Comment by pdonis
9 months ago
> I like having food hygiene standards - it means I don't have to worry about chalk in my bread, arsenic in my sweets, or antibiotics in my beef.
And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Also, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food, I've got some oceanfront property in North Dakota I'd like to sell you. You do know, don't you, that antibiotics in your beef, for example, is done all the time in factory farming with government approval?
> prevent all possible bad things
Well that seems like a bad faith interpretation of my argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning
You included in your argument at least one bad thing that, as I pointed out, is not only not stopped by government regulation, it's explicitly permitted by it. The fact that there was a bad thing that happened before government regulation, which a government regulation was then passed to try to prevent, doesn't make your argument valid.
Which government are we talking about, please?
> And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards
Narrator: "Most humans didn't survive past year five due to preventable illnesses and food born contamination, the humans' ancestor's infant mortality rate was rather high before the age of food safety and soap".
> Narrator
Of what? Where are you getting this from?
It's a reference to the Arrested Development television show.
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>And yet somehow humanity survived for tens or hundreds of thousands of years without such standards, and without having our ancestors' food poisoned.
Sure, with reduced life expectancy. If you're fine dying out in your 30's, maybe 40's at best you can eat whatever you want. Your body is pretty resilient to poison short term.
>, if you actually believe that government food hygiene standards prevent all possible bad things from being in your food
Extremist takes aren't doing you a favor here. Like I just said, we can resist a surprising about of poisons short term. Many people indulge in alcohol after all. We have no need to strive for "all bad things" out of our food.
> with reduced life expectancy.
Most of that was due to high infant mortality. The average person who lived to adulthood did not die in their 30's.