alt Hacker NewsGiven the lack of research into the matter, I present the following pilot study for HN to use:
Number of times the lettuce I grew at home this year made me shit a tsunami: 0
Number of times lettuce I bought at the store this year made me shit a tsunami: 1
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I'm going to give you a really strong counterexample to this. One of the most commonly acquired parasites that comes from gardening is toxoplasmosis.
But doesn't toxoplasmosis come from owning cats?
Nope. The correlation between cat ownership and toxoplasmosis is basically zero. Because toxoplasmosis comes from stray cats who poop in your garden and you catch them through the gardening. Something like 40% of toxoplasmosis cases come from gardening with people unaware that stray cats poop there. (The majority comes from eating undercooked food, like pork, because the pork grazed in fields where there was stray cat poop.)
So essentially doing your own gardening creates a risk vector that is significantly less present in industrial-level gardening of vegetables.
And you're lucky that a sick bird didn't shit on your home grown lettuce before you picked it.
And did you grow enough lettuce to supply yourself for a whole year? If not the problem remains.