There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers, but it comes at a serious cost. With regulations continuously eroding this will only get worse.
My armchair assessment is the best way to push back is for farmers to join together into co-ops and find a middle ground between the efficiency of scale and the concerns of food safety and ethical working conditions.
The oligarchs are gutting the regulatory apparatus that stops this stuff from happening.
zer00eyz · 2026-08-26 15:40:45 UTC
> There's aspects to admire in the ability to provide consistent product to its customers
Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I think most Americans would be shocked as to where their food comes from.
I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a macdonalds burger.
Everyone is invested in maintaining the illusion. And that collision is rampant across all of food: Pepsi price fixing with Walmart, the price of beef at retail being long decoupled from wholesale / Agri Stats...
parineum · 2026-08-26 15:59:58 UTC
The illusion is the Whole Foods shopper thinking that the McDonalds food is crap. Great marketing from the "health food" industry making you think that it's McDonalds making you fat. Raw cane sugar (sold to you at a premium markup over the already more expensive production cost) is, by implication, less bad for you.
cucumber3732842 · 2026-08-26 16:42:19 UTC
>Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I would fully support such a mandate, for meat products too.
It would be interesting, giving consumers more information is nearly always better, it opens the door for open source analysis, the 2nd and 3rd order effects would probably be mostly harmless and highly entertaining.
>I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a McDonalds burger.
They're be too busy being angry that "BNSF Alliance Intermodal Facility, Haslet Texas" is in fact not an avocado farm.
yoyohello13 · 2026-08-26 19:56:14 UTC
I know this sounds crazy, but maybe we can stop eroding regulations. This obsession with 'regulations bad' is going to destroy us all.
clumsysmurf · 2026-08-26 15:31:39 UTC
"Taylor Farms’ massive operations depend on thousands of workers who process, package, and move its produce. Its workplace safety record includes serious violations and worker complaints."
Taylor Farms is "heavily involved in modern-day forced labor."
They contract labor out from AZ Dept of Corrections for $4.75 / hr (but inmates are capped at $1.50 / hr in AZ)
Some of the incarcerated workers were here as non-citizens, detained by ICE, and only then eligible for work / slavery.
parineum · 2026-08-26 16:04:52 UTC
1) The work is voluntary, calling voluntary work forced labor is a bold faced lie. The people are being imprisoned, which is obviously not a good situation to be in. If doing that work didn't improve their lives in some way, they could not do it. Since they are voluntarily doing these jobs, presumably it makes their imprisonment better.
2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
AngryData · 2026-08-26 16:15:30 UTC
Im not sure I would call "You can sit in a concrete box all day and then eat food that was rejected from the dog food plant" versus "Go outside for awhile doing some work, be able to buy a pack of prepackaged ramen when you are done" clearly voluntary.
Have you ever ate prison food? I literally would not feed most of it to my dog.
strictnein · 2026-08-26 16:35:29 UTC
Would it be better if you could only do the former then?
Also, if you worked 8 hours you'd be able to buy a lot more than a single pack of ramen.
> While ramen costs about 35 cents at Target, prison commissaries charge between 24 cents to $1.06 nationwide.
It would be better if they weren't treated like dogs to begin with and they shouldn't be allowed to undercut local labor costs. Nor should the jail receive 75% of their wage on top of the 400% markup on commissary items they already take. Thats ends up with about 6% of the wages value going to the workers on top of their wages being 3x lower than local workers.
strbean · 2026-08-26 21:32:48 UTC
We incentivize creating the conditions of the former, and increased incarceration, by making the latter profitable.
parineum · 2026-08-26 17:02:19 UTC
The uncomfortable part of that is the involuntary part, not the work.
Prison is not voluntary.
lesuorac · 2026-08-26 17:55:43 UTC
> "You can sit in a concrete box all day and then eat food that was rejected from the dog food plant"
Isn't that not the actual choice though?
