Food is being produced at a scale, efficiency, and level of safety unheard of generations ago. One of the recommendations in this article is to buy "through farmers markets, community-supported agriculture programs, farm stands, and direct online sales." That's a fine way to get fresh food, but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't. And online sales? Who knows.
Food packaged and distributed by these mega-suppliers probably has less human handling through the supply chain than any other food, and they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.
There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it.
It's a lot like AWS. Yes, the uptime is likely to be better than your on-prem solution. However, unlike when yours inevitably falls over and has zero impact on anybody else, when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet.
Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.
Smaller organizations means redundancies and options. Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency. Redundancy is good.
> I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.
1) Why? The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier.
2) Why only now? Bagged leafy greens are notorious for outbreaks. The extra processing steps means greater opportunity for introducing contamination (more people handling the produce), and greater opportunity for cross-contamination.
This food safety expert/activist/litigator has explained both of those points many times: https://www.marlerblog.com/ Though, being middle-aged and perhaps with better-than-average recollection, I connected the dots to bagged leafy greens years ago, across many news cycles, and to the risk of food poisoning from vegetables generally, through hard, personal experience.
I was one of those affected. The official CDC numbers are underestimates, because they're only counting cases confirmed by culture. My doc asked enough questions to make sure it wasn't your typical stomach flu or food poisoning and got me the antibiotics ASAP which I appreciated. I assume I'm not counted as a result. I have to assume others aren't as well.
This. As an infectious disease epidemiologist, the number of people who will work their way into laboratory confirmed case reports is a small fraction of the total number of people impacted.
You are almost certainly not reflected in those numbers.
Comparing it to car safety does put it in perspective, but at the same time the safety of cars has nothing to do with food safety. Considering the necessity of food for life, and the fact our current population size is dependent on industrialized farming, I think it's worth to scrutinize food safety and hold it to a high standard.
The US is uniquely dependent on cars for survival, it’s probably not appropriate to presume that cars are less necessary. Anyways, if you live in the middle of nowhere you can grow your own food. If you live deep in the city, the chances of getting sick from McD’s or whatever is pretty low.
We do hold food safety to a high standard. We have some of the highest standards on the planet.
I'm sorry, it is not appropriate to presume that cars are less necessary than food? Hmm, what about water, is that one more important or are cars still top of mind for you?
I think the point being made wasn't literally that cars are more important than food, but more that for most Americans, you can't really get by without store-bought food and a car. This is just fact.
A few lucky people live in the densest urban areas where car non-ownership is totally fine, nice even. For the rest, it's horrible and no one would choose it. A trip to the grocery store in the suburbs could take 30-45 minutes each way in 90º heat (and in half the country, with humidity too) is terrible - and think how many times you'll have to go to the store if you're buying only what you can carry 3 miles. Also many school districts provide no buses, so now you're walking kids to and from school in all weather. Bikes are a thing, but the roads aren't always safe and it still sucks in weather.
True, but even the most car-centric socities could adapt to a shortage of cars by means less drastic than a culling of the population through widespread famine and death.
> but the safety of driving cars is far worse than that and most of us do that daily.
this "whattabout"ism is brought up during every safety discussion. can we please accept that 1/ everyone knows about the car issue, and 2/ the car issue being a problem does not mean we should stop talking about other issues that exist.
I'm not convinced about 1. There are a lot of things we could be doing about a 9/11's worth of dead people every single month that we just don't.
In any case, it's a good barometer for judging personal risk. I don't stress about the danger when I get into my car, so I probably shouldn't stress about the danger from something substantially less likely to take me out. It contextualizes a number by comparing it to something most of us do every day.
I think a lot of people sort of instinctively avoid thinking about or engaging with the dangers posed by cars, at least in part because it creates a sense of dissonance that there’s a non-zero risk of life changing harm to you or your family from such a “normal” activity. For many people today, there is no alternative but to accept the risk if you want to do anything outside your home, other than dramatically upending your life to move somewhere else. Thinking too much about risks that feel outside your control just creates a state of anxiety.
ONE person getting SICK is too much??? We’ve never been within a million miles of this random bar you’ve set. No country has. It’s absolutely insane to try and hold the position that our food must be so perfectly clean that it cannot ever get anyone sick. That would almost certainly be impossible. If you can’t even engage with reality, nobody will take these massive statements seriously.
inefficiency often creates redundancy, but they are not synonyms.
Redundancy may be inefficient, but you can also build redundant systems that looking at from a micro perspective seem inefficient but what you see is only a local inefficiency; if you distribute their effects far enough in space and time you find that they are actually at a macro scale more efficient than not having them because they prevent breakdowns that destroy all the smaller systems held within the bigger one.
From a strictly utilitarian perspective, more redundancy will result in more deaths, since food handling expertise is concentrated in larger organizations.
I say this as someone who gets most of my veg from a local CSA. It's not because I think it's safer. It probably isn't.
A possible issue with consolidation is "too big to fail." The bigger the company, the more likely that the government goes into denial about it rather than meeting the problem head-on.
> when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet
Except AWS doesn't fall over, regions do. The problem isn't using one provider, it's that everyone uses one region of that provider. When that region goes down, so many people report outages that it seems like AWS as a whole went down, but it didn't.
Same basic deal with Taylor Farms. It was only lettuce sourced from Central Mexico, and it was distributed to the east coast and some central states. Page 18 of this PDF (https://www.taylorfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Taylo...) shows all the growing regions. Of all 22, only 1 sent out bad lettuce. But popular opinion is that the all of it was bad.
So the risk wasn't their scale. If anything, the risk was their customers (the walmarts, costcos, krogers, etc) not labeling where it came from or more stringently tracking these things or planning for an "incident". None of this is new, everybody knows leafy greens are the most likely source of food poisoning.
Just like AWS isn't to blame when customer sites we depend on go down from one bad service in one region, we shouldn't be blaming Taylor Farms. We should be blaming the customer-companies we all use who didn't plan for a very predictable failure.
> Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.
These are two unrelated events though.
Other consolidated suppliers have had events in the past, and they did not 'wipe out' our food supply because they identified the root cause and the impacted supplies, initiated a recall, and the rest of their redundant, distributed systems remained intact.
The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility.
If we had 20 'local' distributors who were all bought by Taylor farms and one of those locations had a significant health issue, there wouldn't be a large issue if Taylor identified which one had the failing and then distributed their other 19 location's product to the area facing the shortage due to it's location's product being recalled.
> The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility.
Right, and the issue with the King of England wasn't the consolidation of all power in his hands, but rather him not taking responsibility for everyone's welfare.
I’ve seen where a local butcher slaughters the cows for local farmers, and it’s definitely nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for. It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means but he just doesn’t have the man power to wash every surface several times a day whereas the plant shuts down one line at a time to do a full daily cleaning with power washers and this foam stuff that gets into every nook and cranny and then gets washed down a central drain. My limited experience with fresh produce isn’t much better (omg the flies).
I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes. Efficiency means things move quicker and cheaper, and a few people get richer. It does not by any means inherently increase safety. The effects of a fuckup in a hugely efficientized industry often scale directly with just how much efficiency was mined away from caution and human-interaction.
Bubba flipping burgers getting his dirty hands on your meal might make you sick, but Bobba inspecting the meatslop production line with constant pressure from upper management to be as efficient as possible according to whatever recent regulations were stripped back might accidentally spray the horse-meat product decontaminizer on the pig-meat product, generating a national pandemic.
But there isn’t one size of food producer. I would think there are diminishing marginal returns on food safety after a certain size. At that point perhaps the blast radius of mistakes offsets the advantage of scale. It’s a false dichotomy to consider only national producers and local producers.
What data might that be? I've looked and there doesn't appear to be any authoritative source of long-term data for either # of reported foodborne illness outbreaks or # of individuals sickened in this way per year, either of which would clearly demonstrate a dip in sickness rates if industrial-scale food production does, in fact, result in cleaner production.
2) assuming I had enough space to subsistence farm for my household (I don't), I wouldn't try growing lettuce year-round. Lettuce in the cooler months, peppers and tomatoes in the warmer months.
3) the majority of the lettuce I've prepared in my home this year did come from my patio
Containers. When it's nice out, they live outside. When it's not nice out, they move indoors. yeah yeah, not op, but it's possible. If you're growing food to sustain yourself for a whole year, I'm assuming you're willing to sacrifice some indoor space to accommodate.
Also, the GP doesn't read to me the way you're interpreting it. To me the GP has grown produce and purchased produce this year. The purchase hit him while the grown at home did not.
It would be... unusual... for an American home to contain enough space to grow the family's annual supply of lettuce.
> If you're growing food to sustain yourself for a whole year, I'm assuming you're willing to sacrifice some indoor space to accommodate.
It would be unheard of for it to contain enough space to produce the family's annual supply of food. And pointless. If you're growing that much food, there's no reason to build walls around it.
> It would be... unusual... for an American home to contain enough space to grow the family's annual supply of lettuce
I grow leafy greens in containers, and while not totally self sufficient, it provides a decent amount. I have multiple pots that I rotate through offsetting planting so new seedlings are going in as older plants are harvesting. If you're wanting head lettuce types then it's different, but if you just want leafy greens, you can totally do more than I think you're thinking you can.
I'm going to give you a really strong counterexample to this. One of the most commonly acquired parasites that comes from gardening is toxoplasmosis.
But doesn't toxoplasmosis come from owning cats?
Nope. The correlation between cat ownership and toxoplasmosis is basically zero. Because toxoplasmosis comes from stray cats who poop in your garden and you catch them through the gardening. Something like 40% of toxoplasmosis cases come from gardening with people unaware that stray cats poop there. (The majority comes from eating undercooked food, like pork, because the pork grazed in fields where there was stray cat poop.)
So essentially doing your own gardening creates a risk vector that is significantly less present in industrial-level gardening of vegetables.
The FDA suggests that the proper preventative measure against this is "thoroughly wash your dishes and produce." which is something I was gonna do anyway, with both the store-bought lettuce and my own. Doesn't sound like a big deal to me.
Am I the only one who doubts how thoroughly anyone's ever washed produce at home?
Like, it's not like we're scrubbing every crevice of every leaf with soap. We're spraying some water on a whole pile of it, and then like shaking it off or spinning it. It feels like theatre more than it does food safety.
And I'll confess, I don't even buy or consume fresh produce normally, besides apples and bananas.
Yes, the cleanliness can vary based on the outfit and the tech/facilities tends to be lower. However, there are not 100s of animals being ran through the same grinder. It doesn't seem like there are any real tests being done to each animal by the inspectors.
So facility risk seems similar or higher for the local shop, depending on specific people running it, but animal-bourne risk seems higher at the packing plant, which seems to be the more likely vector to me anyways.
No data on that. But qualitative experience shows the local farmer/butcher has much nicer/fresher looking/smelling meat than the Walmart.
Ground products are also what lets us make more efficient use of the animal. I took my first deer a couple years ago, and had it cut by a local guy. I got back 60 pounds of meat, of which about 30 was ground[0].
Supposing cows yield a better ratio of cut to ground meat (we've been breeding them for meat production and process them on an industrial scale), you'd still have to raise and kill a whole lot more cows to satisfy the world's current beef demand. I think good food safety practices and accepting a low, controlled risk of food-borne illness are justified by not having to kill as many animals.
[0] Not looking to start a discussion about the ethics of hunting. Not being in meat processing, this is an example I have first-hand knowledge of.
