For the recent cyclospora outbreak, a relatively tiny number of people were affected. Per the CDC[1]: 17,180 cases; 922 Hospitalizations; 2 deaths.

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.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/cases/index.html

> I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak.

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.

inefficiency often creates redundancy, but they are not synonyms.

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.

From a strictly utilitarian perspective, more redundancy will result in more deaths, since food handling expertise is concentrated in larger organizations.

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.

> Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency.

No; you can't have redundancy without inefficiency, but you can have inefficiency without redundancy.

> 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.

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.