Comment by arbitrary_name
13 hours ago
the guy selling lettuce at my farmers market grows it, transports it and sells it. if it makes me sick, he will hear about it, and i bet he has a very strong incentive to avoid that situation over a too big to fail megacorp that is basically insulated from consequences in the current climate.
do we need both options? probably. but painting small scale organic farming as'the same' as the alternative is...not accurate.
> if it makes me sick, he will hear about it
I think one of the problems of our modern food system is it can be difficult for a consumer to pinpoint the source of an infection. Food-borne illnesses can take 24-48 hrs or more to become apparent, by which time you may not know what you ate. Combined with the fact that we can't know where certain ingredients were sourced (one of the topics of TFA), and you can know you're sick, but not why.
It's not difficult at all, food products all have factory + machine origin coding on all packages. If something makes you sick you can easily pin point which region and even which exact factories were used.
If there is an outbreak there are multiple pin points, it's also not hard to do this with local market goods either (unless you live in Texas or something where there are no regulations).
Why do you think this is the first time we've dealt with such situations? The only reason why it's happening now is because Elon Musk had his DOGE goons gut the programs that monitor our food supply.
I hope those DOGE goons have deep pockets because they are about to find out what happens when your supposed benefactors abandon you.
If it takes as long as 48 hours for it to become plain that I'm sick from eating something, then I've probably eaten 6 meals in that timeframe.
If those meals average just 2 ingredient+source combinations that are introduced during that timeframe, then there are 12 different combinations to question and I really have no idea which one of them could be the culprit.
Meanwhile, cyclospora symptoms normally take around 2 weeks to show up. That's 14 days, or 42 meals worth of ingredients. I definitely don't even come close to remembering every meal I had over the last two weeks.
> It's not difficult at all, food products all have factory + machine origin coding on all packages. If something makes you sick you can easily pin point which region and even which exact factories were used.
Speak for yourself. I'd love to have this information available, but I would still find it very difficult to pinpoint what it was that made me sick.
This type of outbreak is challenging because the symptoms take weeks to appear.
(I don't disagree that an administration focused on widespread carnage can be blamed for making things worse.)
The problem is typically you ate a bunch of things in the time before becoming ill and don't know which one (or none) is the culprit. So it takes a government investigation to identify the cause by correlating many different victims' food consumption to find the common factor.
Even when it's totally obvious the cause can be hard to actually prove. A restaurant near me put several people in the hospital with a certain kind of mushroom a couple years back but investigations never conclusively proved the source.