Comment by Espressosaurus
13 hours ago
It's a lot like AWS. Yes, the uptime is likely to be better than your on-prem solution. However, unlike when yours inevitably falls over and has zero impact on anybody else, when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet.
Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.
Smaller organizations means redundancies and options. Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency. Redundancy is good.
> I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.
1) Why? The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier.
2) Why only now? Bagged leafy greens are notorious for outbreaks. The extra processing steps means greater opportunity for introducing contamination (more people handling the produce), and greater opportunity for cross-contamination.
This food safety expert/activist/litigator has explained both of those points many times: https://www.marlerblog.com/ Though, being middle-aged and perhaps with better-than-average recollection, I connected the dots to bagged leafy greens years ago, across many news cycles, and to the risk of food poisoning from vegetables generally, through hard, personal experience.
> it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier
It really, really is not. They are massive and are a supplier for a huge number of restaurants.
> The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier.
The mixed messaging certainly didn’t help.
One day it’s Taylor Farms and the next the FDA was apologizing.
And even once it was found to be Taylor Farms, you can’t control every Taco Bell or anything else.
Mostly it just killed any consumer confidence in greens
For the recent cyclospora outbreak, a relatively tiny number of people were affected. Per the CDC[1]: 17,180 cases; 922 Hospitalizations; 2 deaths.
Not to diminish this for anyone affected, but the safety of driving cars is far worse than that and most of us do that daily.
I never stopped buying or eating lettuce.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/cases/index.html
I was one of those affected. The official CDC numbers are underestimates, because they're only counting cases confirmed by culture. My doc asked enough questions to make sure it wasn't your typical stomach flu or food poisoning and got me the antibiotics ASAP which I appreciated. I assume I'm not counted as a result. I have to assume others aren't as well.
This. As an infectious disease epidemiologist, the number of people who will work their way into laboratory confirmed case reports is a small fraction of the total number of people impacted.
You are almost certainly not reflected in those numbers.
Furthermore the present CDC was gutted by an administration whose solution to Covid was to stop counting
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Comparing it to car safety does put it in perspective, but at the same time the safety of cars has nothing to do with food safety. Considering the necessity of food for life, and the fact our current population size is dependent on industrialized farming, I think it's worth to scrutinize food safety and hold it to a high standard.
The US is uniquely dependent on cars for survival, it’s probably not appropriate to presume that cars are less necessary. Anyways, if you live in the middle of nowhere you can grow your own food. If you live deep in the city, the chances of getting sick from McD’s or whatever is pretty low.
We do hold food safety to a high standard. We have some of the highest standards on the planet.
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> but the safety of driving cars is far worse than that and most of us do that daily.
this "whattabout"ism is brought up during every safety discussion. can we please accept that 1/ everyone knows about the car issue, and 2/ the car issue being a problem does not mean we should stop talking about other issues that exist.
No one is saying we shouldn’t work to improve the safety of multiple systems at a time. But it is helpful to keep perspective over relative safety.
People are very prone to overweight the risk of things that are prominent in the media.
I'm not convinced about 1. There are a lot of things we could be doing about a 9/11's worth of dead people every single month that we just don't.
In any case, it's a good barometer for judging personal risk. I don't stress about the danger when I get into my car, so I probably shouldn't stress about the danger from something substantially less likely to take me out. It contextualizes a number by comparing it to something most of us do every day.
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The economic utility of car transportation is also far higher than that of lettuce.
My entire family was affected. We didn’t report it but the impact was felt.
We also stopped buying lettuce.
Honestly I did not know the numbers at all, so thank you, but those are higher than what I would have guessed.
i have health insurance, i know i got it, and i rode it out without going to the doctor (not saying that was the right choice, it's just what i did).
i guarantee you that first number is wildly non-illustrative of the reach of this outbreak.
"not to diminish" as you wave away 2 people that have died and make a false equivalency to traffic accidents.
This is not a data exercise, this is real life and 1 person getting sick from this stuff is too much.
> This is not a data exercise, this is real life [...]
You may not wish to hear this, but real life is very much a data exercise:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
ONE person getting SICK is too much??? We’ve never been within a million miles of this random bar you’ve set. No country has. It’s absolutely insane to try and hold the position that our food must be so perfectly clean that it cannot ever get anyone sick. That would almost certainly be impossible. If you can’t even engage with reality, nobody will take these massive statements seriously.
inefficiency often creates redundancy, but they are not synonyms.
Redundancy may be inefficient, but you can also build redundant systems that looking at from a micro perspective seem inefficient but what you see is only a local inefficiency; if you distribute their effects far enough in space and time you find that they are actually at a macro scale more efficient than not having them because they prevent breakdowns that destroy all the smaller systems held within the bigger one.
A possible issue with consolidation is "too big to fail." The bigger the company, the more likely that the government goes into denial about it rather than meeting the problem head-on.
From a strictly utilitarian perspective, more redundancy will result in more deaths, since food handling expertise is concentrated in larger organizations.
I say this as someone who gets most of my veg from a local CSA. It's not because I think it's safer. It probably isn't.
> when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet
Except AWS doesn't fall over, regions do. The problem isn't using one provider, it's that everyone uses one region of that provider. When that region goes down, so many people report outages that it seems like AWS as a whole went down, but it didn't.
Same basic deal with Taylor Farms. It was only lettuce sourced from Central Mexico, and it was distributed to the east coast and some central states. Page 18 of this PDF (https://www.taylorfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Taylo...) shows all the growing regions. Of all 22, only 1 sent out bad lettuce. But popular opinion is that the all of it was bad.
So the risk wasn't their scale. If anything, the risk was their customers (the walmarts, costcos, krogers, etc) not labeling where it came from or more stringently tracking these things or planning for an "incident". None of this is new, everybody knows leafy greens are the most likely source of food poisoning.
Just like AWS isn't to blame when customer sites we depend on go down from one bad service in one region, we shouldn't be blaming Taylor Farms. We should be blaming the customer-companies we all use who didn't plan for a very predictable failure.
> Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.
These are two unrelated events though.
Other consolidated suppliers have had events in the past, and they did not 'wipe out' our food supply because they identified the root cause and the impacted supplies, initiated a recall, and the rest of their redundant, distributed systems remained intact.
The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility.
If we had 20 'local' distributors who were all bought by Taylor farms and one of those locations had a significant health issue, there wouldn't be a large issue if Taylor identified which one had the failing and then distributed their other 19 location's product to the area facing the shortage due to it's location's product being recalled.
> The issue going on with Taylor Farms isn't their consolidation, it's their lack of taking responsibility.
Right, and the issue with the King of England wasn't the consolidation of all power in his hands, but rather him not taking responsibility for everyone's welfare.
> Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency.
No; you can't have redundancy without inefficiency, but you can have inefficiency without redundancy.