Like for a prison with monetary advantages to the inmates working don't they actually send you to solitary for refusing work detail?
preg_match · 2026-08-26 22:16:35 UTC
It’s even deeper than this, because in some states, like Georgia, you’re “rewarded” with good time and a higher chance of parole.
Good time means you get to exit the prison for things like visiting family.
The prisoners are coerced to work for sub-human wages because, if they don’t, they stay in prison longer and can’t see their loved ones.
legitster · 2026-08-26 16:19:21 UTC
The reality is in a lot of prison situations the people are bored and the money is going to non-essentials from a commissary.
It's definitely an extremely exploitative situation and overall icky, but the people who jump in to compare it to slave labor are kind of embarrassing themselves in unnecessary hyperbole.
mrguyorama · 2026-08-26 16:33:50 UTC
Prisoners in most states are literally underfed, and then "allowed" to buy more food, like a single packet of ramen for a whole dollar.
This is because many states are full of people who are both weirdly "Free market" brain, to the point that they believe it's a good idea to tell the warden "Any dollar from this budget that you do not spend feeding inmates, you get to personally keep" is a good idea because they have no knowledge of systems design or perverse incentives, and more importantly, because they genuinely want prisoners to suffer. No, this is not a joke. In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.
When people joke about "I should go to jail, at least I will get three square meals a day", that's just false. Most prisons are only required to serve two meals a day. The quality of those meals varies from "Okay for a middle school lunch if you put a gun to my head" to "Fyre festival had better food, and this is not a joke"
strictnein · 2026-08-26 16:42:01 UTC
> In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.
This is an incredible claim, so I'm trying to find out where you got that from. Seems like maybe that was just in Alabama and they changed the law already?
The commissary markup is absolutely true, but "deliberately underfed" is as far as I can tell, completely untrue. Most states actually have calorie minimum rules. Arkansas is 2300 per day. Kentucky 2400 per day. Both states mandate annual menu reviews by a third-party dietician. New York state's guideline is 2800 per day + 90g protein. California 2500 per day. The Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities additionally states there are to be at least 3 meals per day, two of them hot, and no more than 14 hours between dinner and breakfast.
These are all right within the USDA's general population daily calorie guidance of 2-3 thousand per day for males.
mrguyorama · 2026-08-26 20:04:40 UTC
It's possible that some of this is down to the "Prison" vs "Jail" distinction?
But I can't source what I said.
What I can source is that prisoners largely report going hungry. That's a completely different problem though.
I cannot remove or edit my comment. Thank you for the push back.
mschuster91 · 2026-08-26 16:40:55 UTC
> 2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
That still is massively undercutting regular wages, it's government price dumping. The ethics of prison labor aside, whoever buys prison labor should be forced to pay fair market wages to the prison.
parineum · 2026-08-26 17:05:19 UTC
I'm on board with that.
But, again, that's not a Taylor Farms issue, that's a government issue.
Personally, I think it's a very good thing to let prisoners work as long as the working conditions are the same standards as free people, including any wage laws.
wat10000 · 2026-08-26 20:46:13 UTC
It's not voluntary. They're required to work. It's literal slavery, made legal by the carveout for criminal punishment in the 13th Amendment.
cute_boi · 2026-08-26 22:22:20 UTC
It isn't voluntary and is slavery. Stop justifying it, when the parent clearly mentioned ICE detaining random people off street.
andy99 · 2026-08-26 15:33:05 UTC
Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players? Obviously the “blast radius” is bigger when it’s a big company with a huge footprint, but are incidents rarer and quality control better?
Completely anecdotal, I see lots or recalls from smaller producers I’ve never heard of, I can imagine they have less scrutiny and oversight.
CodingJeebus · 2026-08-26 15:44:21 UTC
> Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players?
Not only is the blast radius smaller, but small businesses are less incentivized to cut corners since serious violations pose a greater risk to their business than large businesses. Corruption is essentially legalized in America via lobbying, but only big companies can really afford to lobby and make huge campaign contributions to sway the government in their favor.
