The cheese and listeriosis issue

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.

Knee-jerk Reactions

Now that we have had the listeriosis accident with the meat and that we have had shock and surprise that such things can still happen in the 21st century, there is now a new development in the news. Listeriosis was found in some of the locally produced cheeses in the province of Quebec (that's in Canada and a "province" is like a "state" in the U.S.). Now we come to the opposite extreme of do nothing with existing protocols, which is based upon a lack of judgment and a refusal to think about an issue; and we decide to throw out all the cheeses found, in case they may have been contaminated.

Both situations indicate move before thinking, a shoot before asking questions type of scenario. The unfortunate knee-jerk reaction. We get the listeriosis because we want to move too quickly and get the product out there before the competitor (see previous blogs for the rationale of that argument); then when a product is discovered to be infected with listeriosis, we throw everything out with no verification because we want to move too quickly to reassure non-thinkers that the situation is under control. Lets throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater, no thinking required: bathwater dirty-->throw out contents of bath!

There was a limited number of cheese brands that fell in the category of the infection and the government inspectors decided to include all the cheese and destroy it all in one shot. Store owners were prepared to destroy the identified infected cheeses but tried to talk sense in the government inspectors to at least test the other unrelated products before throwing them out. Were the other cheeses infected? Who knows? But the decision assumed that they were all infected and needed to be destroyed. Again, a loss of valuable resources for the same reason: move quicker than what your brain can react to.

The actions of allowing listeriosis products to go onto the marketplace and the actions of destroying ALL products that were found in the same store as a FEW contaminated products are opposite extremes. Both ridiculous extremes, both show a lack of judgment and both based upon not wanting to think things out first.

If we drive down a highway and see a deer on the road, the better reaction is to slow down and bypass the deer. Some would prefer to ignore the deer and plough on through with the deadly consequences as we have seen with the meat infection. Others would prefer to get off the road altogether and drive through the wilderness because if the deer is on the road it aint in the wilderness. If people can't drive properly and either ignore the deer or decide to go on treks through the wilderness (both damaging the car beyond repair), why do we still allow them access to the controls? Give the controls of the car to someone who has better judgment, yes?

One last thing, if the driver slows down to consult a bureaucratic manual to make a decision about the deer then it shows that he is under training and this better be a car-simulator (we may not have the luxury to consult the regulation for every new situation that comes up, this person may be better suited to be in the co-pilot's seat until he can ignore the regulations and use his proper judgment to make snap decisions which will then be included in the updated regulations for the next trainee).

Bureaucratic Blunders

My second argument for the listeriosis accident pertains to the inflexible bureaucratic rules which stifle human judgment and common sense. Now I don't know how accurate the news reports are about the actual happenings of the food inspectors of the private company or of the government inspectors. Who knew what when and where is often difficult to ascertain in the context of the next news report let alone a full investigation. I also know that the bureaucracy has an internal confidentiality to prevent anyone outside the in-group to know what actually goes on. No one on the inside of the bureaucratic machine will inform the external observer unless the external observer asks very precise questions, and no external observer can ever know what precise questions to ask to get the answers sought. The bureaucrat will not volunteer information because of confidentiality clauses and will only answer the properly filled out requests on the appropriate forms during the appropriate times.

But to get back to the listeriosis issue and the news, I did hear about an interesting development. Apparently, there was appropriate testing done by the private company. The testing was done on the work stations themselves and when the bacteria was found, the entire work station was cleaned up immediately. That's great and efficient on their part, but; and this is where the bureaucratic rules come in to stifle common sense, they never bothered to inspect the food products themselves. After all, aren't the government inspectors responsible for that? "Not my department, my bureaucratic rules say to clean workstation B if bacteria is found on workstation B. Why would I check to see if any of the food has been contaminated? There are no rules written for that!"

I can understand that bureaucratic instructions can cover many routine situations and help to train people to make proper decisions. But we seem to have placed these rules above human ingenuity and human judgment. The rules we create should be there to serve our interests not the other way around. We don't create rules so that we can eliminate our independence and end up being servants of what we created. Assuming that the news reports accurately depicted the situation (and having seen some bureaucratic blunders with my own eyes in the areas I have worked), this is an indication of allowing the bureaucratic regulations to dictate actions that go opposite common sense with the obvious results.

Once a person has been trained to use the bureaucratic rules and that he knows them implicitly, then that person should be encouraged to throw the rules away. Lets take a lesson from military strategy, the goal of military strategy is to achieve an objective with the least amount of damage to oneself. To do this, plans are made that covers every single possible contingency, you are expected to memorize every military precept, every potential contingency and be ready to follow every section of the plan precisely...... then, as soon as battle commences, every great strategist from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz and beyond, all agree on one thing: you throw every plan away after the first few seconds of the battle and use your human judgment to carry on. Otherwise, disaster strikes.

So this accident could have been averted if someone would have just thought for three seconds; that perhaps if the work station was contaminated, then perhaps one should spend a small amount of money to inspect some of the food as well and see if it has been contaminated. Don't expect that the other department would catch it in time, don't rely on the bureaucratic rules to avoid doing the right thing because you hope that every contingency has been covered. Well, as the news reports claim, the inspection of the food products were not carried out by the private company and by the time the government inspectors came to the food itself, the damage had already been done. With a much higher cost to the private company than what he would have had to pay if he would have just thought about it for three seconds and not cut corners. Is this another side-effect of capitalism gone wild?