Local and organic foods are not better for food safety, BECAUSE of the requirements to be organic and nature of local versus factory farms. The main point is the betterment of the earth and environment and as with all food, the safety is increased with proper care.

Agreed, thrid001. And like the post says, proper hygiene and preparation techniques are really important. You can make yourself sick at home by not following safety rules about food handling.

Here's a handy dandy pamphlet (pdf) from K State on the subject.

[www.oznet.ksu.edu]

I recommend eating boogers and food off the floor. It builds your immune system, tastes great, and you get sick less than other folks. And you have less stress by not being a germophobe!

BarfBlog. I love it!

We will only be safe when the Hygiene Police start doing random door to door busts on civilian houses. A sterile nation starts at home, free industrial grade bleach for all!

Safer? I use good food handling and preparation practices, and I am on great terms with the gal who runs our CSA. I have spoken to her about this issue, just to understand what she thought, and she subsequently fired a part-time helper who was too careless. I feel good about my food, and our local produce is just fresher, better tasting, and more nutritious.

Of course, I live in Texas and we can grow lots of things year-round here. My share this week contained potatoes, tangerines, grapefruit, cabbage, lettuce, leeks, kohlrabi, and onions. Hooray :)

One of our local farmers' markets requires all the farms bringing dairy, meat, or certain kinds of prepared foods to have cooling facilities on site (cooled trailers, coolers in trailers, etc.) and a city health inspection certification.

These can be very low-tech, and the city's inspection requirements recognize a farmer's market is different from a restaurant and they're tailored specifically to these needs.

They're pretty strict about it (eggs don't need to be refrigerated nearly as badly as you think they need to be refrigerated), but it means there's a much wider variety of food available and I can be confident in the dead heat of July that that meat has been refrigerated all the way from the farm and (as long as I buy it last) it won't be exposed to the July heat for longer than it takes me to get back home.

Duh.... food borne illnesses can be achieved whether the product comes from MegaMart or is grown in your own yard.

@GuinevereRucker: And you make your kids chew gum you pick from beneath restaurant tables to immunize themselves against childhood diseases, and you sleep with random strangers to make sure you're resistant against VD. Yeah, I get it.

Interestingly, I read that Rasputin actually did make himself resistant to poisoning by accustoming his body to small continuous doses. Do not try this at home.

although packaged food is more convenient, don't believe the "pasteurized for your protection" BS...I had some bad juju stemming from that stuff in college

Be smart, analyze what you're buying and where you're buying from. If at all questionable, walk away. Ask questions if you have any, and use common sense. i.e the guy in shorts and a tee-shirt selling Maine lobster on the corner this time of year should raise some flags.

I just want some knowledge of where the food was produced and possibly how it was. That and having it pass through as few hands as possible.
Having lettuce washed in smaller batches rather than all of it comingled lowers the risk of all of it being contaminated. I know vendor #1 didn't wash their lettuce with vendor #2 at the farmers market.
Buying things that you know the source & passed through fewer hands or no processing into finished food lowers the risk of improper handling or poisonous Chinese ingredients being added. I doubt my local bottled milk is going to have melamine in it. Powdered milk from Walmart is anyone's guess.

@thrid001: "...because of the...nature of local versus factory farms..."? What?

You're missing the whole point. The nature of factory farms is to make a profit at almost any cost. They use heavy doses of dangerous industrial chemicals to sterilize the soil, and on top of that they require the continual use of more dangerous industrial chemicals to restore the soil to something that will support plant life and to feed the inferior, standardized food crops that are engineered specifically to grow on their fake soil. When they harvest the good-looking but pitifully bland and nutrition-lacking produce, they administer various sorts of preservative chemicals to keep it looking fresh for market. Animal food is produced with "acceptable" levels of contaminants, dead and dying animals, and diseases that are treated with antibiotics and hormones before being introduced, without cautionary labeling, into the food supply. The raw, improperly handled by-products from the animal farms are piled on the property in violation of sanitary laws (with the bought-off local politicians turning a blind eye), and they seep into the local water supply, contaminating it with the drugs, chemicals, diseases, and stress hormones from the badly treated animals. Mmmm, tasty.