Government is meant to be a check on businesses, but that completely falls down once business is big enough to buy the government. It wouldn't surprise me if quality control at large companies is worse for the simple fact that they know who to pay off if they get caught, as Taylor Farms has here.
cryzinger · 2026-08-26 16:48:51 UTC
IIRC that's what happened with the Boar's Head listeria outbreak. Inspectors had repeatedly documented that the facilities were nasty, but BH was allowed to continue operating for years because <reasons>. Things only came to a tipping point after multiple people died.
aNoob7000 · 2026-08-26 15:44:37 UTC
I would personally like to see fines commensurate with the size of the organization.
The United States has allowed many industries to consolidate, but the fines they face when they mess up are infinitely small compared to their size.
foolswisdom · 2026-08-26 16:37:30 UTC
As a thought experiment, there's a big difference between "3 companies share 70% of a market, while 30 companies sharing the remaining 30%", and "30 companies share the whole market, none being larger than 8%".
In the former example, there's far more pressure on the smaller companies, which is why in such a regime people expect more consistent quality from the big guys, and the smaller guys are often boutique in some way (=offering something unique in their service/product in order to be able to compete). Small guys have a hard time standing up to big guys.
On the other hand, in a regime where no one becomes that huge, like the latter example, there's still pressure, but the competition is fair, just like if all the companies were similarly big (except that you can't have that many big companies in a single industry, by proportion definitions).
Realizing this drove home why inconsistent antitrust enforcement appears to produce bad results. Because it leaves us in the state of the former example. It's also unfortunately the intermediate state of getting serious with antitrust enforcement.
browningstreet · 2026-08-26 16:41:32 UTC
> Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players?
Like.. before? When we didn't have nationwide food recalls that had seeped into nationwide fast food chains and bagged products distributed into every commercial food selling outlet, under a myriad of different names?
0xffff2 · 2026-08-26 17:08:30 UTC
The United States population has more than doubled since 1950. There is no "before" that we could actually go back to. The massive, sustained population growth is built on the massive efficiency growth.
cute_boi · 2026-08-26 22:20:06 UTC
Yes, smaller companies means there would be no monopoly and they can't bribe politician that much to prevent regulation.
usern20260720 · 2026-08-26 15:34:12 UTC
“The only social responsibility of Taylor Farms is to increase investor’s profits” Milton Friedman.
“The only social responsibility of the government is to increase campaign sponsor’s profits”
strictnein · 2026-08-26 15:41:22 UTC
While the first made up quote is inline with what Friedman said over 45 years ago [0], I'm not seeing anything that resembles the second one? In fact, he warned against the influence that large corporations can have on the government [1].
Well it's more about our lived reality, I can't remember the last time any current US politician successfully campaigned then enacted legislation that benefits workers; it's always been forms of corporate welfare and more corporate welfare for like the last 60 years.
The new dealers can be counted on one hand (they're the ones 70+) while the neoliberals have been at the helm for 40 years.
bruce511 · 2026-08-27 04:13:26 UTC
Around 85 members of the current congress are over 70. 13 are over 80.
You've got some weird looking hands :)
shimman · 2026-08-27 12:47:31 UTC
How many of those are new deal democratic politicians now? That is the distinction that matters because old neoliberals do exist and have outnumbered new dealers for decades now.
legitster · 2026-08-26 16:13:45 UTC
It's worth pointing out that Milton Friedman's words are regularly taken out of context. His full quote:
> "In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his 'social responsibility' reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.
> The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct 'social responsibility,' rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it.
> But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other."
His point wasn't that businesses can't act ethically or with responsibility, it's that they shouldn't act to become welfare centers and corporate philanthropies (which was a trend at the time). And I think even the most anti-capitalist person would agree that corporation acting "charitably" should be treated with a huge eye of skepticism.
wat10000 · 2026-08-26 20:39:53 UTC
Funny how "taken out of context" is so often used when the context doesn't make it any better.