Of course there's some trim that has to go into the grinder, but we could do a much better, more respectful job of using the animal as it was instead of homogenized lumps of 80/20 or 90/10. More beef cheek in the butcher case and homemade cabeza, more lengua, more shank and round and plate, more heart and tripe and liver, etc etc etc. Buy a subprimal and grind your burgers at home from a single animal.
This is more a culinary and ethical argument than efficiency or safety. One should use the whole animal, in all its varieties, because they're delicious. Grinding otherwise edible parts of an animal killed on one's behalf because one disfavors (or is repulsed by) them seems to me much worse than the killing. Eat - and enjoy! - all of it or don't kill it.
It’s not “some trim”, it’s basically half the animal. I buy several whole cows a year and out of a carcass that yields 400 lbs of meat, I’ve never managed to get more than 60% with a very good butcher. Cabeza/lingua/tripa/offal/oxtails aren’t going to get few more than a few percent points extra. Once you’re deciding on which cuts you want, that trim is unavoidable.
It’s definitely better to freeze the left over bits and grind it yourself, but half the animal gets ground up regardless.
> Grinding otherwise edible parts of an animal killed on one's behalf because one disfavors (or is repulsed by) them seems to me much worse than the killing. Eat - and enjoy! - all of it or don't kill it.
Who are you to say that it's wrong for me to enjoy some parts of the animal ground up, versus in their original shape? Either way the entire animal is being eaten and enjoyed, so there's no reasonable moral basis on which to say it's wrong. Your position would make sense if people were throwing away the cheek, tongue, etc but we aren't.
The modern meat industry makes more productive use of the animal than what has ever been possible before in history. It makes the famed Native American efficiency of animal use look laughable.
Fwiw venison leans heavily on ground because it’s so lean that it’s nearly impossible to cook it to be tender and cooked; even sous vide methods require lower temps. Grinding it with cheap pork fat allows it not to be basically jerky.
There are levels of integration in between "Bubba down the block" and "Weyland-Yutani Megacorp"
Busting up Taylor Farms into 5 different companies would affect the food safety not one whit. In fact, it would probably improve it. If there were 6 different companies to choose from, for example, this incident would mean that one of them would go bankrupt as everybody switched to the other 5. And that would be a warning to the remaining companies not to screw up the same way.
However, since there is only a single supplier, Taylor Farms doesn't get any penalty at all. A couple of junior VPs get sacked and life rolls on for the CEO and his buddies.
Industrial operations have industrial scale problems that require much higher standards. The local butcher might not scrub the floor and walls with the same industrial anti-bacterial detergent, but he's also not running hundreds of cows a day through the space. The local farmers don't pre-emptively administer antibiotics to their herd; the CAFO operation that feeds the industrial slaughterhouse has to cram antibiotics into the cows to keep them healthy enough to slaughter. Comparing the two directly is very misleading.
The way the butcher explained to me, it’s not so much the volume that’s the problem, it’s the time between cleanings which gives microbes time to multiply in ideal conditions with lots of nutrients from blood and optimal temperature. Any crevice that’s hard to clean becomes a focal point for contamination and it doesn’t really matter if you’re butchering one cow or a hundred, because if you leave that biofilm there for even a few days, it can grow enough to contaminate future batches.
The other side of it is that many forms of contamination sporulate, so short of using a powerful surfactant to wipe it all away, the spores will survive basically forever until they hit growing conditions.
So this butcher was standing in his insufficiently cleaned butchering room telling you about how he should really be doing what industrial slaughterhouses do, but he just can't be bothered? Or did he have his own methods of sufficiently sanitizing his workspace such that he wasn't a source of disease and poisoning?
What volume brings is increased odds of one of them introducing/reinforcing a contaminant, especially if they're from a CAFO, which are horrifically unsanitary. Again, there's a reason industrial operations have apparently higher standards. When Mad Cow disease was spreading, it wasn't because a local butcher was lax wiping things down, it was because cow brains were being recycled into cow feed and sold across North America on an industrial scale.
I’m sorry but I can’t take you seriously if you’re bringing up mad cow disease in this discussion. Prions don’t spread because of butchers, they spread because of bone-and-meal feed. You know, stuff fed to a cow while it’s still alive, before it gets slaughtered. No amount of sanitary practice is going to help if you’re feeding prions to the animals because that’s just not how sanitation works.
And yes, small scale butchers slaughtering cows for a few local farmers and their customers buying whole carcasses have very different sanitary standards than an industrial meat packing plant. I sign a waiver every time.
> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means
How did you get from that to “this butcher was standing in his insufficiently cleaned butchering room”? Whatever personal bugbear you have, I want nothing to do with it.
> ... nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for.
It's good that that plant is so well-run. But America doesn't lack for less well-run large meatpacking plants. Remember Boar's Head? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41403919
There's a common pattern with other safety improvements that as safety controls improve, people simply push the envelope further. Cars get safer but then the drivers also get more confident doing things that nobody would get close to doing on an old car because it would spin out before then.
With the elevated standards of megascale agriculture you have the issue now where diseases from a lettuce farm in Mexico could affect somebody's health in NYC a month later in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in a previous era.
There's no complete solution but in this particular case it's important to remember that salads are actually pretty serious foodborne—illness vectors and they need to be heavily rinsed and ideally cleaned with a bleach or vinegar solution. It's one of the reasons that salads are traditionally on the no-eat list for pregnant women.
which is a book that I enjoy less now than the first time I read it. He was worried that shipping and aviation were both going to get more dangerous whereas that perception of a safety crisis in shipping in the 1970s went away and aviation got much much safer.
There are maybe 2 months out of the year that you can't grow lettuce in NYC in a greenhouse. It's not that cold.
Tomatoes prove your point better, but I still would never eat any of the tomatoes in an NYC supermarket in the winter, as they don't taste much better than soggy cardboard.
Also, I don’t think people have realized how much farmers markets now suffer from “dropshippers taking over Etsy” syndrome. Unless it’s a stand selling one or two specific things from a named farm or local producer, it’s likely you’re getting a lot of the same stuff that goes to the grocery stores, just at a markup.
Direct-from-farm delivery boxes are a better bet, at least the mainstay ones, but they’re certainly more expensive and the variety is more obviously seasonal (as you would expect).
Neither of these is a solution to nutrition at scale. It’s difficult to balance the economies of scale that consolidated distribution brings against the corruption that comes along with increased supplier leverage. Monopsony is just as pernicious as Monopoly (and they tend to feed each other, with large grocery and restaurant chains preferring large distributors).
The jist is that a lot of this is from consolidation at all levels. There are fewer grocery stores and distributors which has ultimately made hard to know where food ultimately comes from.
Couple that with deregulation and the dismantling of the government regulatory agencies under DOGE and we get what we have.
It's harder for casual shopper to know where their food comes from. But having worked in food production facilities that couldn't be further from the truth. You'd be surprised how meticulously tracked every part of the, supply chain is. down to the specific row in a field where something is picked.
(That's what makes this recent outbreak so atypical - either there was a massive screw up or someone is hiding something).
People also are not aware that the US has (or at least had) one of the most meticulous food inspection regimes in the world. Agency inspectors actually drop in and inspect facilities regularly. The EU might have more stringent food regulations, but as a reminder people were able to slip horse meat into the beef supply for decades before being caught - something like that would be inconceivable in the US.
The point of the video is that intermediary companies like Driscolls or Taylor Farms focus their efforts on building "accountability sinks."
They give farmers a 500 page document describing in detail how the produce must be grown, but then they provide little to no actual oversite, while producing enormous pricing pressure on the farmer. Any farmer who actually follows the 500 page document will not be able to make any money, so every farmer is compelled to violate the rules.
Then when product is contaminated Driscoll can say "that farmer wasn't following our policy we've cancelled our contract with them" while making no effort to actually clean up all the other farms, who are definitely violating the contract because it's impossible to follow it and make money selling to Driscolls.
There's not really an alternative that also lets farms be independent. If a GSPs really wants that level of control over farms, they might as well start buying them up.
The reality is that the documentation is like software T&Cs. You get to run your farm however you want and Driscolls has some CYA for later.
The reality cuts both ways. You can still sell produce directly to local grocery distributors that pay higher, but the requirements are going to be even more stringent with less guarantees.
What’s your proposed alternative? If the FDA made the 500 page document instead, they aren’t providing day to day oversight.
By logic, a Driscoll or Taylor Farms set of rules needs to sit beyond the regulatory minimum (their lawyers would hate them putting a violation of the regulation in writing).
So, even if a farmer violates the contract, the existing regulation is either insufficient or was also violated.
For starters, I think it's reasonable to break these distributors up into multiple distributors.
One of the big issues with a company like Taylor Farms is that when something like cyclospora hits, we all discovered that the grocery store and restaurants really only had an illusion of choice. Nearly all the lettuce products were actually just Taylor farms. That means the only option for consumers to pressure the company is to stop eating lettuce all together. Healthy competition means these distributors will care a lot more about an outbreak like this because it'll drive people to their competitors rather than just being a blip in this quarter's budget. Markets only work when there's an actual market and not just a single player.
But further, yeah I do think the FDA needs a more active role in doing compliance checks. Ideally this isn't the job of the FDA and instead gets rolled into the USDA or a separate agency dedicated to food products. Having one big agency in charge of both food and drugs isn't great as drugs has ended up with all the actual investment.
Big companies are good at reducing cost, but one way they do that is by making liabilities someone else's problem. The bigger they get, the more they do that. It's a key reason why companies like Walmart are constantly being found to employ slave labor through their contractors. Walmart can rehire the very same contractors (but rebranded) after the controversy blows over and rinse/repeat.
The same dynamic exists with these mega-distributors.
> By logic, a Driscoll or Taylor Farms set of rules needs to sit beyond the regulatory minimum (their lawyers would hate them putting a violation of the regulation in writing).
Why? For years, Tyson Chicken gave written instructions to its undocumented employees on how to stay under the radar for employment, insurance, immigration, tax and healthcare.
Consolidation seems to have lead to massive price leverage for the winners and fewer choices for consumers, huge barriers to entry for small grocers and manufacturers
They also have more incentive and capability to optimize right up to (and past) safety lines. And the impersonal corporate distance from the pride in quality of production matters too.
With appropriate regulation and enforcement I agree with you, but in the current regime, I’m not surprised that foodborne illness in America has 10x in 2026.
I think what is really interesting is the American defense of the mega-farms, while like clockwork you have at least once a year, sometimes a few times, a massive outbreak of contaminated salads.
> but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't.
FUD. While we know the mega farms don't because they kill every year through corner cutting. But keep spraying your salads late in the season with human waste water, keep bleaching your chicken and keep telling yourselves that they follow best practices.
Then food safety should be brought to small and local farms. The whole world does this, it's doable and works.
The high efficiency gains and safety disregard the environmental impact caused by pesticides and agrochemicals in general. These are much less of a concern in small farms when they have much less pressure to increase food yield per area.
> but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't.
I don’t think they have the oversight corporate farmers do. But I also don’t think they put immigrants into the field for 12 hour days with no breaks and no bathroom.
There’s something to be said for a farmer who doesn’t pass explosive diarrhea onto the crops he sells me as food….
Sarah Taber has given some interesting talks about this - the short version is there is probably a fair amount of outbreaks caused by small farms, they just don't have the reach to be detected.
I guess you're right that food is historically speaking extremely safe. I guess with this specifically, the issue is about how connected one company can be to the whole food supply.
A farmers market stand may not have perfect food safety either, but their outbreak would be limited to the few people who bought something on the farmers market (or maybe a cafe/restaurant or two that they supply).