If you're not a robot and you want to eat real food, you make sure what you buy is grown in something like a natural way. You learn things about how your food lives and is grown. You subscribe to a local organic grower's association and you educate yourself about growing techniques so you understand why properly composted manure and naturally maintained soil produces the best quality, most nutritious, and safest possible produce. Maybe you even understand how to raise and slaughter animals so they don't need to be treated with large quantities of dangerous drugs before slaughter and their products don't need to be treated with artificial "freshness" chemicals afterward to mask their putridity.

The big advantage of stuff from the Greenmarket is that the food is fresher than what you would get at the supermarket.

For those in NYC, the overseer of the Greenmarket program on the Council on the Environment of NYC website notes:
All Greenmarket participants are required to follow safety standards prescribed by the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets. Farms, facilities, and markets are inspected to insure compliance.

@speedwell: Well I guess I'll just stick with my "pitifully bland and nutrition-lacking food," while being a "robot," who has not "educated himself," while I passively murder the population by drinking Hood milk.

There must be some way to advocate eating natural, local foods without trying to personally insult everybody who doesn't.

I'd wager to guess that most food safety problems happen in your house, not in the fields or factories. You can buy the safest food on Earth, but if you don't practice some sanitary standards while preparing it... it's all for naught.

@MichaelBrazell: Oh, you're offended?

Grow a pair.

@speedwell: Yeah, your post was patronizing and offensive. And I have a pair.

@speedwell: I don't think you have to go to the extremes you or @GuinevereRucker suggested. But it is pretty clear that kids who are exposed to more germs at a certain age have better immune systems.

@humphrmi: And I have three of a kind. So you found my post offensive; that doesn't mean it was false. Even the so-called "offensive" parts.

@speedwell: At least if he grows a pair they'll be local and organic... :)

@discounteggroll: Pasteurization isn't sterilization, though. It's a reduction of microbes at the time, not a killing of all of them forever.

@humphrmi: Sarcasm, I has it. :) No, of course I believe in ordinary cleanliness. Extraordinary cleanliness I leave to those who want to get next to Godly.

@speedwell:

Yes, you're right there. Just because it's offensive doesn't mean it's wrong. The fact that it's wrong makes it wrong.

I will start out saying that there are some things that I try to buy organic, some things I don't. Everything in life is filled with compromise.

"Sterilize" do you know what that even means? If a farmer, by chemical means or other, were to sterilize a plot of land, nothing would grow. There are safe chemical fertilizers and there are unsafe ones. When one is found unsafe, it's removed. Yes, that unsafe one shouldn't have been used in the first place, but we can't put progress on hold while we wait for the technologies to determine the safety of something to advance.

Most foods in a supermarket are not bland because of "chemical fertilizers" or "industrial farming". They are bland because of mass market appeal. Because each person has different tastes, what may be wonderfully flavorful to me may be nasty to you. Therefore, to feed as many people as possible in an efficient way, one needs to tone things down a bit.

Everything has an acceptable level of contaminants. Not even your precious organically grown food will be contaminant free. Sure, some of our guidelines are too lax, but you cannot expect something to be free from all contaminants, it would be too cost prohibitive for even the super wealthy to obtain.

There are also areas that growing locally is infeasible in certain months of the year, the local land will just not yield enough crop to feed the local populous.

One other problem is making enough food through organic farming. While it is better food, and better for the land to do so, it would be difficult in this country to grow enough food to feed everyone, especially in an affordable manner. Not impossible here in the USA, just difficult. But it is impossible in other countries with much higher population densities and much lower amounts of usable farmland.

Honestly, though, if you want to make your point, do not be offensive. That's just going to make yourself lose credibility with whoever you're talking to and in turn make your cause lose credibility. I can see that you feel quite passionately about this subject, but you should not go and calling other people robots and being all offensive. That's /not/ a way to make a point.

Honestly, I'd love it if all food was organic and local, but frankly, due to population size and distribution, that's not going to happen.

