alt Hacker NewsI’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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Yes, the cleanliness can vary based on the outfit and the tech/facilities tends to be lower. However, there are not 100s of animals being ran through the same grinder. It doesn't seem like there are any real tests being done to each animal by the inspectors.
So facility risk seems similar or higher for the local shop, depending on specific people running it, but animal-bourne risk seems higher at the packing plant, which seems to be the more likely vector to me anyways.
No data on that. But qualitative experience shows the local farmer/butcher has much nicer/fresher looking/smelling meat than the Walmart.
Industrial operations have industrial scale problems that require much higher standards. The local butcher might not scrub the floor and walls with the same industrial anti-bacterial detergent, but he's also not running hundreds of cows a day through the space. The local farmers don't pre-emptively administer antibiotics to their herd; the CAFO operation that feeds the industrial slaughterhouse has to cram antibiotics into the cows to keep them healthy enough to slaughter. Comparing the two directly is very misleading.
> ... nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for.
It's good that that plant is so well-run. But America doesn't lack for less well-run large meatpacking plants. Remember Boar's Head? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41403919
I would much rather rely on data on this kind of question over vibes. Efficiency means things move quicker and cheaper, and a few people get richer. It does not by any means inherently increase safety. The effects of a fuckup in a hugely efficientized industry often scale directly with just how much efficiency was mined away from caution and human-interaction.
Bubba flipping burgers getting his dirty hands on your meal might make you sick, but Bobba inspecting the meatslop production line with constant pressure from upper management to be as efficient as possible according to whatever recent regulations were stripped back might accidentally spray the horse-meat product decontaminizer on the pig-meat product, generating a national pandemic.