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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

Why though? There’s nothing inherent about speeding production up, producing more at once, or increasing profits that makes things cleaner or safer, and the obvious argument is the opposite. If the regulations that force cleanliness and safety get peeled back too far, you could be left with all of the conditions for worst case scenarios because of how much more efficient the thing has become.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

As you seem to know, the prion example was to highlight how industrial scale operations create industrial scale problems, namely the bone-and-meal feed that was throwing all the cow brains into a common pool from which all were feeding. I understand that sanitary practices don't affect this.

> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means

I didn't say this and I don't know where you got it from.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> ... 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

I used to read small/tiny/hobby farming blogs. Several of them were complaining about upgraded regulations that ended up closing the small slaughtering shops that they had been using.

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