@mewyn dyner: Yes, of course I understand "sterilize." Industrial farms use broad-spectrum insecticides, weed-killers and other treatments to kill inconvenient organisms in the soil, so that they don't have to maintain the fields in a natural way. In the process, they destroy much of what contributes to the natural and healthy growth of a food crop. They have to replace this with further applications of industrial chemicals before and while the crop is growing.

Food crops evolved in a natural environment where they derived certain benefits from soil organisms and the presence of nearby other plants. Most organic growers know to do things like growing carrots near tomatoes, for example, which confers disease and insect resistance to both plants and improves the final product. Single-crop industrial farming ignores this in favor of ease and quickness of growth and harvest and storage and shelf longevity. Natural, superior varieties of plants, suitable for organic growing, are simply unsuitable for growing in the artificial environment of industrial farms.

It may have made sense to use "appeal to the mass market" fifty or even thirty years ago as an excuse for poor but pretty produce in the grocery store. These days, it's all about the "long tail" and appealing to the refined tastes of niche markets. There are strong incentives to the growers to provide "gourmet" products. Our expanded hypermarket grocery stores can certainly support a much wider variety of products. Why do you think it is, then, that produce has recently been found to be much less nutritious than it was fifty years ago? Why are "high-production" varieties of produce consistently found to be less nutritious than other varieties? It's because the incentives to make everything "industrial" are greater than the incentives to make a quality, safe product.

You say, "...due to population size and distribution, that's not going to happen." Your perfect is the enemy of the good. Certainly we want our food supply to be as healthful and delicious as possible, in the places where it is feasible (nobody expects organic pineapple in Alaska). The "market" seems to be buying organic at an ever-increasing rate. Maybe that should tell agribusiness a little about what people really want and what should profit them to provide.

Produce at the supermarket looks n tastes great to me. "Organic" is just a term to get bleeding hearts to pay more for stuff that isn't any better.

@thrid001: While you're on the subject of "betterment of the environment," perhaps you'd like to take a look at the science:

[scienceblogs.com]

For a while the Public Health people were mostly in favor of large scale production for this very reason. They believed that only large corporations with uniform standards would be able to provide a safe food supply. Lately however we've come to recognize that no one, large or small can create a perfectly safe food supply (it only takes one lazy employee, or even one errant flock of diseased birds). The advantage therefore to a local food economy is that disease outbreaks themselves are localized, instead of the untraceable, untrackable global outbreaks we've had recently.

Thanks for the "shout out" on the Top 10 - here is want I am working on today:

Minnesota Department of Health announces late Friday that the have linked thirty illnesses ( and a death) to the consumption of King Nut Peanut Butter (and Parnell's Pride?). There is nothing on the CDC website or other State Health Department sites naming names - yet. On Saturday King Nut and the FDA jointly release a recall notification, but King Nut blames the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) for its problem. PCA’s lawyers write a press release that tries to deny as much as possible.

So, what is next? Here are a few ideas (not in any particular order) that the companies involved and the government should do Monday morning:

1. Make sure ALL product is promptly recalled;

2. Do not destroy any documents;

3. The companies should pay the medical bills and all related expenses of the innocent victims and their families;

4. The companies should pay the cost of all related Health Department, CDC and FDA investigations;

5. Provide all bacterial and viral testing of all recalled product and any other tested product (before and after recall);

6. Release all inspection reports on the plants by any Governmental Entity or Third-party Auditor;

7. Release all Salmonella safety precautions taken by either King Nut or Peanut Corporation of America - especially after the 2007 Salmonella Peanut Butter Outbreak;

8. Provide the public with the Epidemiological investigation (with names redacted), so it is clear who knew what and when about the likely source of the outbreak; and,

9. Show the public what is being done to prevent the next outbreak.

Taking these steps will go a long way in convincing us that food safety and consumer confidence is of primary importance both to the companies and the government.

@Steven Irish: Yet another ignorant statement. It's not just the quality of the product that makes people join things like CSA's. It's the entire process that goes into making it, and the effects on the environment, workers, etc.