That whole "he is in effect imposing taxes" thing is ridiculous. Taxes are forcibly collected by the government, not voluntarily spent by a business. Businesses are not the military, executives are not obligated to follow orders. If the stockholders don't like what an executive does, they can fire the executive and hire someone else. An executive who wants to keep their job therefore might be wise to stick to what the stockholders will like. But they aren't doing anything wrong if they don't, any more than an employee is doing something wrong if they disobey their manager.
It also misses the idea that a lot of misbehavior by companies is stuff that's bad for the company, but they do it anyway because of stupidity, shortsightedness, coordination problems, or the incentives of decisionmakers not lining up with the consequences for the company they work for. Or rather, it doesn't miss the idea but explicitly dismisses it; anything that is actually good for the company is defined by Friedman as not being "social responsibility."
SoftTalker · 2026-08-26 15:34:17 UTC
Food is being produced at a scale, efficiency, and level of safety unheard of generations ago. One of the recommendations in this article is to buy "through farmers markets, community-supported agriculture programs, farm stands, and direct online sales." That's a fine way to get fresh food, but if you think the people selling lettuce at farmers markets or farm stands have any verified food safety or food handling expertise, they don't. And online sales? Who knows.
Food packaged and distributed by these mega-suppliers probably has less human handling through the supply chain than any other food, and they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.
There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it.
throwup238 · 2026-08-26 15:41:17 UTC
I’ve seen where a local butcher slaughters the cows for local farmers, and it’s definitely nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for. It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means but he just doesn’t have the man power to wash every surface several times a day whereas the plant shuts down one line at a time to do a full daily cleaning with power washers and this foam stuff that gets into every nook and cranny and then gets washed down a central drain. My limited experience with fresh produce isn’t much better (omg the flies).
notnaut · 2026-08-26 15:58:41 UTC
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.
ryukoposting · 2026-08-26 16:03:04 UTC
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
afavour · 2026-08-26 16:10:43 UTC
And did you grow enough lettuce to supply yourself for a whole year? If not the problem remains.
dylan604 · 2026-08-26 16:23:14 UTC
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.
thaumasiotes · 2026-08-26 19:14:59 UTC
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.
dylan604 · 2026-08-26 20:00:33 UTC
> 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.
ryukoposting · 2026-08-26 19:57:53 UTC
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
SoftTalker · 2026-08-26 18:25:56 UTC
And you're lucky that a sick bird didn't shit on your home grown lettuce before you picked it.
ryukoposting · 2026-08-26 19:58:44 UTC
My bad. I'll stop growing food to avoid birds shitting on it.
cm2012 · 2026-08-26 19:45:54 UTC
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.
ryukoposting · 2026-08-26 20:04:49 UTC
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.
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.
ssl-3 · 2026-08-27 01:48:48 UTC
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.
"I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes."
follows with wall of vibes
LOL
tshaddox · 2026-08-26 17:50:04 UTC
That's actually the point. Opposing vibes are just as easy to utter as the initial vibes.
tptacek · 2026-08-26 23:05:15 UTC
Not really. The opposing vibes in this case seem really weak?
tshaddox · 2026-08-27 04:35:42 UTC
Don’t you just mean that one set of vibes resonates with your own vibes better than the other set of vibes?
cm2012 · 2026-08-26 19:43:43 UTC
Data is incredibly clear that industrial-scale food production is cleaner than small-business food production.
catlifeonmars · 2026-08-27 01:34:45 UTC
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.
lokar · 2026-08-27 04:10:35 UTC
Is it just a question of variance in the size of the issue? Is having 10 incidents of 10 people each the same as one with 100?
