> both seem to carry plenty of baggage
Salads can literally kill you via the listeria they bring.
Salads can literally kill you via the listeria they bring.
Above all I’d love to see better technology and attention for food safety, though. It’s stunning to see how many people suffer from food born illness today — something I’d thought was far more under control up until my mid 30s. It’s better under many circumstances and I’m not going to pretend it’s anything like it has been in the past. However, we could do much, much better than we do now and it would literally save lives.
In terms of food safety and risk of pathogens, salad is far, far more dangerous than steak.
Animals also accumulate things like heavy metals and the drugs they are given.
Plants can be washed of pesticides fairly well and they accumulate these chemicals at much lower rates, but meat can’t be washed of what has accumulated in it.
Overall the health outcomes of consuming plants appear to be better than those of consuming meat.
The primary contaminant in steak is E. coli. You are more likely to consume E. coli from a salad than from a steak.
A quick google search yields a few results, each pointing to the same conclusion:
https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/attribution/attribution-...
> Meat and poultry, a combination of four animal food categories, Beef, Game, Pork, and Poultry, accounted for fewer illnesses, but for 29% of deaths.
Poultry accounted for the most deaths (19%); many of those were caused by Listeria and Salmonella infections. This rate is partly due to three large Listeria outbreaks linked to sliced processed deli turkey meat; the last such large outbreak occurred in 2002.
Produce, on the other hand, accounted for 27% of deaths. However, it's important to distinguish here that produce accounts for 27% of all deaths, but animal products accounts for all of the rest. That's 73% of all food borne illness coming from animal products.
You are far more likely to die from food borne illness caused by animal products; especially agricultural animals.
Steak is significantly safer than other types of meat, and steak in particular is significantly safer than salad.
As your link notes, chicken is one of the worst offenders
Your data supports my point, not yours.
If I remember correctly it was far better to eat organic vegetables/fruit and “normal” meat, than the other way around, and only marginally worse than all organic. The explanation being mammals have kidneys and a liver that we no longer eat (most of us at least).
From this one could guess insects could be worse than steak.
Sorry I don’t have a reference right now, or know if this research was heavily skewed somehow by the meat industry. I would be happy to hear more from someone knowledgeable on the subject.
please stop with the weasel scare words.
We are exposing ourselves to dangerous substances every day due to bioaccumulation in animal foods.
Cooking has been our food safety technology for millennia.
Even for milk, pasteurization is a way of cooking it.
If you as a human have been exposed to an extremely "clean" environment, your immune system will not have had the opportunity to get trained and strong. So you might get a severe infection at the first opportunity.
However, the other extreme can be very bad. I wouldn't recommend living in a lush tropical forest without any protection from novel viruses and bacteria spread from all kinds of insects and other vectors. Your body may not be able to take that kind of bio-warfare against it.
So, the million dollar question is: How much should we train our immune system by exposing ourselves to the natural environment and how much should we protect it?
Different people will put themselves on different sides of this spectrum.
The "middle" ground is of of course the best, some self-exposure to natural environment and some self-protection. But it is difficult to quantify this "middle" ground and that is why we have many of these arguments.
The way I see people handle food, I'm not surprised at all. People leave lunch meat out of the fridge for sometimes hours, cut the fungus off things and eat the rest (which is ok sometimes, but often isn't), rinse chicken breast in the sink, use the same tools and cutting boards to handle uncooked and cooked food... And I can keep going.
So many people have no clue how food should be handled, or willfully ignore what they do know.
I think a lot of the time when people say they have "food poisoning" what they really have is digestive distress from eating poorly handled food. There's an incredible lack of awareness around safe food handling (which is really very simple) and most of it stems from laziness or inattention. Even if you only have one cutting board, cut the chicken last, and clean the cutting board correctly, etc. Don't leave a knife on the counter and use it over and over. Wash it with the rest of the dishes. If it was used to cut meat, don't use it again until it is properly sanitized. Don't leave leftovers sitting on the stove or counter for hours, esp. things prone to going off. And so on.
It's better, but it's still not good. I don't drink organic alcohol, either; it's harmful to your health no matter how you slice it.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/attribution-image.html#f...
Without manure being used the risk is diminished by orders of magnitude.
It doesn't seem to rank the causes it lists, but googling it suggests widespread contamination caused by fecal matter runoff from animal ag finding its way into irrigation water.
I suspect we rarely grow greens immediately after applications, but to say only backyard operations use animal manure isn't true.
Evidently this is a common and well-researched practice in the USA as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286297896_Animal_Ma...
The data is also from 2008. Things have likely changed since US households and food prep has been heavily focused on cleanliness around animal products but nowhere near as much focus is on produce. The 'pre-washed' pre-packaged produce is especially risky.