FDA Admitted in Print That Nothing It Knows of Will Wash Cyclospora Off Lettuce | Hacker News Reader

FDA Admitted in Print That Nothing It Knows of Will Wash Cyclospora Off Lettuce

marlerblog.com

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Apologies if this was in a prior thread but detection and washing are irrelevant when the parasite is dead.

How Food Irradiation Works

https://www.cdc.gov/radiation-health/food-irradiation/index....

https://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publication/?...

There is 'cold plasma':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonthermal_plasma

Irradiating enough to kill cyclospora oocysts would ruin the lettuce though.

It seems the studies that have been done indicate pretty high dosages required for noticeable damage to occur and that even then it can be minimized with packaging changes and care:

https://staging.billmarler.com/blog/pros-and-cons-of-commerc...

At the 1.0 kGy level required to effect Cyclospora, little difference was noticed in lettuce packaged in MAP instead of air, but some browning in air.

Food irradiation is a topic with depth. Spices are irradiated like crazy because there's no nutrition to nuke and they are insect fodder. Irradiation can be a continuum across food types. I'll bet a heavily nuked Pringle is indistinguishable from an unnuked Pringle except perhaps for improved phosphorescence.

> The process is safe and effective.

What interesting phrasing.

TFA could really benefit from a concise thesis statement. It jumps around randomly and repeats facts that don't appear to be building a strong case for anything specific. Reading between the lines, it seems like the author believes the guidance document should include more on supply chain water testing, but I don't have enough context to know what reason they think it was not included or why they consider that reasoning to be flawed.

The article appears to be trying to smuggle in a notion of “the organism cannot be killed in water” via a path of indirectly repeating the reference that the water cannot kill the organism in the food; because the chemical treatment of the water is therefore insufficient to avoid cross contamination, testing becomes an absolute requirement.

I get real suspicious of ulterior motives whenever such equivocation makes a prominent appearance in an argument.

Sanitizing water won't kill it? Not chlorination?

What is cyclospora, anyway? It is not a bacterium or thing that I am familiar with. It is parasitic; it is a eukaryote; beyond those two definitions, it might as well be an alien from Venus because I'm not familiar.

How does it get into produce? Does it seep inside from irrigation? Fall on it in droplets? Grow inside the vegetables, waiting for human host? Where does it come from?

Just how do you protect from it and mitigate it?

By the way, chopped salads and processed produce isn't typically washed at the destination. It's not a good thing to wash a salad you're just about ready to eat. Once I grabbed a "salad spinner" gadget at the thrift store that was supposed to spin the moisture out of a large volume of salad, but if food service set about washing their already-shredded lettuce, we'd have soggy yucky tacos.

Taylor Farms is a very big player in the produce market. Every salad kit I've ever bought has been either Taylor Farms or a store-brand, and I'd wager most of those store-brands are simply Taylor Farms in disguise. To know they were supplying Taco Bell and other food service... they must be real big.

I picked up salad kits at Target. They say Salinas. I believe they are non-Taylor. But there was plenty of Taylor Farm product on the shelves as well, also professing a Salinas origin. I would suppose that we are still dealing with a chiefly Mexican outbreak, and that Salinas, CA is safe for now?

> What is cyclospora, anyway? It is not a bacterium or thing that I am familiar with. It is parasitic; it is a eukaryote; beyond those two definitions, it might as well be an alien from Venus because I'm not familiar.

It's a protist, which is pretty much "miscellaneous eukaryote".

Eukariotes include animals, plants, fungus, and the protists. As a sibling comment say, protists is a catch all bag for all the other eukaryotes, that include most algae, amebas and a looooooooooooooooooot of different unicelular organism.

In particular the closest relative of cyclospora that <allcaps>I</allcaps> can recognize is the one that causes toxoplasmosis, and more far away the one that cause malaria. But it's a very big and diverse bag, so I'd not extract too many conclusion from that. It also includes a lot of nice behaved things, not everyone is a nasty parasite there, just some of the most famous.

> Sanitizing water won't kill it? Not chlorination?

I guess the chlorine in tap water is not enough, but pure concentrated bleach would kill it. But I'm not sure and it also ruin your salad. Also, I guess enough heat would kill it too, and it also ruin your salad. https://xkcd.com/1217/

The article is written by a robot. Ask another one to summarize or to change the style from the current meandering stew of LLMisms to something more concise.

I’m not sure the author has any options worth paying attention to since they didn’t care enough to write them down. Plus, I don’t particularly trust this article, since I have no domain expertise in this area and my bs detector doesn’t work in this circumstance.

I've been buying local produce, when I can. I signed up for a CSA share in the spring and get an assortment of fresh veggies every week. The same place does have a local farm stand, so you don't have to sign up for the whole summer if you just want to buy some veggies.

There are a couple of "Saturday market" type things in my town, where people have booths selling produce also, but from what I can see there is no requirement that they grow their own produce, and I suspect they just buy from SYSCO or wherever. They always have things that aren't in season where I live.

I had this exact same epiphany when going to one of my local "farmers markets" last saturday. I noticed a suspicious amount of vegetables that should've died during the last few weeks of this spiraling heat and they were all perfectly green.