Most likely, any harm wouldn't even be traced back to any individual salad because the sample wouldn't be big enough to form a pattern people would notice.
But because they supply so many salads to everywhere, it's a major issue that affects the whole food system.
I guess it's similar to an AWS outage. Companies constantly have outages, but an AWS one takes down half the internet.
I think competition is still absolutely necessary with heavy restrictions.
Much of the consolidation locations of food production is how illnesses spread among farm animals. I could get eggs from a local farmer because their birds don't socialize around birds with the flu.
Just my take on the matter. It is important to balance the sources.
Obviously it doesn't scale, but buying from small sellers has the advantage that the risks are completely decoupled. You might get cyclosporin or whatever, but it's not going to be a million people being hit by the same thing.
i suspect the concerns are, if your food is killing people or making them sick:
1) how big is the fallout,
2) how insulated from repercussions are you?
if a small local farms food is making people sick, it will only be a few people and word will spread.
a small local farm could more easily go out of business from just a few sick people. the market functions correctly at that scale. if a major corporation does it, the market does not function anywhere close to the same efficiency and the fallout is 1000s and 1000s of people sick or worse.
i think what many are arguing is that the responsibility should scale along with the possible impacts.
And... once I stopped at a roadside farmer's stand and the fruit still had the grocery store chain label and barcode on it, just smaller stuff and perhaps older than at the original store.
it depends, there are certain farmers markets here in LA that have strict minimum criteria in terms of food handling, organic label compliance and food safety before they give a vendor a spot. Also, you can definitely tell just by looking at the quality of the produce of these places vs. the average Vons/Pavilions supermarket
"There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it."
Nope, quite the contrary. By necessity consolidation means fewer individual processing facilities, which in turn means any single facility services a larger percentage of the market. Given fixed odds of any given single processing facility being cross-contaminated by a dirty shipment, by necessity that contamination event will impact a larger volume of product due to bulk mixing. Additionally this cross-contamination event will impact a larger portion of the market due to now-commonplace multi-state product distribution.
I frequently hear "efficiency" touted in the context of the agriculture industry, always by individuals who have no involvement with it, and have to wonder what, exactly, they believe they are cheerleading. A loaf of bread is not significantly cheaper now than it was 50 years ago, so no obvious benefits to the consume accrue from this notional efficiency. What has changed is rural bankruptcy and suicide rates have both skyrocketed, with the consolidation of the AG industry consistently implicated as the primary driver of both.
Worse is, nonetheless, worse. You are sidestepping the issue that DOGE, and RFK Jr. have made things measurably worse in many dimensions. They, and the tech oligarchs whose money is regarded as speech bear responsibility for making things worse. But hey the TVs are bigger and cheap.
Deregulation and the evisceration of enforcement mechanisms isn't what makes food handling at scale efficient and safe. That's just nonsensical. The reason it isn't worse still is the inertia of his system that used to be better run.
Our current government is actively rolling back safety measures so these single points of failure become much more pronounced. I don't know but I would bet that companies like this are actively lobbying to have those safety measure reduced. It seems like deflection what you're saying. Yes, things are better than before, but they could still be better and trying to stop people from talking about that isn't helpful or wise.
When I buy from a local farmer I expect to wash my produce thoroughly, and if his product makes me sick I can come back later and complain to his face. If that doesn't fix the problem I can probably get him excluded from market participation in the future.
When I buy salad in a bag* at the supermarket, I assume it's been cleaned. If not, a lot more people than me will get sick and we have little power to make the faceless company change their ways.
*Just an example. I don't buy salad in plastic bags because I think that stuff tastes like cardboard.
> Really? At least here (Canada), you absolutely do need food safe certifications to sell any food at farmers markets.
Sure, but you still have many more human hands on your head of lettuce on a farmers market (plus all the contamination from potential buyers sneezing, grabbing produce to check it out or from the environment in general aka flying birds, mice, rats, ...) than there will be on the mass produced lettuce that maybe saw a human hand at picking and everything since then is automated.
IIRC outbreaks in mass-produced green stuff usually end up tied to farmers or their neighbors spraying fecal based fertilizer at the wrong time. Unfortunately... that makes the blast radius of such a thing much, much worse.
"That's a fine way to get fresh food, but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't."
They most certainly do at my farmer's market, and every vendor has their certification posted for all to see, along with a health inspector rating underneath it.
I myself would trust produce from smaller local farms more than larger farms, however I also live near the farms and know what is in season and don't deal with the problems of people reselling food like they often do in "farmers markets" near or in large urban centers.
Small farms just don't have the pressure, or the large amount of disinterested or temporary employees that large farms have.
Same with smaller slaughter houses. Perhaps they don't have the manpower to deep clean every shift, but they also don't process nearly as much stuff, don't churn through employees as fast, more directly handle and train employees, and don't have some crap corner of the factory where people can be messing around being dumb.
Of course none of that is bullet proof, but small farms and slaughter houses know that if they fuck things up they don't just lose a bit of money and have to deal with some legal problems like Tyson or other large suppliers and distributors, they lose literally everything.
> allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.
Did they actually do this? All the reporting I saw basically amounted to “we have no friggin’ idea, shrug”. Unless you mean “Taylor Farms”, but that’s not a farm.
They certainly haven’t “pinpointed the farm”. In fact, they have no idea which farm might have been the source. As such, this claim is completely false:
> “they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.”
Consolidation does not improve food safety. Read the ISO's. The standards of the industry are equally effective at a scale of 10 or 1000 different orgs. Everyone watches everyone else, and makes batches traceable, and those who don't are told to shape up by downstream, or they lose downstream consumers.
Consolidation's only benefit is shifting the fiscal gain into fewer pockets, which comes with it's own perverse incentives. (See the Boeing/Airbus duopoly and the problems that causes.)
Safety regulation isn't necessarily the point — an outbreak at a small farm is localized and might impact hundreds of people, Taylor Farms spanned over a dozen states, and this sort of scale is the sort of thing that can cause a epidemic.
Or you can say, that the outbreaks will be much more bigger as a result of centralization of facilities. For example one small batch could contaminate other lettuces in shared facilities.
This consolidation argument only works up to 1-3 processing plants. After a company owns more than that, there's no more efficiency from automation, only market dominance and abuse.
the guy selling lettuce at my farmers market grows it, transports it and sells it. if it makes me sick, he will hear about it, and i bet he has a very strong incentive to avoid that situation over a too big to fail megacorp that is basically insulated from consequences in the current climate.
do we need both options? probably. but painting small scale organic farming as'the same' as the alternative is...not accurate.
I think one of the problems of our modern food system is it can be difficult for a consumer to pinpoint the source of an infection. Food-borne illnesses can take 24-48 hrs or more to become apparent, by which time you may not know what you ate. Combined with the fact that we can't know where certain ingredients were sourced (one of the topics of TFA), and you can know you're sick, but not why.
It's not difficult at all, food products all have factory + machine origin coding on all packages. If something makes you sick you can easily pin point which region and even which exact factories were used.
If there is an outbreak there are multiple pin points, it's also not hard to do this with local market goods either (unless you live in Texas or something where there are no regulations).
Why do you think this is the first time we've dealt with such situations? The only reason why it's happening now is because Elon Musk had his DOGE goons gut the programs that monitor our food supply.
I hope those DOGE goons have deep pockets because they are about to find out what happens when your supposed benefactors abandon you.
If it takes as long as 48 hours for it to become plain that I'm sick from eating something, then I've probably eaten 6 meals in that timeframe.
If those meals average just 2 ingredient+source combinations that are introduced during that timeframe, then there are 12 different combinations to question and I really have no idea which one of them could be the culprit.
Meanwhile, cyclospora symptoms normally take around 2 weeks to show up. That's 14 days, or 42 meals worth of ingredients. I definitely don't even come close to remembering every meal I had over the last two weeks.
> It's not difficult at all, food products all have factory + machine origin coding on all packages. If something makes you sick you can easily pin point which region and even which exact factories were used.
Speak for yourself. I'd love to have this information available, but I would still find it very difficult to pinpoint what it was that made me sick.
The problem is typically you ate a bunch of things in the time before becoming ill and don't know which one (or none) is the culprit. So it takes a government investigation to identify the cause by correlating many different victims' food consumption to find the common factor.
Even when it's totally obvious the cause can be hard to actually prove. A restaurant near me put several people in the hospital with a certain kind of mushroom a couple years back but investigations never conclusively proved the source.
This analysis is a bit shallow. Massive GSPs grew as a solution to deal with the massive problems that come with greens sourcing.
If an individual farm has an outbreak they can (usually) source it, eliminate it from the supply chain, and switch to an alternative without any interruption to service. That also means you want as large of a geographic distribution of your farm network as possible. (I'm looking at you, Yuma Valley - a semi-regular source of e.coli outbreaks).
As a bonus, the supply chain is much more efficient at this scale. Small farms can have their salads packed in nitrogen filled bags for longer shelf life and less waste.
Fresh leafy greens are naturally just one of the toughest and most vulnerable supply chains. The disappointing answer (like in a lot of these situations) is that being bigger and more massive company is what makes the product better.
- Lobbying and specialist groups can and do hamstringing America's ability to make better, safer food at scale. This isn't about big vs small producers. It's a regulatory resourcing problem.
- The FDA / USDA split is something those groups _love_ to take advantage of to further hamstring America's food supply.
The conclusion I've come to is that this gives profit-driven-corporations or foreign adversaries an excellent way to harm America's food chain through these specialist groups.
Fixing the FDA/USDA split is probably a good idea, but it will take a political earthquake to do so, and I'm absolutely willing to vote for people who pledge to make my food both safer and more delicious.
Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players? Obviously the “blast radius” is bigger when it’s a big company with a huge footprint, but are incidents rarer and quality control better?
Completely anecdotal, I see lots or recalls from smaller producers I’ve never heard of, I can imagine they have less scrutiny and oversight.
As a thought experiment, there's a big difference between "3 companies share 70% of a market, while 30 companies sharing the remaining 30%", and "30 companies share the whole market, none being larger than 8%".
In the former example, there's far more pressure on the smaller companies, which is why in such a regime people expect more consistent quality from the big guys, and the smaller guys are often boutique in some way (=offering something unique in their service/product in order to be able to compete). Small guys have a hard time standing up to big guys.
On the other hand, in a regime where no one becomes that huge, like the latter example, there's still pressure, but the competition is fair, just like if all the companies were similarly big (except that you can't have that many big companies in a single industry, by proportion definitions).
Realizing this drove home why inconsistent antitrust enforcement appears to produce bad results. Because it leaves us in the state of the former example. It's also unfortunately the intermediate state of getting serious with antitrust enforcement.
> Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players?
Like.. before? When we didn't have nationwide food recalls that had seeped into nationwide fast food chains and bagged products distributed into every commercial food selling outlet, under a myriad of different names?
The United States population has more than doubled since 1950. There is no "before" that we could actually go back to. The massive, sustained population growth is built on the massive efficiency growth.
> Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players?
Not only is the blast radius smaller, but small businesses are less incentivized to cut corners since serious violations pose a greater risk to their business than large businesses. Corruption is essentially legalized in America via lobbying, but only big companies can really afford to lobby and make huge campaign contributions to sway the government in their favor.
Government is meant to be a check on businesses, but that completely falls down once business is big enough to buy the government. It wouldn't surprise me if quality control at large companies is worse for the simple fact that they know who to pay off if they get caught, as Taylor Farms has here.