I’ve argued in systems reliability that once you are already high reliability you are better off lowering incident size vs total unavailability.
forgetfreeman · 2026-08-27 04:41:28 UTC
What data might that be? I've looked and there doesn't appear to be any authoritative source of long-term data for either # of reported foodborne illness outbreaks or # of individuals sickened in this way per year, either of which would clearly demonstrate a dip in sickness rates if industrial-scale food production does, in fact, result in cleaner production.
giantg2 · 2026-08-26 16:04:37 UTC
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.
kristjansson · 2026-08-26 16:51:27 UTC
> grinder
There's your problem. Ground products are completely dispensable.
mauvehaus · 2026-08-26 17:28:18 UTC
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.
kristjansson · 2026-08-26 18:33:20 UTC
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.
laurencerowe · 2026-08-26 18:59:06 UTC
These cuts have gotten expensive as they're now quite popular. Lengua, beef cheeks, and oxtail are no longer cheap.
bigstrat2003 · 2026-08-26 19:41:47 UTC
> 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.
cm2012 · 2026-08-26 19:47:24 UTC
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.
throwup238 · 2026-08-26 21:23:40 UTC
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.
devilbunny · 2026-08-26 18:50:59 UTC
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.
fatbird · 2026-08-26 18:01:05 UTC
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.
throwup238 · 2026-08-27 00:35:13 UTC
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.
fatbird · 2026-08-27 04:51:10 UTC
So this butcher was standing in his insufficiently cleaned butchering room telling you about how he should really be doing what industrial slaughterhouses do, but he just can't be bothered? Or did he have his own methods of sufficiently sanitizing his workspace such that he wasn't a source of disease and poisoning?
What volume brings is increased odds of one of them introducing/reinforcing a contaminant, especially if they're from a CAFO, which are horrifically unsanitary. Again, there's a reason industrial operations have apparently higher standards. When Mad Cow disease was spreading, it wasn't because a local butcher was lax wiping things down, it was because cow brains were being recycled into cow feed and sold across North America on an industrial scale.
throwup238 · 2026-08-27 05:29:28 UTC
I’m sorry but I can’t take you seriously if you’re bringing up mad cow disease in this discussion. Prions don’t spread because of butchers, they spread because of bone-and-meal feed. You know, stuff fed to a cow while it’s still alive, before it gets slaughtered. No amount of sanitary practice is going to help if you’re feeding prions to the animals because that’s just not how sanitation works.
And yes, small scale butchers slaughtering cows for a few local farmers and their customers buying whole carcasses have very different sanitary standards than an industrial meat packing plant. I sign a waiver every time.
> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means
How did you get from that to “this butcher was standing in his insufficiently cleaned butchering room”? Whatever personal bugbear you have, I want nothing to do with it.
fatbird · 2026-08-27 22:30:01 UTC
As you seem to know, the prion example was to highlight how industrial scale operations create industrial scale problems, namely the bone-and-meal feed that was throwing all the cow brains into a common pool from which all were feeding. I understand that sanitary practices don't affect this.
> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means
I didn't say this and I don't know where you got it from.
bell-cot · 2026-08-26 18:47:21 UTC
> ... 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
bsder · 2026-08-27 06:00:11 UTC
There are levels of integration in between "Bubba down the block" and "Weyland-Yutani Megacorp"
Busting up Taylor Farms into 5 different companies would affect the food safety not one whit. In fact, it would probably improve it. If there were 6 different companies to choose from, for example, this incident would mean that one of them would go bankrupt as everybody switched to the other 5. And that would be a warning to the remaining companies not to screw up the same way.
However, since there is only a single supplier, Taylor Farms doesn't get any penalty at all. A couple of junior VPs get sacked and life rolls on for the CEO and his buddies.
Tangurena2 · 2026-08-27 12:27:38 UTC
I used to read small/tiny/hobby farming blogs. Several of them were complaining about upgraded regulations that ended up closing the small slaughtering shops that they had been using.
salawat · 2026-08-26 15:42:29 UTC
Consolidation does not improve food safety. Read the ISO's. The standards of the industry are equally effective at a scale of 10 or 1000 different orgs. Everyone watches everyone else, and makes batches traceable, and those who don't are told to shape up by downstream, or they lose downstream consumers.