And frankly, I don't that produce at most "normal" supermarkets is very good. If you think it is, then you haven't had REALLY good produce recently or maybe even ever. Try buying something really fresh and in season from your local farmer's market and compare. Now, I'm not saying that "organic" automatically means better quality; obviously it doesn't. But usually the locally grown stuff we buy is much fresher and therefore far tastier, and it's often possible to get (for example) heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables that are NEVER sold at most groceries. These varieties taste MUCH better because they're actually chosen for taste rather than just looks and shelf life.

@johnva: Interesting thing about shelf life. I get my CSA produce within a day of harvest in most cases. It lasts longer than produce from the grocery store. No surprise, that. It's just fresher to begin with.

@lockdog:
For a while the Public Health people were mostly in favor of large scale production for this very reason. They believed that only large corporations with uniform standards would be able to provide a safe food supply.

LOL

@speedwell, avatar of snark: NO you seem to miss the point. Food borne illness is an issue for those who are unfamiliar with eating organic products. The nature of natural fertilizer (shit for those who don't know what it is) is that it contains many things people should not ingest. My point is, just buying local and organic without knowing proper handling and care of the products will increase illness.

@MichaelBrazell: That is true for all food products.Food borne illness is caused in the home and blamed on restaurants all the time because people think they couldn't poison themselves.

Three words: Ready Pac Spinach.

@thrid001: No, sweetie, I am not missing the point. Nobody spreads raw sewage over their farm. It would kill the plants. Manure ("shit") is always properly composted before use as a fertilizer. Composting destroys the harmful soil bacteria and other microorganisms, as you'd know if you knew "proper handling and care of the products."

@thrid001: And don't you wash your produce before you eat it?

How can any farmer "maintain a field in a natural way"?

Agriculture is unnatural. Weeds and stuff just growingon its own with NO human intervention is natural.

Once you till the soi, or plant something deliberatlyl you are violating that which is natural

I can't speak for farmer's markets or local organic stores. But in my experience, local restaurants are always less cleanly, and their food less tasty, than larger chains. I don't know if it has anything to do with lesser profits from the less recognized name, or from no assistance or guidelines from "corporate". The only exception I have found in the Glen Ellyn, IL area is Alfie's on Roosevelt Rd. The building is clean and the food is great.

@lockdog:

The advantage therefore to a local food economy is that disease outbreaks themselves are localized, instead of the untraceable, untrackable global outbreaks we've had recently.

This was always what I thought the "food safety" argument for eating local food was as well. Look at the current 42-state salmonella outbreak for a perfect example!

@thrid001: I think you should have said not necessarily better for food safety. I would trust meat from a local source much more than meat from a CAFO. Fruit and veggies, eh, it depends. Proper food handling should be used regardless of where and how your food is grown.

@BlackMage is doing the Time Warp agaaaaaaain!!!: Hmm, odd. I've found the opposite true. Local restaurants near me tend to buy from local farms. I've even ran into the chefs at the farmer's markets buying veggies for that day. Chain restaurants seem to have a lot of pre-packaged foods. Chains can stay in business even with poorer service and food, just because of the fact they are a chain but local restaurants depend on their service and food to keep them in business.

You know, using the "safety" argument for buying local food doesn't really do any favors for urban sustainability. There are so many better reasons to buy locally.

@speedwell, avatar of snark: Yeah, our CSA food also had longer shelf-life for similar reasons. I'm just saying the varieties of vegetables chosen by industrialized producers are chosen for shelf-life because they will sit on trucks and in the store sometimes weeks before you get them. So while the CSA food may well have longer shelf-life while in your possession, the industrial, tasteless types might still have longer shelf life overall.

@Red-headed bookworm:

Typically, Chains do have better food safety practices than locally owned restaurants. There are exceptions to every statistic, and this isn't speaking of the quality or taste of their products, only the safety. That said, the worst restaurants in my county are locally owned, and the best are also locally owned. The chains are above average on the curve though.

@speedwell, avatar of snark: "Interestingly, I read that Rasputin actually did make himself resistant to poisoning..."

Um, you forgot that guy in Princess Bride with the Iocaine powder.