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.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-cdc-food-net-monitorin...
But it does cripple our ability to ask if this was a one-off, or if we're seeing long term trends that should be worrisome.
You are almost certainly not reflected in those numbers.
We do hold food safety to a high standard. We have some of the highest standards on the planet.
A few lucky people live in the densest urban areas where car non-ownership is totally fine, nice even. For the rest, it's horrible and no one would choose it. A trip to the grocery store in the suburbs could take 30-45 minutes each way in 90º heat (and in half the country, with humidity too) is terrible - and think how many times you'll have to go to the store if you're buying only what you can carry 3 miles. Also many school districts provide no buses, so now you're walking kids to and from school in all weather. Bikes are a thing, but the roads aren't always safe and it still sucks in weather.
For all animals on earth, you can't really get by without food. This is jus a fact.
I have a car (and a license) anyway for comfort reasons, but I keep the scooter in the back for situations like distant parking. Works pretty well for me.
I'm shocked to hear many school districts provide no busses though... I guess I always assumed that was some legal requirement? Like you have to send your kid to school, so we have to provide transportation if you're outside of a certain range.
Example: The assigned school for my neighborhood is 1.5 miles away by the shortest possible route, and requires crossing a 7-lane arterial.
Our dependency on food is not a choice.
i guarantee you that first number is wildly non-illustrative of the reach of this outbreak.
this "whattabout"ism is brought up during every safety discussion. can we please accept that 1/ everyone knows about the car issue, and 2/ the car issue being a problem does not mean we should stop talking about other issues that exist.
In any case, it's a good barometer for judging personal risk. I don't stress about the danger when I get into my car, so I probably shouldn't stress about the danger from something substantially less likely to take me out. It contextualizes a number by comparing it to something most of us do every day.
People are very prone to overweight the risk of things that are prominent in the media.
This is not a data exercise, this is real life and 1 person getting sick from this stuff is too much.
You may not wish to hear this, but real life is very much a data exercise:
We also stopped buying lettuce.
1) Why? The source was quickly identified, and it's trivial to avoid the tainted supplier.
2) Why only now? Bagged leafy greens are notorious for outbreaks. The extra processing steps means greater opportunity for introducing contamination (more people handling the produce), and greater opportunity for cross-contamination.
This food safety expert/activist/litigator has explained both of those points many times: https://www.marlerblog.com/ Though, being middle-aged and perhaps with better-than-average recollection, I connected the dots to bagged leafy greens years ago, across many news cycles, and to the risk of food poisoning from vegetables generally, through hard, personal experience.
The mixed messaging certainly didn’t help.
One day it’s Taylor Farms and the next the FDA was apologizing.
And even once it was found to be Taylor Farms, you can’t control every Taco Bell or anything else.
Mostly it just killed any consumer confidence in greens
Restaurants and fast-food outlets generally can't/don't avoid their staff making sketchy health decisions.
Don't eat at them if you're worried.
Read anything about back-kitchens and staff's interesting attitudes towards health risks.
I highly recommend Kitchen Confidential - amazing novel writing.
Although my intro to the genre was 1933's Down and Out in Paris and London (an upper-middle class хорошо horrorshow). An all-time favorite book.
It really, really is not. They are massive and are a supplier for a huge number of restaurants.
Exactly. I never saw a reason to even get started.
If you go back not that many decades, consumers had never bought tightly-bagged vegetables because they were not available.
If you were accustomed to never having bagged lettuce growing up it mainly just seems like false convenience to begin with.
>Bagged leafy greens are notorious for outbreaks.
Naturally without data this was not well-established nor completely confirmed like it is now.
Everybody and their grandmother had just instinctively known better for centuries.
When homemakers did cut or shred lettuce it was usually intended to be eaten within the hour. Nobody would do this very far in advance at home, and only after discarding the outer leaves, then thoroughly washing the remaining part that was going to be carefully "processed" by hand, then eaten by their loving family. With clean hands after washing with soap.
Back when government regulators were actually recognized having stronger interest in food safety than today, you still couldn't expect their standards to be the very highest.
It was just better than nothing.
That same hard personal experience goes way back before the advent pf plastics.
And in any case, a preventative measure, like thoroughly washing the lettuce is a good form of insurance for home made foods, regardless of what's reported on the news.
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.
I say this as someone who gets most of my veg from a local CSA. It's not because I think it's safer. It probably isn't.
No; you can't have redundancy without inefficiency, but you can have inefficiency without redundancy.
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.
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.
Except AWS doesn't fall over, regions do. The problem isn't using one provider, it's that everyone uses one region of that provider. When that region goes down, so many people report outages that it seems like AWS as a whole went down, but it didn't.
Same basic deal with Taylor Farms. It was only lettuce sourced from Central Mexico, and it was distributed to the east coast and some central states. Page 18 of this PDF (https://www.taylorfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Taylo...) shows all the growing regions. Of all 22, only 1 sent out bad lettuce. But popular opinion is that the all of it was bad.
So the risk wasn't their scale. If anything, the risk was their customers (the walmarts, costcos, krogers, etc) not labeling where it came from or more stringently tracking these things or planning for an "incident". None of this is new, everybody knows leafy greens are the most likely source of food poisoning.
Just like AWS isn't to blame when customer sites we depend on go down from one bad service in one region, we shouldn't be blaming Taylor Farms. We should be blaming the customer-companies we all use who didn't plan for a very predictable failure.
2020 Kinesis outage has entered the chat
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.