Consolidation's only benefit is shifting the fiscal gain into fewer pockets, which comes with it's own perverse incentives. (See the Boeing/Airbus duopoly and the problems that causes.)
The jist is that a lot of this is from consolidation at all levels. There are fewer grocery stores and distributors which has ultimately made hard to know where food ultimately comes from.
Couple that with deregulation and the dismantling of the government regulatory agencies under DOGE and we get what we have.
legitster · 2026-08-26 16:01:16 UTC
It's harder for casual shopper to know where their food comes from. But having worked in food production facilities that couldn't be further from the truth. You'd be surprised how meticulously tracked every part of the, supply chain is. down to the specific row in a field where something is picked.
(That's what makes this recent outbreak so atypical - either there was a massive screw up or someone is hiding something).
People also are not aware that the US has (or at least had) one of the most meticulous food inspection regimes in the world. Agency inspectors actually drop in and inspect facilities regularly. The EU might have more stringent food regulations, but as a reminder people were able to slip horse meat into the beef supply for decades before being caught - something like that would be inconceivable in the US.
jordanb · 2026-08-26 16:12:06 UTC
The point of the video is that intermediary companies like Driscolls or Taylor Farms focus their efforts on building "accountability sinks."
They give farmers a 500 page document describing in detail how the produce must be grown, but then they provide little to no actual oversite, while producing enormous pricing pressure on the farmer. Any farmer who actually follows the 500 page document will not be able to make any money, so every farmer is compelled to violate the rules.
Then when product is contaminated Driscoll can say "that farmer wasn't following our policy we've cancelled our contract with them" while making no effort to actually clean up all the other farms, who are definitely violating the contract because it's impossible to follow it and make money selling to Driscolls.
voakbasda · 2026-08-26 16:42:41 UTC
It seems to be the (modern) American way.
legitster · 2026-08-26 17:02:26 UTC
There's not really an alternative that also lets farms be independent. If a GSPs really wants that level of control over farms, they might as well start buying them up.
The reality is that the documentation is like software T&Cs. You get to run your farm however you want and Driscolls has some CYA for later.
The reality cuts both ways. You can still sell produce directly to local grocery distributors that pay higher, but the requirements are going to be even more stringent with less guarantees.
mint5 · 2026-08-26 18:31:58 UTC
Local grocery distributers? I thought the big ones had an absurd market share
Comments
My armchair assessment is the best way to push back is for farmers to join together into co-ops and find a middle ground between the efficiency of scale and the concerns of food safety and ethical working conditions.
We're working against the desire to get the basic needs of life (in this case, food) met for the lowest possible price.
Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I think most Americans would be shocked as to where their food comes from.
I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a macdonalds burger.
Everyone is invested in maintaining the illusion. And that collision is rampant across all of food: Pepsi price fixing with Walmart, the price of beef at retail being long decoupled from wholesale / Agri Stats...
I would fully support such a mandate, for meat products too.
It would be interesting, giving consumers more information is nearly always better, it opens the door for open source analysis, the 2nd and 3rd order effects would probably be mostly harmless and highly entertaining.
>I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a McDonalds burger.
They're be too busy being angry that "BNSF Alliance Intermodal Facility, Haslet Texas" is in fact not an avocado farm.
According to https://futurism.com/science-energy/diarrhea-lettuce-taylor-...
Taylor Farms is "heavily involved in modern-day forced labor."
They contract labor out from AZ Dept of Corrections for $4.75 / hr (but inmates are capped at $1.50 / hr in AZ)
Some of the incarcerated workers were here as non-citizens, detained by ICE, and only then eligible for work / slavery.
2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
Have you ever ate prison food? I literally would not feed most of it to my dog.
Also, if you worked 8 hours you'd be able to buy a lot more than a single pack of ramen.
> While ramen costs about 35 cents at Target, prison commissaries charge between 24 cents to $1.06 nationwide.
https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-c...
Prison is not voluntary.
Isn't that not the actual choice though?
Like for a prison with monetary advantages to the inmates working don't they actually send you to solitary for refusing work detail?