IIRC that's what happened with the Boar's Head listeria outbreak. Inspectors had repeatedly documented that the facilities were nasty, but BH was allowed to continue operating for years because <reasons>. Things only came to a tipping point after multiple people died.
While the first made up quote is inline with what Friedman said over 45 years ago [0], I'm not seeing anything that resembles the second one? In fact, he warned against the influence that large corporations can have on the government [1].
Well it's more about our lived reality, I can't remember the last time any current US politician successfully campaigned then enacted legislation that benefits workers; it's always been forms of corporate welfare and more corporate welfare for like the last 60 years.
The new dealers can be counted on one hand (they're the ones 70+) while the neoliberals have been at the helm for 40 years.
It's worth pointing out that Milton Friedman's words are regularly taken out of context. His full quote:
> "In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his 'social responsibility' reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.
> The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct 'social responsibility,' rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it.
> But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other."
His point wasn't that businesses can't act ethically or with responsibility, it's that they shouldn't act to become welfare centers and corporate philanthropies (which was a trend at the time). And I think even the most anti-capitalist person would agree that corporation acting "charitably" should be treated with a huge eye of skepticism.
Funny how "taken out of context" is so often used when the context doesn't make it any better.
That whole "he is in effect imposing taxes" thing is ridiculous. Taxes are forcibly collected by the government, not voluntarily spent by a business. Businesses are not the military, executives are not obligated to follow orders. If the stockholders don't like what an executive does, they can fire the executive and hire someone else. An executive who wants to keep their job therefore might be wise to stick to what the stockholders will like. But they aren't doing anything wrong if they don't, any more than an employee is doing something wrong if they disobey their manager.
It also misses the idea that a lot of misbehavior by companies is stuff that's bad for the company, but they do it anyway because of stupidity, shortsightedness, coordination problems, or the incentives of decisionmakers not lining up with the consequences for the company they work for. Or rather, it doesn't miss the idea but explicitly dismisses it; anything that is actually good for the company is defined by Friedman as not being "social responsibility."
This is a helpful industry article with clear recommendations. Many critiques on competition or consumer issues don't have such precision on their recommendations. I'd donate to them if I was in the US.
"Taylor Farms’ massive operations depend on thousands of workers who process, package, and move its produce. Its workplace safety record includes serious violations and worker complaints."
1) The work is voluntary, calling voluntary work forced labor is a bold faced lie. The people are being imprisoned, which is obviously not a good situation to be in. If doing that work didn't improve their lives in some way, they could not do it. Since they are voluntarily doing these jobs, presumably it makes their imprisonment better.
2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
Im not sure I would call "You can sit in a concrete box all day and then eat food that was rejected from the dog food plant" versus "Go outside for awhile doing some work, be able to buy a pack of prepackaged ramen when you are done" clearly voluntary.
Have you ever ate prison food? I literally would not feed most of it to my dog.
It would be better if they weren't treated like dogs to begin with and they shouldn't be allowed to undercut local labor costs. Nor should the jail receive 75% of their wage on top of the 400% markup on commissary items they already take. Thats ends up with about 6% of the wages value going to the workers on top of their wages being 3x lower than local workers.
> 2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
That still is massively undercutting regular wages, it's government price dumping. The ethics of prison labor aside, whoever buys prison labor should be forced to pay fair market wages to the prison.
But, again, that's not a Taylor Farms issue, that's a government issue.
Personally, I think it's a very good thing to let prisoners work as long as the working conditions are the same standards as free people, including any wage laws.
Prisoners in most states are literally underfed, and then "allowed" to buy more food, like a single packet of ramen for a whole dollar.
This is because many states are full of people who are both weirdly "Free market" brain, to the point that they believe it's a good idea to tell the warden "Any dollar from this budget that you do not spend feeding inmates, you get to personally keep" is a good idea because they have no knowledge of systems design or perverse incentives, and more importantly, because they genuinely want prisoners to suffer. No, this is not a joke. In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.
When people joke about "I should go to jail, at least I will get three square meals a day", that's just false. Most prisons are only required to serve two meals a day. The quality of those meals varies from "Okay for a middle school lunch if you put a gun to my head" to "Fyre festival had better food, and this is not a joke"
> In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.
This is an incredible claim, so I'm trying to find out where you got that from. Seems like maybe that was just in Alabama and they changed the law already?
The commissary markup is absolutely true, but "deliberately underfed" is as far as I can tell, completely untrue. Most states actually have calorie minimum rules. Arkansas is 2300 per day. Kentucky 2400 per day. Both states mandate annual menu reviews by a third-party dietician. New York state's guideline is 2800 per day + 90g protein. California 2500 per day. The Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities additionally states there are to be at least 3 meals per day, two of them hot, and no more than 14 hours between dinner and breakfast.
These are all right within the USDA's general population daily calorie guidance of 2-3 thousand per day for males.
The reality is in a lot of prison situations the people are bored and the money is going to non-essentials from a commissary.
It's definitely an extremely exploitative situation and overall icky, but the people who jump in to compare it to slave labor are kind of embarrassing themselves in unnecessary hyperbole.
> Taylor Farms and its CEO, Bruce Taylor, have donated millions to Republican and Trump Administration-associated political action committees (PACs) since 2025. This includes a $1 million contribution to both MAGA Inc. and a super PAC dedicated to electing House Republicans.
> ...on July 16, the same day the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced their investigation into the multistate Cyclospora outbreak, Taylor Farms executives met with White House and FDA officials
Ah, well, there it is. Good for them that they're able to get away with it. Corporate protection is bought and sold out in the open.
There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers, but it comes at a serious cost. With regulations continuously eroding this will only get worse.
My armchair assessment is the best way to push back is for farmers to join together into co-ops and find a middle ground between the efficiency of scale and the concerns of food safety and ethical working conditions.
> There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers
Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I think most Americans would be shocked as to where their food comes from.
I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a macdonalds burger.
Everyone is invested in maintaining the illusion. And that collision is rampant across all of food: Pepsi price fixing with Walmart, the price of beef at retail being long decoupled from wholesale / Agri Stats...
>Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I would fully support such a mandate, for meat products too.
It would be interesting, giving consumers more information is nearly always better, it opens the door for open source analysis, the 2nd and 3rd order effects would probably be mostly harmless and highly entertaining.
>I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a McDonalds burger.
They're be too busy being angry that "BNSF Alliance Intermodal Facility, Haslet Texas" is in fact not an avocado farm.
The illusion is the Whole Foods shopper thinking that the McDonalds food is crap. Great marketing from the "health food" industry making you think that it's McDonalds making you fat. Raw cane sugar (sold to you at a premium markup over the already more expensive production cost) is, by implication, less bad for you.
Food is being produced at a scale, efficiency, and level of safety unheard of generations ago. One of the recommendations in this article is to buy "through farmers markets, community-supported agriculture programs, farm stands, and direct online sales." That's a fine way to get fresh food, but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't. And online sales? Who knows.
Food packaged and distributed by these mega-suppliers probably has less human handling through the supply chain than any other food, and they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.
There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it.
It's a lot like AWS. Yes, the uptime is likely to be better than your on-prem solution. However, unlike when yours inevitably falls over and has zero impact on anybody else, when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet.
Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.
Smaller organizations means redundancies and options. Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency. Redundancy is good.
> I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.
1) Why? The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier.
2) Why only now? Bagged leafy greens are notorious for outbreaks. The extra processing steps means greater opportunity for introducing contamination (more people handling the produce), and greater opportunity for cross-contamination.
This food safety expert/activist/litigator has explained both of those points many times: https://www.marlerblog.com/ Though, being middle-aged and perhaps with better-than-average recollection, I connected the dots to bagged leafy greens years ago, across many news cycles, and to the risk of food poisoning from vegetables generally, through hard, personal experience.
> it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier
It really, really is not. They are massive and are a supplier for a huge number of restaurants.
> The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier.
The mixed messaging certainly didn’t help.
One day it’s Taylor Farms and the next the FDA was apologizing.
And even once it was found to be Taylor Farms, you can’t control every Taco Bell or anything else.
Mostly it just killed any consumer confidence in greens
> you can’t control every Taco Bell
Restaurants and fast-food outlets generally can't/don't avoid their staff making sketchy health decisions.
Don't eat at them if you're worried.
Read anything about back-kitchens and staff's interesting attitudes towards health risks.
I highly recommend Kitchen Confidential - amazing novel writing.
Although my intro to the genre was 1933's Down and Out in Paris and London (an upper-middle class хорошо horrorshow). An all-time favorite book.
For the recent cyclospora outbreak, a relatively tiny number of people were affected. Per the CDC[1]: 17,180 cases; 922 Hospitalizations; 2 deaths.
Not to diminish this for anyone affected, but the safety of driving cars is far worse than that and most of us do that daily.
I never stopped buying or eating lettuce.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/cases/index.html
I was one of those affected. The official CDC numbers are underestimates, because they're only counting cases confirmed by culture. My doc asked enough questions to make sure it wasn't your typical stomach flu or food poisoning and got me the antibiotics ASAP which I appreciated. I assume I'm not counted as a result. I have to assume others aren't as well.
This. As an infectious disease epidemiologist, the number of people who will work their way into laboratory confirmed case reports is a small fraction of the total number of people impacted.
You are almost certainly not reflected in those numbers.
Furthermore the present CDC was gutted by an administration whose solution to Covid was to stop counting
And whose solution to "Is cyclospora a problem?" was to remove the monitoring and presumably stick their fingers in their ears.[0]
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-cdc-food-net-monitorin...
The FoodNet thing, while bad, has a bit of nuance in the system was not meant to do outbreak detection, so likely wouldn't have helped here.
But it does cripple our ability to ask if this was a one-off, or if we're seeing long term trends that should be worrisome.
It would have made identifying the source trivial. Instead we had waves of confused and confusing reports.
Comparing it to car safety does put it in perspective, but at the same time the safety of cars has nothing to do with food safety. Considering the necessity of food for life, and the fact our current population size is dependent on industrialized farming, I think it's worth to scrutinize food safety and hold it to a high standard.
The US is uniquely dependent on cars for survival, it’s probably not appropriate to presume that cars are less necessary. Anyways, if you live in the middle of nowhere you can grow your own food. If you live deep in the city, the chances of getting sick from McD’s or whatever is pretty low.
We do hold food safety to a high standard. We have some of the highest standards on the planet.
I'm sorry, it is not appropriate to presume that cars are less necessary than food? Hmm, what about water, is that one more important or are cars still top of mind for you?
The attitude is unnecessary.
I disagree.
I think the point being made wasn't literally that cars are more important than food, but more that for most Americans, you can't really get by without store-bought food and a car. This is just fact.
A few lucky people live in the densest urban areas where car non-ownership is totally fine, nice even. For the rest, it's horrible and no one would choose it. A trip to the grocery store in the suburbs could take 30-45 minutes each way in 90º heat (and in half the country, with humidity too) is terrible - and think how many times you'll have to go to the store if you're buying only what you can carry 3 miles. Also many school districts provide no buses, so now you're walking kids to and from school in all weather. Bikes are a thing, but the roads aren't always safe and it still sucks in weather.
True, but even the most car-centric socities could adapt to a shortage of cars by means less drastic than a culling of the population through widespread famine and death.
For most Americans, you can't really get by without store-bought food and a car. This is just fact.
For all animals on earth, you can't really get by without food. This is jus a fact.
