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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a common pattern with other safety improvements that as safety controls improve, people simply push the envelope further. Cars get safer but then the drivers also get more confident doing things that nobody would get close to doing on an old car because it would spin out before then.
With the elevated standards of megascale agriculture you have the issue now where diseases from a lettuce farm in Mexico could affect somebody's health in NYC a month later in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in a previous era.
There's no complete solution but in this particular case it's important to remember that salads are actually pretty serious foodborne—illness vectors and they need to be heavily rinsed and ideally cleaned with a bleach or vinegar solution. It's one of the reasons that salads are traditionally on the no-eat list for pregnant women.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What’s your proposed alternative? If the FDA made the 500 page document instead, they aren’t providing day to day oversight.
By logic, a Driscoll or Taylor Farms set of rules needs to sit beyond the regulatory minimum (their lawyers would hate them putting a violation of the regulation in writing).
So, even if a farmer violates the contract, the existing regulation is either insufficient or was also violated.
I guess you're right that food is historically speaking extremely safe. I guess with this specifically, the issue is about how connected one company can be to the whole food supply.
A farmers market stand may not have perfect food safety either, but their outbreak would be limited to the few people who bought something on the farmers market (or maybe a cafe/restaurant or two that they supply).
Most likely, any harm wouldn't even be traced back to any individual salad because the sample wouldn't be big enough to form a pattern people would notice.
But because they supply so many salads to everywhere, it's a major issue that affects the whole food system.
I guess it's similar to an AWS outage. Companies constantly have outages, but an AWS one takes down half the internet.
They also have more incentive and capability to optimize right up to (and past) safety lines. And the impersonal corporate distance from the pride in quality of production matters too.
With appropriate regulation and enforcement I agree with you, but in the current regime, I’m not surprised that foodborne illness in America has 10x in 2026.
Or you can say, that the outbreaks will be much more bigger as a result of centralization of facilities. For example one small batch could contaminate other lettuces in shared facilities.
And... once I stopped at a roadside farmer's stand and the fruit still had the grocery store chain label and barcode on it, just smaller stuff and perhaps older than at the original store.
i suspect the concerns are, if your food is killing people or making them sick:
1) how big is the fallout,
2) how insulated from repercussions are you?
if a small local farms food is making people sick, it will only be a few people and word will spread.
a small local farm could more easily go out of business from just a few sick people. the market functions correctly at that scale. if a major corporation does it, the market does not function anywhere close to the same efficiency and the fallout is 1000s and 1000s of people sick or worse.
i think what many are arguing is that the responsibility should scale along with the possible impacts.
> Really? At least here (Canada), you absolutely do need food safe certifications to sell any food at farmers markets.
Sure, but you still have many more human hands on your head of lettuce on a farmers market (plus all the contamination from potential buyers sneezing, grabbing produce to check it out or from the environment in general aka flying birds, mice, rats, ...) than there will be on the mass produced lettuce that maybe saw a human hand at picking and everything since then is automated.
IIRC outbreaks in mass-produced green stuff usually end up tied to farmers or their neighbors spraying fecal based fertilizer at the wrong time. Unfortunately... that makes the blast radius of such a thing much, much worse.
This consolidation argument only works up to 1-3 processing plants. After a company owns more than that, there's no more efficiency from automation, only market dominance and abuse.
I myself would trust produce from smaller local farms more than larger farms, however I also live near the farms and know what is in season and don't deal with the problems of people reselling food like they often do in "farmers markets" near or in large urban centers.
Small farms just don't have the pressure, or the large amount of disinterested or temporary employees that large farms have.
Same with smaller slaughter houses. Perhaps they don't have the manpower to deep clean every shift, but they also don't process nearly as much stuff, don't churn through employees as fast, more directly handle and train employees, and don't have some crap corner of the factory where people can be messing around being dumb.
Of course none of that is bullet proof, but small farms and slaughter houses know that if they fuck things up they don't just lose a bit of money and have to deal with some legal problems like Tyson or other large suppliers and distributors, they lose literally everything.
Our current government is actively rolling back safety measures so these single points of failure become much more pronounced. I don't know but I would bet that companies like this are actively lobbying to have those safety measure reduced. It seems like deflection what you're saying. Yes, things are better than before, but they could still be better and trying to stop people from talking about that isn't helpful or wise.