It made me suspicious and I found myself thinking about bylaws for farmers markets. I don't think there are any; so I'm sure there is nothing stopping vendors from just reselling sysco products for "organic" labeled, "locally-grown" products.

Wish there was a feasible way of checking, for now I will continue to buy my goods from Whole Foods and Natural Groceries near me.

In Florida there have been some articles talking about how some local farmers markets produce may actually be the rejected produce from the southern grocery chain Publix, rather than local growers selling directly.

https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2016/food/farm-to-fab...

Where I am, all the farmers markets are full of produce marked with the local grocery chain, or boxes from mexican grocery chains. I suspect they all "fell off the truck", since there are exactly zero of these crops in this region.

There’s some rather infamous examples I’ve seen recently of people unpacking grocery store bins at farmers markets. There is no provenance around the origin of the goods in most markets, more common of a problem than people might think.

In Central Texas when peaches are in season people set up roadside stalls, but there’s no guarantee you are getting an actual local grown peach instead of whatever was on the shelf at the grocery store that day

Thankfully most of us have a provenance detector attached to our faces. If you've ever worked with freshly harvested produce, the aroma is, well... distinct, which most store-shelf products aren't. Not preferable, but a semi-reliable fallback.

I find most in-store produce genuinely symbolic of the real thing. Makes me think the growth was due to coercion and mentalism. A palpable snapshot of reality, with a high price.

My local farmers market has different colored table cloths to indicate the source of the vegetables. I’m sure sure if or how it’s checked.

Generally speaking, from having family who were organic market garden farmers who also did a few farmers markets stalls…

Smaller markets tend to be better and more curated/policed by the organizers. This typically means you are driving to a smaller town on the outskirts of a larger urban area. If you are an infrequent buyer this is probably your best bet, plus just the eyeball test.

If you are a weekly shopper, it’s a bit easier to sus out reliably even for the larger markets. Find booths that have the same people staffing them most of the time, who can speak to the product. Look for “ugly” produce - the stuff that looks like it’s made for display at Whole Foods is almost always going to be commercially grown since those varieties are for aesthetics vs. taste. And of course look for booths that generally tend to only have stuff that is in season. Their product mix should shift throughout the growing season in most places.

The latter can by a tiny bit tricky since some local farms are going to have hoop houses and even greenhouses for a few different kinds of veggies. The hoop houses especially are used in part to “time shift” the growing season so as to take advantage of a market where you are a few weeks early or late compared to competitors.

Certainly not perfect but most of the time it’s immediately obvious to me which booths are obviously simply reselling. I’m sure some operations can fake it a bit better, but I would be surprised if I was wrong very often on false positives.

We took our garden more seriously this year and we are totally overwhelmed with tomatoes and cucumbers. I planted potatoes for the first time this year and they are ready to go. Had a huge pea harvest earlier in the summer. Unfortunately it's been too hot for our lettuce.

It's been fun planning meals around what we have (supplementing what we need from the store obviously)

Congrats! Being overwhelmed with tomatoes and cucumbers sounds like a great opportunity to can tomatoes and pickle cucumbers.

TLDR: nobody is testing irrigation water for cyclospora, it's a blind spot.

FDA has failed. We’re going to need you start to look up Costco and Walmart or local organic cart body’s to regulate because the FDA can’t.

Surely has nothing to do with rolling back literal decades of safety regulations in 2 years.

It was fine for decades, I wonder what changed. Maybe the republicans did something stupid like putting a bunch of incompetent jackasses in charge.

It wasn't fine for decades. Both democrats and republicans allowed regulatory capture to take place.

Perhaps. But did democrats famously take a “chainsaw for ‘government waste’” to all major federal agencies? No. That was a handful of Republican edgelords.

Oh yes of course, both sides. That's why there were huge cyclospora outbreaks in 2022. Because of the Democrats.

You can track food outbreaks by administration pretty easily. This isn’t hidden knowledge.

These bootlicking cowards all play the same game. 6 years ago, none of these dipshits had any complaints about the FDA besides - maybe - that it was a bit slow approving new medications.

Then Trump 2.0 comes along and puts the known fascist and all-around shit heal musk in charge of gutting the federal government. Now the FDA isn’t working, USAID is gone, FEMA is a disaster, we’re critically short of air traffic controllers, and on and on it goes but anytime someone points out the obvious damage that the republicans have done the legion of drooling racists comes around to babble about how actually the FDA was broken the whole time. It’s insulting to anyone with a memory that isn’t wholly owned by Rupert Murdoch.

yes, Democrats put ideologues in charge of the EPA, took a 'chainsaw' to government, and gutted the agencies.

you're so right.

go peddle your mediocrity somewhere else.

Let's remember, though, not to fall into the trap of thinking that its current incompetence is intrinsic.

Playbook: anti-regulation entities capture government, strip down regulators, and when disaster ensues, point to regulators' inability to prevent or address issues as an argument to further scale down the watchdog's power.

its definitely the playbook: screw up the govt then make the point that cant do anything right

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