> but the safety of driving cars is far worse than that and most of us do that daily.
this "whattabout"ism is brought up during every safety discussion. can we please accept that 1/ everyone knows about the car issue, and 2/ the car issue being a problem does not mean we should stop talking about other issues that exist.
No one is saying we shouldn’t work to improve the safety of multiple systems at a time. But it is helpful to keep perspective over relative safety.
People are very prone to overweight the risk of things that are prominent in the media.
I'm not convinced about 1. There are a lot of things we could be doing about a 9/11's worth of dead people every single month that we just don't.
In any case, it's a good barometer for judging personal risk. I don't stress about the danger when I get into my car, so I probably shouldn't stress about the danger from something substantially less likely to take me out. It contextualizes a number by comparing it to something most of us do every day.
I think a lot of people sort of instinctively avoid thinking about or engaging with the dangers posed by cars, at least in part because it creates a sense of dissonance that there’s a non-zero risk of life changing harm to you or your family from such a “normal” activity. For many people today, there is no alternative but to accept the risk if you want to do anything outside your home, other than dramatically upending your life to move somewhere else. Thinking too much about risks that feel outside your control just creates a state of anxiety.
The economic utility of car transportation is also far higher than that of lettuce.
My entire family was affected. We didn’t report it but the impact was felt.
We also stopped buying lettuce.
Honestly I did not know the numbers at all, so thank you, but those are higher than what I would have guessed.
i have health insurance, i know i got it, and i rode it out without going to the doctor (not saying that was the right choice, it's just what i did).
i guarantee you that first number is wildly non-illustrative of the reach of this outbreak.
"not to diminish" as you wave away 2 people that have died and make a false equivalency to traffic accidents.
This is not a data exercise, this is real life and 1 person getting sick from this stuff is too much.
> This is not a data exercise, this is real life [...]
You may not wish to hear this, but real life is very much a data exercise:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
ONE person getting SICK is too much??? We’ve never been within a million miles of this random bar you’ve set. No country has. It’s absolutely insane to try and hold the position that our food must be so perfectly clean that it cannot ever get anyone sick. That would almost certainly be impossible. If you can’t even engage with reality, nobody will take these massive statements seriously.
inefficiency often creates redundancy, but they are not synonyms.
Redundancy may be inefficient, but you can also build redundant systems that looking at from a micro perspective seem inefficient but what you see is only a local inefficiency; if you distribute their effects far enough in space and time you find that they are actually at a macro scale more efficient than not having them because they prevent breakdowns that destroy all the smaller systems held within the bigger one.
From a strictly utilitarian perspective, more redundancy will result in more deaths, since food handling expertise is concentrated in larger organizations.
I say this as someone who gets most of my veg from a local CSA. It's not because I think it's safer. It probably isn't.
A possible issue with consolidation is "too big to fail." The bigger the company, the more likely that the government goes into denial about it rather than meeting the problem head-on.
> when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet
Except AWS doesn't fall over, regions do. The problem isn't using one provider, it's that everyone uses one region of that provider. When that region goes down, so many people report outages that it seems like AWS as a whole went down, but it didn't.
Same basic deal with Taylor Farms. It was only lettuce sourced from Central Mexico, and it was distributed to the east coast and some central states. Page 18 of this PDF (https://www.taylorfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Taylo...) shows all the growing regions. Of all 22, only 1 sent out bad lettuce. But popular opinion is that the all of it was bad.
So the risk wasn't their scale. If anything, the risk was their customers (the walmarts, costcos, krogers, etc) not labeling where it came from or more stringently tracking these things or planning for an "incident". None of this is new, everybody knows leafy greens are the most likely source of food poisoning.
Just like AWS isn't to blame when customer sites we depend on go down from one bad service in one region, we shouldn't be blaming Taylor Farms. We should be blaming the customer-companies we all use who didn't plan for a very predictable failure.
> Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.
These are two unrelated events though.
Other consolidated suppliers have had events in the past, and they did not 'wipe out' our food supply because they identified the root cause and the impacted supplies, initiated a recall, and the rest of their redundant, distributed systems remained intact.
The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility.
If we had 20 'local' distributors who were all bought by Taylor farms and one of those locations had a significant health issue, there wouldn't be a large issue if Taylor identified which one had the failing and then distributed their other 19 location's product to the area facing the shortage due to it's location's product being recalled.
> The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility.
Right, and the issue with the King of England wasn't the consolidation of all power in his hands, but rather him not taking responsibility for everyone's welfare.
> Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency.
No; you can't have redundancy without inefficiency, but you can have inefficiency without redundancy.
I’ve seen where a local butcher slaughters the cows for local farmers, and it’s definitely nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for. It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means but he just doesn’t have the man power to wash every surface several times a day whereas the plant shuts down one line at a time to do a full daily cleaning with power washers and this foam stuff that gets into every nook and cranny and then gets washed down a central drain. My limited experience with fresh produce isn’t much better (omg the flies).
I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes. Efficiency means things move quicker and cheaper, and a few people get richer. It does not by any means inherently increase safety. The effects of a fuckup in a hugely efficientized industry often scale directly with just how much efficiency was mined away from caution and human-interaction.
Bubba flipping burgers getting his dirty hands on your meal might make you sick, but Bobba inspecting the meatslop production line with constant pressure from upper management to be as efficient as possible according to whatever recent regulations were stripped back might accidentally spray the horse-meat product decontaminizer on the pig-meat product, generating a national pandemic.
Data is incredibly clear that industrial-scale food production is cleaner than small-business food production.
Is it just a question of variance in the size of the issue? Is having 10 incidents of 10 people each the same as one with 100?
I’ve argued in systems reliability that once you are already high reliability you are better off lowering incident size vs total unavailability.
But there isn’t one size of food producer. I would think there are diminishing marginal returns on food safety after a certain size. At that point perhaps the blast radius of mistakes offsets the advantage of scale. It’s a false dichotomy to consider only national producers and local producers.
What data might that be? I've looked and there doesn't appear to be any authoritative source of long-term data for either # of reported foodborne illness outbreaks or # of individuals sickened in this way per year, either of which would clearly demonstrate a dip in sickness rates if industrial-scale food production does, in fact, result in cleaner production.
"I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes."
follows with wall of vibes
LOL
That's actually the point. Opposing vibes are just as easy to utter as the initial vibes.
Not really. The opposing vibes in this case seem really weak?
Don’t you just mean that one set of vibes resonates with your own vibes better than the other set of vibes?
Given the lack of research into the matter, I present the following pilot study for HN to use:
Number of times the lettuce I grew at home this year made me shit a tsunami: 0
Number of times lettuce I bought at the store this year made me shit a tsunami: 1
And did you grow enough lettuce to supply yourself for a whole year? If not the problem remains.
A couple of things:
1) you're taking my comment too seriously.
2) assuming I had enough space to subsistence farm for my household (I don't), I wouldn't try growing lettuce year-round. Lettuce in the cooler months, peppers and tomatoes in the warmer months.
3) the majority of the lettuce I've prepared in my home this year did come from my patio
Containers. When it's nice out, they live outside. When it's not nice out, they move indoors. yeah yeah, not op, but it's possible. If you're growing food to sustain yourself for a whole year, I'm assuming you're willing to sacrifice some indoor space to accommodate.
Also, the GP doesn't read to me the way you're interpreting it. To me the GP has grown produce and purchased produce this year. The purchase hit him while the grown at home did not.
It would be... unusual... for an American home to contain enough space to grow the family's annual supply of lettuce.
> If you're growing food to sustain yourself for a whole year, I'm assuming you're willing to sacrifice some indoor space to accommodate.
It would be unheard of for it to contain enough space to produce the family's annual supply of food. And pointless. If you're growing that much food, there's no reason to build walls around it.
> It would be... unusual... for an American home to contain enough space to grow the family's annual supply of lettuce
I grow leafy greens in containers, and while not totally self sufficient, it provides a decent amount. I have multiple pots that I rotate through offsetting planting so new seedlings are going in as older plants are harvesting. If you're wanting head lettuce types then it's different, but if you just want leafy greens, you can totally do more than I think you're thinking you can.
I'm going to give you a really strong counterexample to this. One of the most commonly acquired parasites that comes from gardening is toxoplasmosis.
But doesn't toxoplasmosis come from owning cats?
Nope. The correlation between cat ownership and toxoplasmosis is basically zero. Because toxoplasmosis comes from stray cats who poop in your garden and you catch them through the gardening. Something like 40% of toxoplasmosis cases come from gardening with people unaware that stray cats poop there. (The majority comes from eating undercooked food, like pork, because the pork grazed in fields where there was stray cat poop.)
So essentially doing your own gardening creates a risk vector that is significantly less present in industrial-level gardening of vegetables.
The FDA suggests that the proper preventative measure against this is "thoroughly wash your dishes and produce." which is something I was gonna do anyway, with both the store-bought lettuce and my own. Doesn't sound like a big deal to me.
https://www.fda.gov/food/people-risk-foodborne-illness/toxop...
Am I the only one who doubts how thoroughly anyone's ever washed produce at home?
Like, it's not like we're scrubbing every crevice of every leaf with soap. We're spraying some water on a whole pile of it, and then like shaking it off or spinning it. It feels like theatre more than it does food safety.
And I'll confess, I don't even buy or consume fresh produce normally, besides apples and bananas.
I agree.
Having looked into it, it's not clear at all how to do better at home than hosing it down with some plain water and spinning it dry-ish.
Soap ruins leafy vegetables. Dilute bleach seems strongly frowned upon. Vinegar doesn't necessarily kill enough things well-enough.
And water is just water. The efficaciousness of it reminds me of the handwashing scene from Pulp Fiction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4fDsq0k2rI
And you're lucky that a sick bird didn't shit on your home grown lettuce before you picked it.
My bad. I'll stop growing food to avoid birds shitting on it.
Yes, the cleanliness can vary based on the outfit and the tech/facilities tends to be lower. However, there are not 100s of animals being ran through the same grinder. It doesn't seem like there are any real tests being done to each animal by the inspectors.
So facility risk seems similar or higher for the local shop, depending on specific people running it, but animal-bourne risk seems higher at the packing plant, which seems to be the more likely vector to me anyways.
No data on that. But qualitative experience shows the local farmer/butcher has much nicer/fresher looking/smelling meat than the Walmart.
> grinder
There's your problem. Ground products are completely dispensable.
Ground products are also what lets us make more efficient use of the animal. I took my first deer a couple years ago, and had it cut by a local guy. I got back 60 pounds of meat, of which about 30 was ground[0].
Supposing cows yield a better ratio of cut to ground meat (we've been breeding them for meat production and process them on an industrial scale), you'd still have to raise and kill a whole lot more cows to satisfy the world's current beef demand. I think good food safety practices and accepting a low, controlled risk of food-borne illness are justified by not having to kill as many animals.
[0] Not looking to start a discussion about the ethics of hunting. Not being in meat processing, this is an example I have first-hand knowledge of.
Of course there's some trim that has to go into the grinder, but we could do a much better, more respectful job of using the animal as it was instead of homogenized lumps of 80/20 or 90/10. More beef cheek in the butcher case and homemade cabeza, more lengua, more shank and round and plate, more heart and tripe and liver, etc etc etc. Buy a subprimal and grind your burgers at home from a single animal.
This is more a culinary and ethical argument than efficiency or safety. One should use the whole animal, in all its varieties, because they're delicious. Grinding otherwise edible parts of an animal killed on one's behalf because one disfavors (or is repulsed by) them seems to me much worse than the killing. Eat - and enjoy! - all of it or don't kill it.
