not command us. Bureaucrats are expected to have the rules command them and this is a bad road to take. The two listeriosis cases, the meat and the cheese, were caused by this wrong direction. Even if both were opposite actions to each other, one was a lack of action, and the other was a very firm reaction.... both suffered from a lack of human judgment and both followed bureaucratic procedures.
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