3 ms·

You can find "radical deregulation" in this exact field throughout the developing world, and it's one of the things that keeps drawing me back. It's wonderful.

You can find "radical deregulation" in this exact field throughout the developing world, and it's one of the things that keeps drawing me back. It's wonderful. You can find all sorts of of people selling all sorts of delicious stuff at rock bottom prices and when you buy it it's not only made by the same people who own the stand, but also of course directly supporting these people so it even feels better just spending money at these places. In my experience food regulation does very little for food safety. When somebody opens a stall to sell food, they generally know how to cook very well. And a single incidence of bad food is enough to put somebody out of business. These places all develop regulars, and when they lose a regular - it hurts. Sell unclean food, and your regulars are gone. And people also talk, meaning you may lose customers that didn't even come that day. All in all in something like a decade of travel in developing nations, I got food poisoning once. Ironically it was from a western targeted fast food chain! I've never gotten sick from eating at 'street food' vendors literally thousands of times, excepting the early months when you first move to a place that's mostly just your body adjusting to all the new microbial stuff that's present even in clean food. And in many ways, I think the direct ownership provides far greater safeguards than a mountain of rules and regulations. Because in the end those rules and regulations mean absolutely nothing when some detached worker decides not to wash their hands after coming back from the toilet. That and the fact that they are generally going to locally source their ingredients, whereas McCorporate Burger is going to see where they can find the cheapest substance that can legally be classified as meat that passes taste tests, and then import it by the ton.

multjoy 8y ago
"Bad food" isn't the issue. Lethal food poisoning is the issue - a single instance of contamination can kill a number of people and make a larger number very unwell. This idea that small businesses are somehow exemplars of food hygiene is nonsense. Some of the oldest laws made relate to food safety.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  The FDA did not exist until the early 20th century and laws relating specifically to food were scant before then. They've been quick to pile them on like crazy since then, but they don't actually have much of an effect when you look at comparative rates. According to the CDC [1], in the US each year 48 million people get sick from bad food, and 3,000 die. Worldwide rates according to the WHO [2] are 600 million ill, and 420k deaths. The US has 4.37% of the world's populations, so our normal expected value would be 26.3 million ill and 18,381 deaths. So in terms of getting sick from food, we actually score substantially worse than the entire rest of the world. Our death rates are 6x lower than expected which sounds very good, but I think that's unlikely to be attributable to the FDA. Our relatively large rate of foodborn illness is more of an annoyance than anything. But an annoyance for us us is something that kills people in rural areas with less knowledge and less access to resources. In particular the way people die from food poisoning is not some crazy hyper virulent strain of some hyper dangerous ailment or whatever. It's just plain old diarrhea from bad food -- something that's practically unheard of in the developed world. A couple of bottles of gatorade, lots of water, and some pepto turns diarrhea into a mild annoyance for at most a few days for those in developed areas. But for those without access to resources or the knowledge of how dangerous plain old dehydration actually can be, it can kill quite quickly. And in any case this is primarily going to be people cooking their own food at home and making themselves sick. I'd strongly recommending traveling to the developing world. I certainly never would have taken anything I've said at face value before. But living life in a different way makes you appreciate both the things we do right, and the things we do wrong. And having a million regulations on food for the sake of safety that doesn't even really materialize is something I think we are doing very wrong. [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html [2] - http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safe...

multjoy 8y ago

"Bad food" isn't the issue. Lethal food poisoning is the issue - a single instance of contamination can kill a number of people and make a larger number very unwell. This idea that small businesses are somehow exemplars of food hygiene is nonsense. Some of the oldest laws made relate to food safety.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
The FDA did not exist until the early 20th century and laws relating specifically to food were scant before then. They've been quick to pile them on like crazy since then, but they don't actually have much of an effect when you look at comparative rates. According to the CDC [1], in the US each year 48 million people get sick from bad food, and 3,000 die. Worldwide rates according to the WHO [2] are 600 million ill, and 420k deaths. The US has 4.37% of the world's populations, so our normal expected value would be 26.3 million ill and 18,381 deaths. So in terms of getting sick from food, we actually score substantially worse than the entire rest of the world. Our death rates are 6x lower than expected which sounds very good, but I think that's unlikely to be attributable to the FDA. Our relatively large rate of foodborn illness is more of an annoyance than anything. But an annoyance for us us is something that kills people in rural areas with less knowledge and less access to resources. In particular the way people die from food poisoning is not some crazy hyper virulent strain of some hyper dangerous ailment or whatever. It's just plain old diarrhea from bad food -- something that's practically unheard of in the developed world. A couple of bottles of gatorade, lots of water, and some pepto turns diarrhea into a mild annoyance for at most a few days for those in developed areas. But for those without access to resources or the knowledge of how dangerous plain old dehydration actually can be, it can kill quite quickly. And in any case this is primarily going to be people cooking their own food at home and making themselves sick. I'd strongly recommending traveling to the developing world. I certainly never would have taken anything I've said at face value before. But living life in a different way makes you appreciate both the things we do right, and the things we do wrong. And having a million regulations on food for the sake of safety that doesn't even really materialize is something I think we are doing very wrong. [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html [2] - http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safe...