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 guy selling lettuce at my farmers market grows it, transports it and sells it. if it makes me sick, he will hear about it, and i bet he has a very strong incentive to avoid that situation over a too big to fail megacorp that is basically insulated from consequences in the current climate.
do we need both options? probably. but painting small scale organic farming as'the same' as the alternative is...not accurate.
I think one of the problems of our modern food system is it can be difficult for a consumer to pinpoint the source of an infection. Food-borne illnesses can take 24-48 hrs or more to become apparent, by which time you may not know what you ate. Combined with the fact that we can't know where certain ingredients were sourced (one of the topics of TFA), and you can know you're sick, but not why.
It's not difficult at all, food products all have factory + machine origin coding on all packages. If something makes you sick you can easily pin point which region and even which exact factories were used.
If there is an outbreak there are multiple pin points, it's also not hard to do this with local market goods either (unless you live in Texas or something where there are no regulations).
Why do you think this is the first time we've dealt with such situations? The only reason why it's happening now is because Elon Musk had his DOGE goons gut the programs that monitor our food supply.
I hope those DOGE goons have deep pockets because they are about to find out what happens when your supposed benefactors abandon you.
This analysis is a bit shallow. Massive GSPs grew as a solution to deal with the massive problems that come with greens sourcing.
If an individual farm has an outbreak they can (usually) source it, eliminate it from the supply chain, and switch to an alternative without any interruption to service. That also means you want as large of a geographic distribution of your farm network as possible. (I'm looking at you, Yuma Valley - a semi-regular source of e.coli outbreaks).
As a bonus, the supply chain is much more efficient at this scale. Small farms can have their salads packed in nitrogen filled bags for longer shelf life and less waste.
Fresh leafy greens are naturally just one of the toughest and most vulnerable supply chains. The disappointing answer (like in a lot of these situations) is that being bigger and more massive company is what makes the product better.
- Lobbying and specialist groups can and do hamstringing America's ability to make better, safer food at scale. This isn't about big vs small producers. It's a regulatory resourcing problem.
- The FDA / USDA split is something those groups _love_ to take advantage of to further hamstring America's food supply.
The conclusion I've come to is that this gives profit-driven-corporations or foreign adversaries an excellent way to harm America's food chain through these specialist groups.
Fixing the FDA/USDA split is probably a good idea, but it will take a political earthquake to do so, and I'm absolutely willing to vote for people who pledge to make my food both safer and more delicious.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> Taylor Farms and its CEO, Bruce Taylor, have donated millions to Republican and Trump Administration-associated political action committees (PACs) since 2025. This includes a $1 million contribution to both MAGA Inc. and a super PAC dedicated to electing House Republicans.
> ...on July 16, the same day the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced their investigation into the multistate Cyclospora outbreak, Taylor Farms executives met with White House and FDA officials
Ah, well, there it is. Good for them that they're able to get away with it. Corporate protection is bought and sold out in the open.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
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.
> 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 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.
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.
> 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...
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
"I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes."
follows with wall of vibes
LOL
That's actually the point. Opposing vibes are just as easy to utter as the initial vibes.
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
And you're lucky that a sick bird didn't shit on your home grown lettuce before you picked it.
And did you grow enough lettuce to supply yourself for a whole year? If not the problem remains.
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.
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.
> grinder
There's your problem. Ground products are completely dispensable.
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.
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.
There's a common pattern with other safety improvements that as safety controls improve, people simply push the envelope further. Cars get safer but then the drivers also get more confident doing things that nobody would get close to doing on an old car because it would spin out before then.
With the elevated standards of megascale agriculture you have the issue now where diseases from a lettuce farm in Mexico could affect somebody's health in NYC a month later in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in a previous era.
There's no complete solution but in this particular case it's important to remember that salads are actually pretty serious foodborne—illness vectors and they need to be heavily rinsed and ideally cleaned with a bleach or vinegar solution. It's one of the reasons that salads are traditionally on the no-eat list for pregnant women.
Here's a pretty good video about the problem in general. https://youtu.be/nyG-np0S0ZQ
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.
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.
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.
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.
What’s your proposed alternative? If the FDA made the 500 page document instead, they aren’t providing day to day oversight.
By logic, a Driscoll or Taylor Farms set of rules needs to sit beyond the regulatory minimum (their lawyers would hate them putting a violation of the regulation in writing).