It’s not “some trim”, it’s basically half the animal. I buy several whole cows a year and out of a carcass that yields 400 lbs of meat, I’ve never managed to get more than 60% with a very good butcher. Cabeza/lingua/tripa/offal/oxtails aren’t going to get few more than a few percent points extra. Once you’re deciding on which cuts you want, that trim is unavoidable.
It’s definitely better to freeze the left over bits and grind it yourself, but half the animal gets ground up regardless.
> Grinding otherwise edible parts of an animal killed on one's behalf because one disfavors (or is repulsed by) them seems to me much worse than the killing. Eat - and enjoy! - all of it or don't kill it.
Who are you to say that it's wrong for me to enjoy some parts of the animal ground up, versus in their original shape? Either way the entire animal is being eaten and enjoyed, so there's no reasonable moral basis on which to say it's wrong. Your position would make sense if people were throwing away the cheek, tongue, etc but we aren't.
These cuts have gotten expensive as they're now quite popular. Lengua, beef cheeks, and oxtail are no longer cheap.
The modern meat industry makes more productive use of the animal than what has ever been possible before in history. It makes the famed Native American efficiency of animal use look laughable.
Fwiw venison leans heavily on ground because it’s so lean that it’s nearly impossible to cook it to be tender and cooked; even sous vide methods require lower temps. Grinding it with cheap pork fat allows it not to be basically jerky.
There are levels of integration in between "Bubba down the block" and "Weyland-Yutani Megacorp"
Busting up Taylor Farms into 5 different companies would affect the food safety not one whit. In fact, it would probably improve it. If there were 6 different companies to choose from, for example, this incident would mean that one of them would go bankrupt as everybody switched to the other 5. And that would be a warning to the remaining companies not to screw up the same way.
However, since there is only a single supplier, Taylor Farms doesn't get any penalty at all. A couple of junior VPs get sacked and life rolls on for the CEO and his buddies.
Industrial operations have industrial scale problems that require much higher standards. The local butcher might not scrub the floor and walls with the same industrial anti-bacterial detergent, but he's also not running hundreds of cows a day through the space. The local farmers don't pre-emptively administer antibiotics to their herd; the CAFO operation that feeds the industrial slaughterhouse has to cram antibiotics into the cows to keep them healthy enough to slaughter. Comparing the two directly is very misleading.
The way the butcher explained to me, it’s not so much the volume that’s the problem, it’s the time between cleanings which gives microbes time to multiply in ideal conditions with lots of nutrients from blood and optimal temperature. Any crevice that’s hard to clean becomes a focal point for contamination and it doesn’t really matter if you’re butchering one cow or a hundred, because if you leave that biofilm there for even a few days, it can grow enough to contaminate future batches.
The other side of it is that many forms of contamination sporulate, so short of using a powerful surfactant to wipe it all away, the spores will survive basically forever until they hit growing conditions.
So this butcher was standing in his insufficiently cleaned butchering room telling you about how he should really be doing what industrial slaughterhouses do, but he just can't be bothered? Or did he have his own methods of sufficiently sanitizing his workspace such that he wasn't a source of disease and poisoning?
What volume brings is increased odds of one of them introducing/reinforcing a contaminant, especially if they're from a CAFO, which are horrifically unsanitary. Again, there's a reason industrial operations have apparently higher standards. When Mad Cow disease was spreading, it wasn't because a local butcher was lax wiping things down, it was because cow brains were being recycled into cow feed and sold across North America on an industrial scale.
I’m sorry but I can’t take you seriously if you’re bringing up mad cow disease in this discussion. Prions don’t spread because of butchers, they spread because of bone-and-meal feed. You know, stuff fed to a cow while it’s still alive, before it gets slaughtered. No amount of sanitary practice is going to help if you’re feeding prions to the animals because that’s just not how sanitation works.
And yes, small scale butchers slaughtering cows for a few local farmers and their customers buying whole carcasses have very different sanitary standards than an industrial meat packing plant. I sign a waiver every time.
> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means
How did you get from that to “this butcher was standing in his insufficiently cleaned butchering room”? Whatever personal bugbear you have, I want nothing to do with it.
> ... nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for.
It's good that that plant is so well-run. But America doesn't lack for less well-run large meatpacking plants. Remember Boar's Head? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41403919
There's a common pattern with other safety improvements that as safety controls improve, people simply push the envelope further. Cars get safer but then the drivers also get more confident doing things that nobody would get close to doing on an old car because it would spin out before then.
With the elevated standards of megascale agriculture you have the issue now where diseases from a lettuce farm in Mexico could affect somebody's health in NYC a month later in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in a previous era.
There's no complete solution but in this particular case it's important to remember that salads are actually pretty serious foodborne—illness vectors and they need to be heavily rinsed and ideally cleaned with a bleach or vinegar solution. It's one of the reasons that salads are traditionally on the no-eat list for pregnant women.
It's the argument of Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691004129/no...
which is a book that I enjoy less now than the first time I read it. He was worried that shipping and aviation were both going to get more dangerous whereas that perception of a safety crisis in shipping in the 1970s went away and aviation got much much safer.
Megascale agriculture is also the reason you can easily get fresh lettuce at any market in NYC during the winter.
There are maybe 2 months out of the year that you can't grow lettuce in NYC in a greenhouse. It's not that cold.
Tomatoes prove your point better, but I still would never eat any of the tomatoes in an NYC supermarket in the winter, as they don't taste much better than soggy cardboard.
Also, I don’t think people have realized how much farmers markets now suffer from “dropshippers taking over Etsy” syndrome. Unless it’s a stand selling one or two specific things from a named farm or local producer, it’s likely you’re getting a lot of the same stuff that goes to the grocery stores, just at a markup.
Direct-from-farm delivery boxes are a better bet, at least the mainstay ones, but they’re certainly more expensive and the variety is more obviously seasonal (as you would expect).
Neither of these is a solution to nutrition at scale. It’s difficult to balance the economies of scale that consolidated distribution brings against the corruption that comes along with increased supplier leverage. Monopsony is just as pernicious as Monopoly (and they tend to feed each other, with large grocery and restaurant chains preferring large distributors).
If your "farmer's market" is not selling things from a named farm or local producer, it's not a farmer's market, it's just a market.
Here's a pretty good video about the problem in general. https://youtu.be/nyG-np0S0ZQ
The jist is that a lot of this is from consolidation at all levels. There are fewer grocery stores and distributors which has ultimately made hard to know where food ultimately comes from.
Couple that with deregulation and the dismantling of the government regulatory agencies under DOGE and we get what we have.
It's harder for casual shopper to know where their food comes from. But having worked in food production facilities that couldn't be further from the truth. You'd be surprised how meticulously tracked every part of the, supply chain is. down to the specific row in a field where something is picked.
(That's what makes this recent outbreak so atypical - either there was a massive screw up or someone is hiding something).
People also are not aware that the US has (or at least had) one of the most meticulous food inspection regimes in the world. Agency inspectors actually drop in and inspect facilities regularly. The EU might have more stringent food regulations, but as a reminder people were able to slip horse meat into the beef supply for decades before being caught - something like that would be inconceivable in the US.
The point of the video is that intermediary companies like Driscolls or Taylor Farms focus their efforts on building "accountability sinks."
They give farmers a 500 page document describing in detail how the produce must be grown, but then they provide little to no actual oversite, while producing enormous pricing pressure on the farmer. Any farmer who actually follows the 500 page document will not be able to make any money, so every farmer is compelled to violate the rules.
Then when product is contaminated Driscoll can say "that farmer wasn't following our policy we've cancelled our contract with them" while making no effort to actually clean up all the other farms, who are definitely violating the contract because it's impossible to follow it and make money selling to Driscolls.
There's not really an alternative that also lets farms be independent. If a GSPs really wants that level of control over farms, they might as well start buying them up.
The reality is that the documentation is like software T&Cs. You get to run your farm however you want and Driscolls has some CYA for later.
The reality cuts both ways. You can still sell produce directly to local grocery distributors that pay higher, but the requirements are going to be even more stringent with less guarantees.
Local grocery distributers? I thought the big ones had an absurd market share
What’s your proposed alternative? If the FDA made the 500 page document instead, they aren’t providing day to day oversight.
By logic, a Driscoll or Taylor Farms set of rules needs to sit beyond the regulatory minimum (their lawyers would hate them putting a violation of the regulation in writing).
So, even if a farmer violates the contract, the existing regulation is either insufficient or was also violated.
For starters, I think it's reasonable to break these distributors up into multiple distributors.
One of the big issues with a company like Taylor Farms is that when something like cyclospora hits, we all discovered that the grocery store and restaurants really only had an illusion of choice. Nearly all the lettuce products were actually just Taylor farms. That means the only option for consumers to pressure the company is to stop eating lettuce all together. Healthy competition means these distributors will care a lot more about an outbreak like this because it'll drive people to their competitors rather than just being a blip in this quarter's budget. Markets only work when there's an actual market and not just a single player.
But further, yeah I do think the FDA needs a more active role in doing compliance checks. Ideally this isn't the job of the FDA and instead gets rolled into the USDA or a separate agency dedicated to food products. Having one big agency in charge of both food and drugs isn't great as drugs has ended up with all the actual investment.
Big companies are good at reducing cost, but one way they do that is by making liabilities someone else's problem. The bigger they get, the more they do that. It's a key reason why companies like Walmart are constantly being found to employ slave labor through their contractors. Walmart can rehire the very same contractors (but rebranded) after the controversy blows over and rinse/repeat.
The same dynamic exists with these mega-distributors.
> By logic, a Driscoll or Taylor Farms set of rules needs to sit beyond the regulatory minimum (their lawyers would hate them putting a violation of the regulation in writing).
Why? For years, Tyson Chicken gave written instructions to its undocumented employees on how to stay under the radar for employment, insurance, immigration, tax and healthcare.
It seems to be the (modern) American way.
while it may be tracked, it’s often intentionally obfuscated from the actual end customer.
Consolidation seems to have lead to massive price leverage for the winners and fewer choices for consumers, huge barriers to entry for small grocers and manufacturers
They also have more incentive and capability to optimize right up to (and past) safety lines. And the impersonal corporate distance from the pride in quality of production matters too.
With appropriate regulation and enforcement I agree with you, but in the current regime, I’m not surprised that foodborne illness in America has 10x in 2026.
I think what is really interesting is the American defense of the mega-farms, while like clockwork you have at least once a year, sometimes a few times, a massive outbreak of contaminated salads.
> but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't.
FUD. While we know the mega farms don't because they kill every year through corner cutting. But keep spraying your salads late in the season with human waste water, keep bleaching your chicken and keep telling yourselves that they follow best practices.
Then food safety should be brought to small and local farms. The whole world does this, it's doable and works.
The high efficiency gains and safety disregard the environmental impact caused by pesticides and agrochemicals in general. These are much less of a concern in small farms when they have much less pressure to increase food yield per area.
> but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't.
I don’t think they have the oversight corporate farmers do. But I also don’t think they put immigrants into the field for 12 hour days with no breaks and no bathroom.
There’s something to be said for a farmer who doesn’t pass explosive diarrhea onto the crops he sells me as food….
Sarah Taber has given some interesting talks about this - the short version is there is probably a fair amount of outbreaks caused by small farms, they just don't have the reach to be detected.
I guess you're right that food is historically speaking extremely safe. I guess with this specifically, the issue is about how connected one company can be to the whole food supply.
