Comment by cm2012
13 hours ago
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