Comment by AdamN
16 hours ago
There's a common pattern with other safety improvements that as safety controls improve, people simply push the envelope further. Cars get safer but then the drivers also get more confident doing things that nobody would get close to doing on an old car because it would spin out before then.
With the elevated standards of megascale agriculture you have the issue now where diseases from a lettuce farm in Mexico could affect somebody's health in NYC a month later in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in a previous era.
There's no complete solution but in this particular case it's important to remember that salads are actually pretty serious foodborne—illness vectors and they need to be heavily rinsed and ideally cleaned with a bleach or vinegar solution. It's one of the reasons that salads are traditionally on the no-eat list for pregnant women.
It's the argument of Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691004129/no...
which is a book that I enjoy less now than the first time I read it. He was worried that shipping and aviation were both going to get more dangerous whereas that perception of a safety crisis in shipping in the 1970s went away and aviation got much much safer.
Never read that book but I also agree that safety can be demonstrably improved and it's pretty clear that aviation is safer now than in the 70s. One thing that may have helped is that regulations have been slow to loosen since advanced safety mechanisms have been implemented. One could imagine safety regulations loosening alot and ending up back in a lower-safety aviation world.
Megascale agriculture is also the reason you can easily get fresh lettuce at any market in NYC during the winter.
That's a bit of a myth - it's totally doable in greenhouses and in fact in NYC you get really good lettuce grown locally with hydroponics. I miss Gotham Greens now that I think about it, really good greens: https://www.gothamgreens.com/
There are maybe 2 months out of the year that you can't grow lettuce in NYC in a greenhouse. It's not that cold.
Tomatoes prove your point better, but I still would never eat any of the tomatoes in an NYC supermarket in the winter, as they don't taste much better than soggy cardboard.