So, even if a farmer violates the contract, the existing regulation is either insufficient or was also violated.
It seems to be the (modern) American way.
while it may be tracked, it’s often intentionally obfuscated from the actual end customer.
I guess you're right that food is historically speaking extremely safe. I guess with this specifically, the issue is about how connected one company can be to the whole food supply.
A farmers market stand may not have perfect food safety either, but their outbreak would be limited to the few people who bought something on the farmers market (or maybe a cafe/restaurant or two that they supply).
Most likely, any harm wouldn't even be traced back to any individual salad because the sample wouldn't be big enough to form a pattern people would notice.
But because they supply so many salads to everywhere, it's a major issue that affects the whole food system.
I guess it's similar to an AWS outage. Companies constantly have outages, but an AWS one takes down half the internet.
> Food is being produced at a scale, efficiency, and level of safety unheard of generations ago
There are many sensible places between Taylor Farms and backyard agriculture.
They also have more incentive and capability to optimize right up to (and past) safety lines. And the impersonal corporate distance from the pride in quality of production matters too.
With appropriate regulation and enforcement I agree with you, but in the current regime, I’m not surprised that foodborne illness in America has 10x in 2026.
Or you can say, that the outbreaks will be much more bigger as a result of centralization of facilities. For example one small batch could contaminate other lettuces in shared facilities.
And... once I stopped at a roadside farmer's stand and the fruit still had the grocery store chain label and barcode on it, just smaller stuff and perhaps older than at the original store.
i suspect the concerns are, if your food is killing people or making them sick:
1) how big is the fallout,
2) how insulated from repercussions are you?
if a small local farms food is making people sick, it will only be a few people and word will spread.
a small local farm could more easily go out of business from just a few sick people. the market functions correctly at that scale. if a major corporation does it, the market does not function anywhere close to the same efficiency and the fallout is 1000s and 1000s of people sick or worse.
i think what many are arguing is that the responsibility should scale along with the possible impacts.
"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."
Really? At least here (Canada), you absolutely do need food safe certifications to sell any food at farmers markets.
> Really? At least here (Canada), you absolutely do need food safe certifications to sell any food at farmers markets.
Sure, but you still have many more human hands on your head of lettuce on a farmers market (plus all the contamination from potential buyers sneezing, grabbing produce to check it out or from the environment in general aka flying birds, mice, rats, ...) than there will be on the mass produced lettuce that maybe saw a human hand at picking and everything since then is automated.
IIRC outbreaks in mass-produced green stuff usually end up tied to farmers or their neighbors spraying fecal based fertilizer at the wrong time. Unfortunately... that makes the blast radius of such a thing much, much worse.
This consolidation argument only works up to 1-3 processing plants. After a company owns more than that, there's no more efficiency from automation, only market dominance and abuse.
I myself would trust produce from smaller local farms more than larger farms, however I also live near the farms and know what is in season and don't deal with the problems of people reselling food like they often do in "farmers markets" near or in large urban centers.
Small farms just don't have the pressure, or the large amount of disinterested or temporary employees that large farms have.
Same with smaller slaughter houses. Perhaps they don't have the manpower to deep clean every shift, but they also don't process nearly as much stuff, don't churn through employees as fast, more directly handle and train employees, and don't have some crap corner of the factory where people can be messing around being dumb.
Of course none of that is bullet proof, but small farms and slaughter houses know that if they fuck things up they don't just lose a bit of money and have to deal with some legal problems like Tyson or other large suppliers and distributors, they lose literally everything.
Our current government is actively rolling back safety measures so these single points of failure become much more pronounced. I don't know but I would bet that companies like this are actively lobbying to have those safety measure reduced. It seems like deflection what you're saying. Yes, things are better than before, but they could still be better and trying to stop people from talking about that isn't helpful or wise.
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 guy selling lettuce at my farmers market grows it, transports it and sells it. if it makes me sick, he will hear about it, and i bet he has a very strong incentive to avoid that situation over a too big to fail megacorp that is basically insulated from consequences in the current climate.
do we need both options? probably. but painting small scale organic farming as'the same' as the alternative is...not accurate.
> if it makes me sick, he will hear about it
I think one of the problems of our modern food system is it can be difficult for a consumer to pinpoint the source of an infection. Food-borne illnesses can take 24-48 hrs or more to become apparent, by which time you may not know what you ate. Combined with the fact that we can't know where certain ingredients were sourced (one of the topics of TFA), and you can know you're sick, but not why.
