Eat and Runs

“A generation ago, an outbreak of food poisoning generally remained small-scale. The source was likely to be tainted ground beef from a local butcher shop or an egg salad gone bad at a church picnic. As the scale of industrial food production has grown, so has the scale of foodborne outbreaks. When I wrote my book Fast Food Nation, published in 2001, high levels of fecal contamination of ground beef were already a nationwide problem, not just a local one, because huge ground-beef-processing plants with poor safety procedures were supplying the fast-food industry.” Here’s the issue. The scale of food production and distribution is going up. The number of people we have making sure that food is safe is going down. “The food-safety system we have—underfunded for decades—is being methodically dismantled by the Trump administration.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): Should We Be Afraid of Our Food?