The solution is clearly automation. Less humans, higher reliability processes, better tracking of environmental factors (humidity, temperature, etc.) and time in storage/transit. Faster and more modern supply chains with faster and higher reliability unit processes mean lower risks. The area is evolving: for example there has been a shift in Europe from chlorine washes to washing with ozone or ozonated water as well as increased use of UVC. It seems the rest of the world is yet to catch up. In the US https://omidyar.com/ recently funded http://safetraces.com/ ... we actually reached out to them this week but haven't heard back at all. I suspect high impact large scale improvements may be popularized in China with European technology.
How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US
131–140 of 242 posts
Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And if you buy pre-cut bagged salad, how can you wash that? Not sure what you mean? Why can't you wash it?
It's chopped into hundreds of tiny pieces. Do you wash each piece individually? Or dump it into a bowl of water and swirl it around?? And then your salad is a soggy soup!
Does dumping it into a colander, and running water across it not count?
(Essentially, the same way one would wash fruit such as blueberries or strawberries, though I usually use the box those come in since they already have holes.)
Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US
#133> Leafy vegetables were also the second most common cause of food poisoning-related hospitalizations. I never quite got to like lettuce. I don't know why people like it. It just doesn't have much taste, its leaves are too big, so have to shove them in awkwardly. I'd rather have a salad with chopped ripe tomatoes, onions / chives, cucumbers, cabbage, etc. Even with those, I often wonder if people don't eat more veggie…
Cut the lettuce before serving. Use chopsticks instead of forks, which after you are accustomed to chopsticks are frankly ridiculously barbaric implements. I am western but I loathe eating many things with blunt knives and clunky forks. Learn to appreciate the texture and color of food, not just the taste.
Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet most of these products have a label that explicitly says "Ready to eat!".
It likely means they don't need to be cooked and not that they don't need to be washed. We don't wash strawberries we pick, but we wash those that we buy (even if they are ready to eat).
I looked at a bag I have at home -- it says "Thoroughly washed - Ready to eat".
That doesn't sound like something I need to wash before I eat it.
It's not even clear that "washing" (i.e. rinsing) would wash of a significant growth of harmful bacteria.
Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US
#135Keep things in perspective though. That article mentions 3,000 people per year die from food poisoning, and leafy vegetables are the cause of 1/4 of that, or 750 deaths/year. However, heart disease alone causes 610,000 deaths per year ( https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm ). "Individuals who ate more than 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per had roughly a 20 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease" ( h…
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that we eat fewer leafy greens. I, however, definitely think that there could be a lot of improvements to the way that we farm them.
Yes, people do seriously suggest that: http://highsteaks.com/carnivores-creed/owsley-the-bear-stanl... (just the first link I found)
Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US
#136Not mentioned is that organic farming doesn't allow irradiation which would kill e-coli. Everybody looks for organic foods thinking they are better but the truth is organic doesn't mean either.
So this is the logo used to show that food is irradiated: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Radura_intern... This is why I hate big-food. They use any and all opportunities to mislead about what truly is going on.
In the USA, the FDA requires that the package be labeled with the text "treated with radiation", in addition to the Radura mark.
Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but if something has been working for thousands of years, even imperfectly, it carries a guarantee nobody else can provide. my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts. something being used for thousands of years merely means it doesn't cause harm in small enough timescales so that people can associate it with the effects. see: smoking, which is dangerously poisono…
>my point is that the guarantee is a very weak one, and one based on tradition rather than facts. This is incredibly wrong. The guarantee is based 100% on facts. This is literally the only thing it's based on. No assumptions about mechanisms and correlations. Just facts. You then proceed to explain how if something can bypass this method of testing it's only causing mild, low-level symptoms on large timescales. This…
>This is incredibly wrong. The guarantee is based 100% on facts. This is literally the only thing it's based on. No assumptions about mechanisms and correlations. Just facts.
You're throwing around the word "fact" a little too liberally. "people did x for thousands of years" is a fact, but it's not a guarantee of safety. "x is safe because people used it for thousands of years" is a guarantee of safety based on your opinion, but it's not a fact.
>You then proceed to explain how if something can bypass this method of testing it's only causing mild, low-level symptoms on large timescales. This is a much better guarantee than a paper published on nature.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you accepting that harmful substances that cause mild, low-level symptoms can "fly under the radar" of "the test of time"? Or are you saying that the fact something is used for a long time is automatically a better proof of safety to you than a study published in nature?
Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US
#138The reason vegetables are poisonous is because of the animal waste that is being used to grow plants. If there wasn't such a huge livestock industry, people wouldn't be using their excrement for fertilizer and our plants would be safer.
It’s not animal waste. It’s human waste.
Its both. Runoff from factory farms is a serious issue.
Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hate to break it to you, but even cardiologists can’t summon causation from correlation.
So your claim is you have better scientific basis than industry experts? I'll gladly challenge you to a 6-12 month comparison of you eating meats and me eating a primary plant based diet and pay for WellnessFX panels. If you lose you repay me. Edit: vegetable --> plant, and if I win (we can agree on some defined objective comparisons and scoring offline) I'll even donate the money you'd have repaid back to the charit…
No, what I’m saying is that correlational studies are fundamentally incapable of proving causation[0]. Furthermore, despite 50 years of nutritional advice in line with the study you linked to, and despite reductions in red meat consumption[1], health outcomes have gotten catastrophically worse, not better. So maybe the conclusions that people are drawing from these studies are wrong.
Read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes if you want to do a deep dive on how so many people can be so wrong about something for so long. It will completely undermine your faith in experts along the way.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t...
[1]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/januaryfebruary/us...
Re: How salad became a major source of food poisoning in the US
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smart move, indeed. A minor chance of contact with E.Coli seems more dangerous than documented certain heart disease, cancer, and wait for it.. more E.Coli!
If you read the article, there's a bigger chance of getting E. Coli from greens... Also, I believe that was a joke.
This is most certainly untrue. All you have to do is consider the fact that all uncooked meats come with a warning. This is because it is well known, and admitted by the meat and egg industries, that raw and undercooked meats and eggs are unsafe for consumption. This is because of the environments they come out of. Greens on the other hand are not fertilized with manure or subject to E.Coli laden environments during processing. The only unsafe greens are mainly things like alfalfa sprouts that can come into contact in the processing chain. I'm surprised at all of the disinformation.