It's not difficult at all, food products all have factory + machine origin coding on all packages. If something makes you sick you can easily pin point which region and even which exact factories were used.
If there is an outbreak there are multiple pin points, it's also not hard to do this with local market goods either (unless you live in Texas or something where there are no regulations).
Why do you think this is the first time we've dealt with such situations? The only reason why it's happening now is because Elon Musk had his DOGE goons gut the programs that monitor our food supply.
I hope those DOGE goons have deep pockets because they are about to find out what happens when your supposed benefactors abandon you.
This type of outbreak is challenging because the symptoms take weeks to appear.
(I don't disagree that an administration focused on widespread carnage can be blamed for making things worse.)
The argument from the article is when things go wrong (as what happened w/ Taylor), the damage is widespread, whereas damage is contained locally.
This analysis is a bit shallow. Massive GSPs grew as a solution to deal with the massive problems that come with greens sourcing.
If an individual farm has an outbreak they can (usually) source it, eliminate it from the supply chain, and switch to an alternative without any interruption to service. That also means you want as large of a geographic distribution of your farm network as possible. (I'm looking at you, Yuma Valley - a semi-regular source of e.coli outbreaks).
As a bonus, the supply chain is much more efficient at this scale. Small farms can have their salads packed in nitrogen filled bags for longer shelf life and less waste.
Fresh leafy greens are naturally just one of the toughest and most vulnerable supply chains. The disappointing answer (like in a lot of these situations) is that being bigger and more massive company is what makes the product better.
A few things were made clear from this Last Week Tonight episode related to food: https://youtu.be/Za45bT41sXg
- Lobbying and specialist groups can and do hamstringing America's ability to make better, safer food at scale. This isn't about big vs small producers. It's a regulatory resourcing problem.
- The FDA / USDA split is something those groups _love_ to take advantage of to further hamstring America's food supply.
The conclusion I've come to is that this gives profit-driven-corporations or foreign adversaries an excellent way to harm America's food chain through these specialist groups.
Fixing the FDA/USDA split is probably a good idea, but it will take a political earthquake to do so, and I'm absolutely willing to vote for people who pledge to make my food both safer and more delicious.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Taylor Farms and its CEO, Bruce Taylor, have donated millions to Republican and Trump Administration-associated political action committees (PACs) since 2025. This includes a $1 million contribution to both MAGA Inc. and a super PAC dedicated to electing House Republicans.
> ...on July 16, the same day the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced their investigation into the multistate Cyclospora outbreak, Taylor Farms executives met with White House and FDA officials
Ah, well, there it is. Good for them that they're able to get away with it. Corporate protection is bought and sold out in the open.
“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”
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].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_T0WF-uCWg
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
> "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?
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.
https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-c...
The uncomfortable part of that is the involuntary part, not the work.
Prison is not voluntary.
> 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.
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.
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"
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.
> 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?
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alabama-prison-meals-la...
https://law.justia.com/codes/alabama/2024/title-14/chapter-6...
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.
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.
Luckily the article includes a PDF with multiple recommendations at the end. https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Policy-Reco...
> 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...
>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.
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.
this sounds a lot like "vote with your wallet" and then you look in 99% of the wallets and it's like, here's a few million dollars vs trillionaires.
I don't think we're working against trillionaires here. I don't think there's anyone in this situation with that sort of net worth.
We're working against the desire to get the basic needs of life (in this case, food) met for the lowest possible price.
The oligarchs are gutting the regulatory apparatus that stops this stuff from happening.
https://www.farmaid.org/issues/corporate-power/corporate-pow...
There will be a next time and it will be even worse.
I mean we just let over 2,000,000 people die from covid in this country and most people wouldn't even mask to spare anyone or themselves
All we did was make vaccines taboo or difficult to access
Then we put the worse possible people in charge, again
There is zero care for health or safety anymore
There will most definitely be a next time
stop eating meat lol
we're living in 2026
otherwise i don't really give a shit. not my problem, and i don't really care.
edit: meant to reply to the meat grinder comment, not root lol
point still stands
I don't know if you're a bit out of the loop, but ... meat is very much not at issue in this case.
my bad i replied to the root instead of the comment about meat grinders
TFA is about contaminated lettuce my meatless friend