A farmers market stand may not have perfect food safety either, but their outbreak would be limited to the few people who bought something on the farmers market (or maybe a cafe/restaurant or two that they supply).
Most likely, any harm wouldn't even be traced back to any individual salad because the sample wouldn't be big enough to form a pattern people would notice.
But because they supply so many salads to everywhere, it's a major issue that affects the whole food system.
I guess it's similar to an AWS outage. Companies constantly have outages, but an AWS one takes down half the internet.
I think people who don't understand our amazing food supply should read about the contributions and opinions of Norman Borlaug:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
> Food is being produced at a scale, efficiency, and level of safety unheard of generations ago
There are many sensible places between Taylor Farms and backyard agriculture.
I think competition is still absolutely necessary with heavy restrictions.
Much of the consolidation locations of food production is how illnesses spread among farm animals. I could get eggs from a local farmer because their birds don't socialize around birds with the flu.
Just my take on the matter. It is important to balance the sources.
Obviously it doesn't scale, but buying from small sellers has the advantage that the risks are completely decoupled. You might get cyclosporin or whatever, but it's not going to be a million people being hit by the same thing.
i suspect the concerns are, if your food is killing people or making them sick:
1) how big is the fallout,
2) how insulated from repercussions are you?
if a small local farms food is making people sick, it will only be a few people and word will spread.
a small local farm could more easily go out of business from just a few sick people. the market functions correctly at that scale. if a major corporation does it, the market does not function anywhere close to the same efficiency and the fallout is 1000s and 1000s of people sick or worse.
i think what many are arguing is that the responsibility should scale along with the possible impacts.
And... once I stopped at a roadside farmer's stand and the fruit still had the grocery store chain label and barcode on it, just smaller stuff and perhaps older than at the original store.
it depends, there are certain farmers markets here in LA that have strict minimum criteria in terms of food handling, organic label compliance and food safety before they give a vendor a spot. Also, you can definitely tell just by looking at the quality of the produce of these places vs. the average Vons/Pavilions supermarket
"There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it."
Nope, quite the contrary. By necessity consolidation means fewer individual processing facilities, which in turn means any single facility services a larger percentage of the market. Given fixed odds of any given single processing facility being cross-contaminated by a dirty shipment, by necessity that contamination event will impact a larger volume of product due to bulk mixing. Additionally this cross-contamination event will impact a larger portion of the market due to now-commonplace multi-state product distribution.
I frequently hear "efficiency" touted in the context of the agriculture industry, always by individuals who have no involvement with it, and have to wonder what, exactly, they believe they are cheerleading. A loaf of bread is not significantly cheaper now than it was 50 years ago, so no obvious benefits to the consume accrue from this notional efficiency. What has changed is rural bankruptcy and suicide rates have both skyrocketed, with the consolidation of the AG industry consistently implicated as the primary driver of both.
Worse is, nonetheless, worse. You are sidestepping the issue that DOGE, and RFK Jr. have made things measurably worse in many dimensions. They, and the tech oligarchs whose money is regarded as speech bear responsibility for making things worse. But hey the TVs are bigger and cheap.
Deregulation and the evisceration of enforcement mechanisms isn't what makes food handling at scale efficient and safe. That's just nonsensical. The reason it isn't worse still is the inertia of his system that used to be better run.
Our current government is actively rolling back safety measures so these single points of failure become much more pronounced. I don't know but I would bet that companies like this are actively lobbying to have those safety measure reduced. It seems like deflection what you're saying. Yes, things are better than before, but they could still be better and trying to stop people from talking about that isn't helpful or wise.
Yes, and...
When I buy from a local farmer I expect to wash my produce thoroughly, and if his product makes me sick I can come back later and complain to his face. If that doesn't fix the problem I can probably get him excluded from market participation in the future.
When I buy salad in a bag* at the supermarket, I assume it's been cleaned. If not, a lot more people than me will get sick and we have little power to make the faceless company change their ways.
*Just an example. I don't buy salad in plastic bags because I think that stuff tastes like cardboard.
"if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't."
Really? At least here (Canada), you absolutely do need food safe certifications to sell any food at farmers markets.
> Really? At least here (Canada), you absolutely do need food safe certifications to sell any food at farmers markets.
Sure, but you still have many more human hands on your head of lettuce on a farmers market (plus all the contamination from potential buyers sneezing, grabbing produce to check it out or from the environment in general aka flying birds, mice, rats, ...) than there will be on the mass produced lettuce that maybe saw a human hand at picking and everything since then is automated.
IIRC outbreaks in mass-produced green stuff usually end up tied to farmers or their neighbors spraying fecal based fertilizer at the wrong time. Unfortunately... that makes the blast radius of such a thing much, much worse.
"That's a fine way to get fresh food, but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't."
They most certainly do at my farmer's market, and every vendor has their certification posted for all to see, along with a health inspector rating underneath it.
I myself would trust produce from smaller local farms more than larger farms, however I also live near the farms and know what is in season and don't deal with the problems of people reselling food like they often do in "farmers markets" near or in large urban centers.
Small farms just don't have the pressure, or the large amount of disinterested or temporary employees that large farms have.
Same with smaller slaughter houses. Perhaps they don't have the manpower to deep clean every shift, but they also don't process nearly as much stuff, don't churn through employees as fast, more directly handle and train employees, and don't have some crap corner of the factory where people can be messing around being dumb.
Of course none of that is bullet proof, but small farms and slaughter houses know that if they fuck things up they don't just lose a bit of money and have to deal with some legal problems like Tyson or other large suppliers and distributors, they lose literally everything.
Frankly, that sounds more like a fragile, hyper optimzed system that can can be brought down by a single point of failure.
> allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.
Did they actually do this? All the reporting I saw basically amounted to “we have no friggin’ idea, shrug”. Unless you mean “Taylor Farms”, but that’s not a farm.
Edit: here’s the FDA page about it: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...
They certainly haven’t “pinpointed the farm”. In fact, they have no idea which farm might have been the source. As such, this claim is completely false:
> “they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.”
Consolidation does not improve food safety. Read the ISO's. The standards of the industry are equally effective at a scale of 10 or 1000 different orgs. Everyone watches everyone else, and makes batches traceable, and those who don't are told to shape up by downstream, or they lose downstream consumers.
Consolidation's only benefit is shifting the fiscal gain into fewer pockets, which comes with it's own perverse incentives. (See the Boeing/Airbus duopoly and the problems that causes.)
Safety regulation isn't necessarily the point — an outbreak at a small farm is localized and might impact hundreds of people, Taylor Farms spanned over a dozen states, and this sort of scale is the sort of thing that can cause a epidemic.
The first step is to ban slavery in prison and strict regulation and fines.
Or you can say, that the outbreaks will be much more bigger as a result of centralization of facilities. For example one small batch could contaminate other lettuces in shared facilities.
This consolidation argument only works up to 1-3 processing plants. After a company owns more than that, there's no more efficiency from automation, only market dominance and abuse.
the guy selling lettuce at my farmers market grows it, transports it and sells it. if it makes me sick, he will hear about it, and i bet he has a very strong incentive to avoid that situation over a too big to fail megacorp that is basically insulated from consequences in the current climate.
do we need both options? probably. but painting small scale organic farming as'the same' as the alternative is...not accurate.
> if it makes me sick, he will hear about it
I think one of the problems of our modern food system is it can be difficult for a consumer to pinpoint the source of an infection. Food-borne illnesses can take 24-48 hrs or more to become apparent, by which time you may not know what you ate. Combined with the fact that we can't know where certain ingredients were sourced (one of the topics of TFA), and you can know you're sick, but not why.
It's not difficult at all, food products all have factory + machine origin coding on all packages. If something makes you sick you can easily pin point which region and even which exact factories were used.
If there is an outbreak there are multiple pin points, it's also not hard to do this with local market goods either (unless you live in Texas or something where there are no regulations).
Why do you think this is the first time we've dealt with such situations? The only reason why it's happening now is because Elon Musk had his DOGE goons gut the programs that monitor our food supply.
I hope those DOGE goons have deep pockets because they are about to find out what happens when your supposed benefactors abandon you.
If it takes as long as 48 hours for it to become plain that I'm sick from eating something, then I've probably eaten 6 meals in that timeframe.
If those meals average just 2 ingredient+source combinations that are introduced during that timeframe, then there are 12 different combinations to question and I really have no idea which one of them could be the culprit.
Meanwhile, cyclospora symptoms normally take around 2 weeks to show up. That's 14 days, or 42 meals worth of ingredients. I definitely don't even come close to remembering every meal I had over the last two weeks.
> It's not difficult at all, food products all have factory + machine origin coding on all packages. If something makes you sick you can easily pin point which region and even which exact factories were used.
Speak for yourself. I'd love to have this information available, but I would still find it very difficult to pinpoint what it was that made me sick.
This type of outbreak is challenging because the symptoms take weeks to appear.
(I don't disagree that an administration focused on widespread carnage can be blamed for making things worse.)
The problem is typically you ate a bunch of things in the time before becoming ill and don't know which one (or none) is the culprit. So it takes a government investigation to identify the cause by correlating many different victims' food consumption to find the common factor.
Even when it's totally obvious the cause can be hard to actually prove. A restaurant near me put several people in the hospital with a certain kind of mushroom a couple years back but investigations never conclusively proved the source.
The argument from the article is when things go wrong (as what happened w/ Taylor), the damage is widespread, whereas damage is contained locally.
This analysis is a bit shallow. Massive GSPs grew as a solution to deal with the massive problems that come with greens sourcing.
If an individual farm has an outbreak they can (usually) source it, eliminate it from the supply chain, and switch to an alternative without any interruption to service. That also means you want as large of a geographic distribution of your farm network as possible. (I'm looking at you, Yuma Valley - a semi-regular source of e.coli outbreaks).
As a bonus, the supply chain is much more efficient at this scale. Small farms can have their salads packed in nitrogen filled bags for longer shelf life and less waste.
Fresh leafy greens are naturally just one of the toughest and most vulnerable supply chains. The disappointing answer (like in a lot of these situations) is that being bigger and more massive company is what makes the product better.
A few things were made clear from this Last Week Tonight episode related to food: https://youtu.be/Za45bT41sXg
- Lobbying and specialist groups can and do hamstringing America's ability to make better, safer food at scale. This isn't about big vs small producers. It's a regulatory resourcing problem.
- The FDA / USDA split is something those groups _love_ to take advantage of to further hamstring America's food supply.
The conclusion I've come to is that this gives profit-driven-corporations or foreign adversaries an excellent way to harm America's food chain through these specialist groups.
Fixing the FDA/USDA split is probably a good idea, but it will take a political earthquake to do so, and I'm absolutely willing to vote for people who pledge to make my food both safer and more delicious.
I think the 2 Trump administrations have shown that (multiple) political earthquakes are very possible.
Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players? Obviously the “blast radius” is bigger when it’s a big company with a huge footprint, but are incidents rarer and quality control better?
Completely anecdotal, I see lots or recalls from smaller producers I’ve never heard of, I can imagine they have less scrutiny and oversight.
As a thought experiment, there's a big difference between "3 companies share 70% of a market, while 30 companies sharing the remaining 30%", and "30 companies share the whole market, none being larger than 8%".
In the former example, there's far more pressure on the smaller companies, which is why in such a regime people expect more consistent quality from the big guys, and the smaller guys are often boutique in some way (=offering something unique in their service/product in order to be able to compete). Small guys have a hard time standing up to big guys.
