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by ceejayoz 785 days ago
> Want to eat raw lettuce and undercooked steak without getting sick? Those privileges come from factory farming techniques.

Outbreaks of E. coli, listeria, giardia, etc. are common in factory farmed bagged lettuce. Dole certainly isn't some small artisan operation; https://www.cdc.gov/listeria/outbreaks/packaged-salad-mix-12...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/16/ecoli-str...

"'There are more and more people wanting products like triple-washed bagged lettuce, but bagged salad is a great vector for E.coli growth,' he said. 'And farms have expanded closer and closer to animal feedlots and dairies, and these are now more prone to flooding.'"

Farm workers pooping in the fields because they're not allowed to walk 15 minutes to a port-a-potty doesn't help, either. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB888948983807436500

> And I still prefer my meat very well done, burned, because that's how meat must be cooked in parts of the world that don't have western-style factory farming.

That's more likely to speak to a lack of food safety regulation in the supply chain, from farm to slaughterhouse to store to table. It's entirely possible to properly process an artisanly raised organic cow in a way that avoids spreading E. coli all over it.

2 comments

>> Outbreaks of E. coli, listeria, giardia, etc. are common in factory farmed bagged lettuce.

Common, in that millions of people eat the food and a vanishingly small number get sick during the rare outbreaks. Compare pre-industrial farming, where nearly everyone got sick on a somewhat regular basis. Read British history. Everything was boiled for a reason. Today we can get away with lightly washing our food. Most everyone opens a salad and eats without question. That is new. That is because of modern farming practices.

> That is because of modern farming practices.

It's because of a multi-factorial societal shift involving vaccines, sanitation, germ theory, hand washing, water treatment, safety regulations, inspections, refridgeration, etc.

Pretending it's all because of factory farming is just silly.

The key to being able to eat rare meat is not to smear cow shit all over it and store it at 65 degrees for a day in an alley market. The key to being able to eat a salad is washing and cold storage of a product that inevitably gets exposed to pathogens in farm fields unless you raise it hydroponically in a hermetically sealed warehouse.

> Dole certainly isn't some small artisan operation

Just for general interest, they've got quite the colonial banana rebulic oligopoly history (in surges).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dole_plc

The OG Dole brothers were part of breaking the back of traditional rule in Hawaii.

No comment or implication here other than, gosh, history heh?

They say the missionaries came to do good, and ended up doing very well indeed.