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I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes. Efficiency means things move quicker and cheaper, and a few people get richer. It does not by any means inherently increase safety. The effects of a fuckup in a hugely efficientized industry often scale directly with just how much efficiency was mined away from caution and human-interaction.

Bubba flipping burgers getting his dirty hands on your meal might make you sick, but Bobba inspecting the meatslop production line with constant pressure from upper management to be as efficient as possible according to whatever recent regulations were stripped back might accidentally spray the horse-meat product decontaminizer on the pig-meat product, generating a national pandemic.

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Data is incredibly clear that industrial-scale food production is cleaner than small-business food production.
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But there isn’t one size of food producer. I would think there are diminishing marginal returns on food safety after a certain size. At that point perhaps the blast radius of mistakes offsets the advantage of scale. It’s a false dichotomy to consider only national producers and local producers.
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"I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes."

follows with wall of vibes

LOL

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That's actually the point. Opposing vibes are just as easy to utter as the initial vibes.
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Not really. The opposing vibes in this case seem really weak?
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Given the lack of research into the matter, I present the following pilot study for HN to use:

Number of times the lettuce I grew at home this year made me shit a tsunami: 0

Number of times lettuce I bought at the store this year made me shit a tsunami: 1

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And did you grow enough lettuce to supply yourself for a whole year? If not the problem remains.
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A couple of things:

1) you're taking my comment too seriously.

2) assuming I had enough space to subsistence farm for my household (I don't), I wouldn't try growing lettuce year-round. Lettuce in the cooler months, peppers and tomatoes in the warmer months.

3) the majority of the lettuce I've prepared in my home this year did come from my patio

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Containers. When it's nice out, they live outside. When it's not nice out, they move indoors. yeah yeah, not op, but it's possible. If you're growing food to sustain yourself for a whole year, I'm assuming you're willing to sacrifice some indoor space to accommodate.

Also, the GP doesn't read to me the way you're interpreting it. To me the GP has grown produce and purchased produce this year. The purchase hit him while the grown at home did not.

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It would be... unusual... for an American home to contain enough space to grow the family's annual supply of lettuce.

> If you're growing food to sustain yourself for a whole year, I'm assuming you're willing to sacrifice some indoor space to accommodate.

It would be unheard of for it to contain enough space to produce the family's annual supply of food. And pointless. If you're growing that much food, there's no reason to build walls around it.

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> It would be... unusual... for an American home to contain enough space to grow the family's annual supply of lettuce

I grow leafy greens in containers, and while not totally self sufficient, it provides a decent amount. I have multiple pots that I rotate through offsetting planting so new seedlings are going in as older plants are harvesting. If you're wanting head lettuce types then it's different, but if you just want leafy greens, you can totally do more than I think you're thinking you can.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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

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And you're lucky that a sick bird didn't shit on your home grown lettuce before you picked it.
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My bad. I'll stop growing food to avoid birds shitting on it.
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Yes, the cleanliness can vary based on the outfit and the tech/facilities tends to be lower. However, there are not 100s of animals being ran through the same grinder. It doesn't seem like there are any real tests being done to each animal by the inspectors.

So facility risk seems similar or higher for the local shop, depending on specific people running it, but animal-bourne risk seems higher at the packing plant, which seems to be the more likely vector to me anyways.

No data on that. But qualitative experience shows the local farmer/butcher has much nicer/fresher looking/smelling meat than the Walmart.

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> grinder

There's your problem. Ground products are completely dispensable.

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Ground products are also what lets us make more efficient use of the animal. I took my first deer a couple years ago, and had it cut by a local guy. I got back 60 pounds of meat, of which about 30 was ground[0].

Supposing cows yield a better ratio of cut to ground meat (we've been breeding them for meat production and process them on an industrial scale), you'd still have to raise and kill a whole lot more cows to satisfy the world's current beef demand. I think good food safety practices and accepting a low, controlled risk of food-borne illness are justified by not having to kill as many animals.

[0] Not looking to start a discussion about the ethics of hunting. Not being in meat processing, this is an example I have first-hand knowledge of.

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Of course there's some trim that has to go into the grinder, but we could do a much better, more respectful job of using the animal as it was instead of homogenized lumps of 80/20 or 90/10. More beef cheek in the butcher case and homemade cabeza, more lengua, more shank and round and plate, more heart and tripe and liver, etc etc etc. Buy a subprimal and grind your burgers at home from a single animal.

This is more a culinary and ethical argument than efficiency or safety. One should use the whole animal, in all its varieties, because they're delicious. Grinding otherwise edible parts of an animal killed on one's behalf because one disfavors (or is repulsed by) them seems to me much worse than the killing. Eat - and enjoy! - all of it or don't kill it.

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It’s not “some trim”, it’s basically half the animal. I buy several whole cows a year and out of a carcass that yields 400 lbs of meat, I’ve never managed to get more than 60% with a very good butcher. Cabeza/lingua/tripa/offal/oxtails aren’t going to get few more than a few percent points extra. Once you’re deciding on which cuts you want, that trim is unavoidable.

It’s definitely better to freeze the left over bits and grind it yourself, but half the animal gets ground up regardless.

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These cuts have gotten expensive as they're now quite popular. Lengua, beef cheeks, and oxtail are no longer cheap.
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> Grinding otherwise edible parts of an animal killed on one's behalf because one disfavors (or is repulsed by) them seems to me much worse than the killing. Eat - and enjoy! - all of it or don't kill it.

Who are you to say that it's wrong for me to enjoy some parts of the animal ground up, versus in their original shape? Either way the entire animal is being eaten and enjoyed, so there's no reasonable moral basis on which to say it's wrong. Your position would make sense if people were throwing away the cheek, tongue, etc but we aren't.

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The modern meat industry makes more productive use of the animal than what has ever been possible before in history. It makes the famed Native American efficiency of animal use look laughable.
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Fwiw venison leans heavily on ground because it’s so lean that it’s nearly impossible to cook it to be tender and cooked; even sous vide methods require lower temps. Grinding it with cheap pork fat allows it not to be basically jerky.
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Industrial operations have industrial scale problems that require much higher standards. The local butcher might not scrub the floor and walls with the same industrial anti-bacterial detergent, but he's also not running hundreds of cows a day through the space. The local farmers don't pre-emptively administer antibiotics to their herd; the CAFO operation that feeds the industrial slaughterhouse has to cram antibiotics into the cows to keep them healthy enough to slaughter. Comparing the two directly is very misleading.
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The way the butcher explained to me, it’s not so much the volume that’s the problem, it’s the time between cleanings which gives microbes time to multiply in ideal conditions with lots of nutrients from blood and optimal temperature. Any crevice that’s hard to clean becomes a focal point for contamination and it doesn’t really matter if you’re butchering one cow or a hundred, because if you leave that biofilm there for even a few days, it can grow enough to contaminate future batches.

The other side of it is that many forms of contamination sporulate, so short of using a powerful surfactant to wipe it all away, the spores will survive basically forever until they hit growing conditions.

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> ... nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for.

It's good that that plant is so well-run. But America doesn't lack for less well-run large meatpacking plants. Remember Boar's Head? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41403919

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