On the other hand, in a regime where no one becomes that huge, like the latter example, there's still pressure, but the competition is fair, just like if all the companies were similarly big (except that you can't have that many big companies in a single industry, by proportion definitions).
Realizing this drove home why inconsistent antitrust enforcement appears to produce bad results. Because it leaves us in the state of the former example. It's also unfortunately the intermediate state of getting serious with antitrust enforcement.
> Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players?
Like.. before? When we didn't have nationwide food recalls that had seeped into nationwide fast food chains and bagged products distributed into every commercial food selling outlet, under a myriad of different names?
The United States population has more than doubled since 1950. There is no "before" that we could actually go back to. The massive, sustained population growth is built on the massive efficiency growth.
I would personally like to see fines commensurate with the size of the organization.
The United States has allowed many industries to consolidate, but the fines they face when they mess up are infinitely small compared to their size.
> Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players?
Not only is the blast radius smaller, but small businesses are less incentivized to cut corners since serious violations pose a greater risk to their business than large businesses. Corruption is essentially legalized in America via lobbying, but only big companies can really afford to lobby and make huge campaign contributions to sway the government in their favor.
Government is meant to be a check on businesses, but that completely falls down once business is big enough to buy the government. It wouldn't surprise me if quality control at large companies is worse for the simple fact that they know who to pay off if they get caught, as Taylor Farms has here.
IIRC that's what happened with the Boar's Head listeria outbreak. Inspectors had repeatedly documented that the facilities were nasty, but BH was allowed to continue operating for years because <reasons>. Things only came to a tipping point after multiple people died.
Yes, smaller companies means there would be no monopoly and they can't bribe politician that much to prevent regulation.
“The only social responsibility of Taylor Farms is to increase investor’s profits” Milton Friedman.
“The only social responsibility of the government is to increase campaign sponsor’s profits”
While the first made up quote is inline with what Friedman said over 45 years ago [0], I'm not seeing anything that resembles the second one? In fact, he warned against the influence that large corporations can have on the government [1].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_T0WF-uCWg
Well it's more about our lived reality, I can't remember the last time any current US politician successfully campaigned then enacted legislation that benefits workers; it's always been forms of corporate welfare and more corporate welfare for like the last 60 years.
The new dealers can be counted on one hand (they're the ones 70+) while the neoliberals have been at the helm for 40 years.
Around 85 members of the current congress are over 70. 13 are over 80.
You've got some weird looking hands :)
It's worth pointing out that Milton Friedman's words are regularly taken out of context. His full quote:
> "In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his 'social responsibility' reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.
> The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct 'social responsibility,' rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it.
> But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other."
His point wasn't that businesses can't act ethically or with responsibility, it's that they shouldn't act to become welfare centers and corporate philanthropies (which was a trend at the time). And I think even the most anti-capitalist person would agree that corporation acting "charitably" should be treated with a huge eye of skepticism.
Funny how "taken out of context" is so often used when the context doesn't make it any better.
That whole "he is in effect imposing taxes" thing is ridiculous. Taxes are forcibly collected by the government, not voluntarily spent by a business. Businesses are not the military, executives are not obligated to follow orders. If the stockholders don't like what an executive does, they can fire the executive and hire someone else. An executive who wants to keep their job therefore might be wise to stick to what the stockholders will like. But they aren't doing anything wrong if they don't, any more than an employee is doing something wrong if they disobey their manager.
It also misses the idea that a lot of misbehavior by companies is stuff that's bad for the company, but they do it anyway because of stupidity, shortsightedness, coordination problems, or the incentives of decisionmakers not lining up with the consequences for the company they work for. Or rather, it doesn't miss the idea but explicitly dismisses it; anything that is actually good for the company is defined by Friedman as not being "social responsibility."
This is a helpful industry article with clear recommendations. Many critiques on competition or consumer issues don't have such precision on their recommendations. I'd donate to them if I was in the US.
"Taylor Farms’ massive operations depend on thousands of workers who process, package, and move its produce. Its workplace safety record includes serious violations and worker complaints."
According to https://futurism.com/science-energy/diarrhea-lettuce-taylor-...
Taylor Farms is "heavily involved in modern-day forced labor."
They contract labor out from AZ Dept of Corrections for $4.75 / hr (but inmates are capped at $1.50 / hr in AZ)
Some of the incarcerated workers were here as non-citizens, detained by ICE, and only then eligible for work / slavery.
1) The work is voluntary, calling voluntary work forced labor is a bold faced lie. The people are being imprisoned, which is obviously not a good situation to be in. If doing that work didn't improve their lives in some way, they could not do it. Since they are voluntarily doing these jobs, presumably it makes their imprisonment better.
2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
Im not sure I would call "You can sit in a concrete box all day and then eat food that was rejected from the dog food plant" versus "Go outside for awhile doing some work, be able to buy a pack of prepackaged ramen when you are done" clearly voluntary.
Have you ever ate prison food? I literally would not feed most of it to my dog.
It’s even deeper than this, because in some states, like Georgia, you’re “rewarded” with good time and a higher chance of parole.
Good time means you get to exit the prison for things like visiting family.
The prisoners are coerced to work for sub-human wages because, if they don’t, they stay in prison longer and can’t see their loved ones.
Would it be better if you could only do the former then?
Also, if you worked 8 hours you'd be able to buy a lot more than a single pack of ramen.
> While ramen costs about 35 cents at Target, prison commissaries charge between 24 cents to $1.06 nationwide.
https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-c...
It would be better if they weren't treated like dogs to begin with and they shouldn't be allowed to undercut local labor costs. Nor should the jail receive 75% of their wage on top of the 400% markup on commissary items they already take. Thats ends up with about 6% of the wages value going to the workers on top of their wages being 3x lower than local workers.
We incentivize creating the conditions of the former, and increased incarceration, by making the latter profitable.
> "You can sit in a concrete box all day and then eat food that was rejected from the dog food plant"
Isn't that not the actual choice though?
Like for a prison with monetary advantages to the inmates working don't they actually send you to solitary for refusing work detail?
The uncomfortable part of that is the involuntary part, not the work.
Prison is not voluntary.
It isn't voluntary and is slavery. Stop justifying it, when the parent clearly mentioned ICE detaining random people off street.
It's not voluntary. They're required to work. It's literal slavery, made legal by the carveout for criminal punishment in the 13th Amendment.
> 2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
That still is massively undercutting regular wages, it's government price dumping. The ethics of prison labor aside, whoever buys prison labor should be forced to pay fair market wages to the prison.
I'm on board with that.
But, again, that's not a Taylor Farms issue, that's a government issue.
Personally, I think it's a very good thing to let prisoners work as long as the working conditions are the same standards as free people, including any wage laws.
Prisoners in most states are literally underfed, and then "allowed" to buy more food, like a single packet of ramen for a whole dollar.
This is because many states are full of people who are both weirdly "Free market" brain, to the point that they believe it's a good idea to tell the warden "Any dollar from this budget that you do not spend feeding inmates, you get to personally keep" is a good idea because they have no knowledge of systems design or perverse incentives, and more importantly, because they genuinely want prisoners to suffer. No, this is not a joke. In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.
When people joke about "I should go to jail, at least I will get three square meals a day", that's just false. Most prisons are only required to serve two meals a day. The quality of those meals varies from "Okay for a middle school lunch if you put a gun to my head" to "Fyre festival had better food, and this is not a joke"
> In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.
This is an incredible claim, so I'm trying to find out where you got that from. Seems like maybe that was just in Alabama and they changed the law already?
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alabama-prison-meals-la...
https://law.justia.com/codes/alabama/2024/title-14/chapter-6...
The commissary markup is absolutely true, but "deliberately underfed" is as far as I can tell, completely untrue. Most states actually have calorie minimum rules. Arkansas is 2300 per day. Kentucky 2400 per day. Both states mandate annual menu reviews by a third-party dietician. New York state's guideline is 2800 per day + 90g protein. California 2500 per day. The Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities additionally states there are to be at least 3 meals per day, two of them hot, and no more than 14 hours between dinner and breakfast.
These are all right within the USDA's general population daily calorie guidance of 2-3 thousand per day for males.
It's possible that some of this is down to the "Prison" vs "Jail" distinction?
But I can't source what I said.
What I can source is that prisoners largely report going hungry. That's a completely different problem though.
I cannot remove or edit my comment. Thank you for the push back.
The reality is in a lot of prison situations the people are bored and the money is going to non-essentials from a commissary.
It's definitely an extremely exploitative situation and overall icky, but the people who jump in to compare it to slave labor are kind of embarrassing themselves in unnecessary hyperbole.
> Taylor Farms and its CEO, Bruce Taylor, have donated millions to Republican and Trump Administration-associated political action committees (PACs) since 2025. This includes a $1 million contribution to both MAGA Inc. and a super PAC dedicated to electing House Republicans.
> ...on July 16, the same day the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced their investigation into the multistate Cyclospora outbreak, Taylor Farms executives met with White House and FDA officials
Ah, well, there it is. Good for them that they're able to get away with it. Corporate protection is bought and sold out in the open.
Time to break up Big Food.
There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers, but it comes at a serious cost. With regulations continuously eroding this will only get worse.
My armchair assessment is the best way to push back is for farmers to join together into co-ops and find a middle ground between the efficiency of scale and the concerns of food safety and ethical working conditions.
Luckily the article includes a PDF with multiple recommendations at the end. https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Policy-Reco...
I know this sounds crazy, but maybe we can stop eroding regulations. This obsession with 'regulations bad' is going to destroy us all.
> There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers
Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I think most Americans would be shocked as to where their food comes from.
I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a macdonalds burger.
Everyone is invested in maintaining the illusion. And that collision is rampant across all of food: Pepsi price fixing with Walmart, the price of beef at retail being long decoupled from wholesale / Agri Stats...
>Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I would fully support such a mandate, for meat products too.
It would be interesting, giving consumers more information is nearly always better, it opens the door for open source analysis, the 2nd and 3rd order effects would probably be mostly harmless and highly entertaining.
>I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a McDonalds burger.
They're be too busy being angry that "BNSF Alliance Intermodal Facility, Haslet Texas" is in fact not an avocado farm.
The illusion is the Whole Foods shopper thinking that the McDonalds food is crap. Great marketing from the "health food" industry making you think that it's McDonalds making you fat. Raw cane sugar (sold to you at a premium markup over the already more expensive production cost) is, by implication, less bad for you.
this sounds a lot like "vote with your wallet" and then you look in 99% of the wallets and it's like, here's a few million dollars vs trillionaires.
I don't think we're working against trillionaires here. I don't think there's anyone in this situation with that sort of net worth.
We're working against the desire to get the basic needs of life (in this case, food) met for the lowest possible price.
The oligarchs are gutting the regulatory apparatus that stops this stuff from happening.
https://www.farmaid.org/issues/corporate-power/corporate-pow...
There will be a next time and it will be even worse.
I mean we just let over 2,000,000 people die from covid in this country and most people wouldn't even mask to spare anyone or themselves
All we did was make vaccines taboo or difficult to access
Then we put the worse possible people in charge, again
There is zero care for health or safety anymore
There will most definitely be a next time
stop eating meat lol
we're living in 2026
otherwise i don't really give a shit. not my problem, and i don't really care.
edit: meant to reply to the meat grinder comment, not root lol
point still stands
I don't know if you're a bit out of the loop, but ... meat is very much not at issue in this case.
my bad i replied to the root instead of the comment about meat grinders
TFA is about contaminated lettuce my meatless friend