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anotherhue

Am I misreading things or is increasingly the case that LETTUCE is deadlier then undercooked meat?

Is there a radiation treatment or similar for lettuce? Can it simply be washed thoroughly?

I don't even like it.

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> Is there a radiation treatment or similar for lettuce?

Yes. Lettuce which has been sterilized with ionizing radiation has the radura logo.

TIL, thanks!

Fruits and vegetables don’t have the same defense mechanisms that animals do so they can be more dangerous but I think it depends on a lot of factors like nearby animal farms and the regulatory landscape. It’s easier to enforce sanitary conditions at a slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant so the meat doesn’t get contaminated than it is to wash every bacteria colony off of all our produce. The animal’s immune system protects the inside until it gets slaughtered, which isn’t practical for most produce which has exposed surfaces.

The plants get sanitized regularly with cleaning chemicals made to kill everything and have to adjust the frequency based on the number of animals slaughtered. IIRC doing the cleaning procedure more than once a day is not unusual for a large slaughterhouse. You just can’t get that kind of cleanliness from the entire produce supply chain, especially when it’s not plastic wrapped like meat.

Undercooked meat also tends to have a much smaller blast radius like a restaurant, whereas an e-coli outbreak can contaminate produce that goes out to a large number of grocery stores and customers.

Fruits and vegetables are also often eaten raw. Often sold at grocery stores where water misting systems keep them wet.

If I could opt-in to having my produce irradiated, I'd do it in a second. Washing or not, insurance is nice to have. Nuke those little pathogens to the great Petri dish in the sky.

In bad third world countries salads can be one of the iffiest thing to eat as the water can contaminated. Also the locals often don't eat salads and so haven't fixed the system, so tourists suffer. It's less of a problem than it used to be as most places now chlorinate the water.

I think the issue is that undercooked meat is (usually) obvious, but unwashed vegetables fly under the radar more easily. And too many places aren't washing it thoroughly. :/

But for some types of meat, they are voluntarily ordered undercooked, such as steak, eggs, even burgers.

Uncooked greens have always had the highest rate of food poisoning/parasites/whathaveyou. It's not a new thing.

Trichinosis, huh. That's a different parasitic nematode, and it grows in your muscles instead of in your brain. Preferable I suppose, depending which is more useful, hard to decide.

Except you're only likely to get this from certain wild animals due to the hygienic conditions required for agriculture.

Part of the lifecycle needs dirt. And hogs in the USA are all raised on concrete, so it is basically nonexistent in pork here.

maybe commercial hogs but homestead farmers probably don't raise them on concrete. This is good info to know though!

For those, they tend to deworm. Also, you can destroy the parasites in the meat with the proper freezing protocol.

Or by cooking it well done, which is why you sometimes still hear people say to be careful to cook pork thoroughly.

Most of the time the danger of lettuce is e-coli that's agricultural runoff from the animal industry, so ironically it's the meat making the veggies unsafe. Obviously this parasite is a different case but that's hardly typical.

And after all, there's no guarantee it came from the lettuce and not from the seafood, as they say in the article.

I'm not sure about "undercooked" meat, as there can be huge variance in risk based on meat type. But it's pretty much always been the case that uncooked fruits and veggies have been the cause of more food borne illness than cooked meat (not sure if that number includes raw/undercooked).

I like lettuce, even iceberg lettuce, but not at the cost of ingesting parasites.

> even iceberg lettuce

Even? Isn't it best lettuce?

Obviously opinions vary, but a lot of people consider it to be one of the worst of common lettuce varieties. Like the Red Delicious apple, it's popular because it holds up well during transport and storage, not because it's particularly good.

It tastes like water. Romaine is better.

The most dangerous of the lettuce https://veggieknowledge.com/was-romaine-lettuce-recalled/

Raw foods are most likely to get you. Even those pre washed or treated bags. You don’t know what other handling happened after the cleaning. So might be contaminated again.

I can't believe some people eat those without washing it themselves. Might as well be a petri dish if there's a time when the refrigeration isn't on during transit.

I think I've seen somebody compared lettuce and raw milk to argue that the latter isn't too bad.

>> LETTUCE is deadlier then undercooked meat

Underbleached lettuce.

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