Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk
https://farmaction.us/taylorfarmsreport/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.
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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).
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