Good time means you get to exit the prison for things like visiting family.
The prisoners are coerced to work for sub-human wages because, if they don’t, they stay in prison longer and can’t see their loved ones.
It's definitely an extremely exploitative situation and overall icky, but the people who jump in to compare it to slave labor are kind of embarrassing themselves in unnecessary hyperbole.
This is because many states are full of people who are both weirdly "Free market" brain, to the point that they believe it's a good idea to tell the warden "Any dollar from this budget that you do not spend feeding inmates, you get to personally keep" is a good idea because they have no knowledge of systems design or perverse incentives, and more importantly, because they genuinely want prisoners to suffer. No, this is not a joke. In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.
When people joke about "I should go to jail, at least I will get three square meals a day", that's just false. Most prisons are only required to serve two meals a day. The quality of those meals varies from "Okay for a middle school lunch if you put a gun to my head" to "Fyre festival had better food, and this is not a joke"
This is an incredible claim, so I'm trying to find out where you got that from. Seems like maybe that was just in Alabama and they changed the law already?
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alabama-prison-meals-la...
https://law.justia.com/codes/alabama/2024/title-14/chapter-6...
These are all right within the USDA's general population daily calorie guidance of 2-3 thousand per day for males.
But I can't source what I said.
What I can source is that prisoners largely report going hungry. That's a completely different problem though.
I cannot remove or edit my comment. Thank you for the push back.
That still is massively undercutting regular wages, it's government price dumping. The ethics of prison labor aside, whoever buys prison labor should be forced to pay fair market wages to the prison.
But, again, that's not a Taylor Farms issue, that's a government issue.
Personally, I think it's a very good thing to let prisoners work as long as the working conditions are the same standards as free people, including any wage laws.
Completely anecdotal, I see lots or recalls from smaller producers I’ve never heard of, I can imagine they have less scrutiny and oversight.
Not only is the blast radius smaller, but small businesses are less incentivized to cut corners since serious violations pose a greater risk to their business than large businesses. Corruption is essentially legalized in America via lobbying, but only big companies can really afford to lobby and make huge campaign contributions to sway the government in their favor.
Government is meant to be a check on businesses, but that completely falls down once business is big enough to buy the government. It wouldn't surprise me if quality control at large companies is worse for the simple fact that they know who to pay off if they get caught, as Taylor Farms has here.
The United States has allowed many industries to consolidate, but the fines they face when they mess up are infinitely small compared to their size.
In the former example, there's far more pressure on the smaller companies, which is why in such a regime people expect more consistent quality from the big guys, and the smaller guys are often boutique in some way (=offering something unique in their service/product in order to be able to compete). Small guys have a hard time standing up to big guys.
On the other hand, in a regime where no one becomes that huge, like the latter example, there's still pressure, but the competition is fair, just like if all the companies were similarly big (except that you can't have that many big companies in a single industry, by proportion definitions).
Realizing this drove home why inconsistent antitrust enforcement appears to produce bad results. Because it leaves us in the state of the former example. It's also unfortunately the intermediate state of getting serious with antitrust enforcement.
Like.. before? When we didn't have nationwide food recalls that had seeped into nationwide fast food chains and bagged products distributed into every commercial food selling outlet, under a myriad of different names?
“The only social responsibility of the government is to increase campaign sponsor’s profits”
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_T0WF-uCWg
The new dealers can be counted on one hand (they're the ones 70+) while the neoliberals have been at the helm for 40 years.
You've got some weird looking hands :)
> "In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his 'social responsibility' reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.
> The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct 'social responsibility,' rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it.
> But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other."
His point wasn't that businesses can't act ethically or with responsibility, it's that they shouldn't act to become welfare centers and corporate philanthropies (which was a trend at the time). And I think even the most anti-capitalist person would agree that corporation acting "charitably" should be treated with a huge eye of skepticism.
