I'm just spitballing here, but I wonder how much of this food-borne illness is a function of a person's environment. I grew up on a farm in Central Texas. We f

I'm just spitballing here, but I wonder how much of this food-borne illness is a function of a person's environment. I grew up on a farm in Central Texas. We fertilized our vegetables fields with sheep manure. From our sheep. I drank raw milk from a dairy down the road, pre-pasturization. It was wonderful stuff. The cream would rise to the top, and my mom would skim some of it off for coffee, but often we would just shake it up and drink it. Until I moved to NYC last June, I still spent a lot of time on that farm with my family, eating vegetables and fruits fertilized by feces, eating sheep and chickens that I slaughtered myself, eating eggs right from the chickens with the detritus of chicken vag still on them. (yeah, you would rinse the eggs a little, but probably not enough to get rid of anything serious. The rinsing was purely cosmetic.) My family runs a situation that I wouldn't call either organic, nor safe by any standards. They call it mutually beneficial. The sheep eat the grass, then the sheep poop on the garden, the garden grows and is healthy. The chickens wander around the garden and eat the bugs that tend to eat the produce. The chickens also poop on the garden. The chickens lay eggs that we mostly eat, and the ones we don't turn into more chickens. Sometimes we eat the chickens; sometimes we eat the sheep. Sometimes the eggs don't hatch, and we shoot them for target practice. Anyway, my point is this: Not a single one of us has ever gotten sick from this scenario. I'm not suggesting that it's scalable or sustainable at all. Just that it hasn't been a problem for us. I think it's interesting to note that a lot of people who go to my parent's farm from places like L.A. or Chicago or NYC do, in fact have digestive problems. I'll be curious to find out after a year or two in NYC if I have problems when I go home. It isn't unreasonable for multiple things to be going on here. There's an idea that because the vast majority of people live in urban areas and are not biologically equipped to handle natural food doesn't mean that really natural food is bad. It might just mean that our bodies' adapt over time. On the other hand, I get the point that the way of doing things that my family does is definitely not sustainable. Hell, we spend as much or more buying feed for the animals as we would just buying the stuff we eat there. And that's using 43 acres for 30-something head of sheep and maybe 25 hens. And only maybe 20 acres for vegetables. That's not even enough for a family of 5. Though, I have to say, as proud as I am to be a part of Brooklyn, I'm probably a little more proud of my 96-year-old dad for managing that farm and taking care of all of it every day. Especially in that crazy heat.