That whole "he is in effect imposing taxes" thing is ridiculous. Taxes are forcibly collected by the government, not voluntarily spent by a business. Businesses are not the military, executives are not obligated to follow orders. If the stockholders don't like what an executive does, they can fire the executive and hire someone else. An executive who wants to keep their job therefore might be wise to stick to what the stockholders will like. But they aren't doing anything wrong if they don't, any more than an employee is doing something wrong if they disobey their manager.
It also misses the idea that a lot of misbehavior by companies is stuff that's bad for the company, but they do it anyway because of stupidity, shortsightedness, coordination problems, or the incentives of decisionmakers not lining up with the consequences for the company they work for. Or rather, it doesn't miss the idea but explicitly dismisses it; anything that is actually good for the company is defined by Friedman as not being "social responsibility."
Food packaged and distributed by these mega-suppliers probably has less human handling through the supply chain than any other food, and they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.
There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
https://www.fda.gov/food/people-risk-foodborne-illness/toxop...
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.
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
follows with wall of vibes
LOL
I’ve argued in systems reliability that once you are already high reliability you are better off lowering incident size vs total unavailability.
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.
There's your problem. Ground products are completely dispensable.
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.
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.
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.
It’s definitely better to freeze the left over bits and grind it yourself, but half the animal gets ground up regardless.
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.
What volume brings is increased odds of one of them introducing/reinforcing a contaminant, especially if they're from a CAFO, which are horrifically unsanitary. Again, there's a reason industrial operations have apparently higher standards. When Mad Cow disease was spreading, it wasn't because a local butcher was lax wiping things down, it was because cow brains were being recycled into cow feed and sold across North America on an industrial scale.
And yes, small scale butchers slaughtering cows for a few local farmers and their customers buying whole carcasses have very different sanitary standards than an industrial meat packing plant. I sign a waiver every time.
> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means
How did you get from that to “this butcher was standing in his insufficiently cleaned butchering room”? Whatever personal bugbear you have, I want nothing to do with it.
> It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means
I didn't say this and I don't know where you got it from.
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
Busting up Taylor Farms into 5 different companies would affect the food safety not one whit. In fact, it would probably improve it. If there were 6 different companies to choose from, for example, this incident would mean that one of them would go bankrupt as everybody switched to the other 5. And that would be a warning to the remaining companies not to screw up the same way.
However, since there is only a single supplier, Taylor Farms doesn't get any penalty at all. A couple of junior VPs get sacked and life rolls on for the CEO and his buddies.
Consolidation's only benefit is shifting the fiscal gain into fewer pockets, which comes with it's own perverse incentives. (See the Boeing/Airbus duopoly and the problems that causes.)
The jist is that a lot of this is from consolidation at all levels. There are fewer grocery stores and distributors which has ultimately made hard to know where food ultimately comes from.
Couple that with deregulation and the dismantling of the government regulatory agencies under DOGE and we get what we have.
(That's what makes this recent outbreak so atypical - either there was a massive screw up or someone is hiding something).
People also are not aware that the US has (or at least had) one of the most meticulous food inspection regimes in the world. Agency inspectors actually drop in and inspect facilities regularly. The EU might have more stringent food regulations, but as a reminder people were able to slip horse meat into the beef supply for decades before being caught - something like that would be inconceivable in the US.
They give farmers a 500 page document describing in detail how the produce must be grown, but then they provide little to no actual oversite, while producing enormous pricing pressure on the farmer. Any farmer who actually follows the 500 page document will not be able to make any money, so every farmer is compelled to violate the rules.
Then when product is contaminated Driscoll can say "that farmer wasn't following our policy we've cancelled our contract with them" while making no effort to actually clean up all the other farms, who are definitely violating the contract because it's impossible to follow it and make money selling to Driscolls.
The reality is that the documentation is like software T&Cs. You get to run your farm however you want and Driscolls has some CYA for later.
The reality cuts both ways. You can still sell produce directly to local grocery distributors that pay higher, but the requirements are going to be even more stringent with less guarantees.