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> made food a lot more dangerous You are almost certainly too young to remember it in the United States, but it wasn't that long ago that food was terribly dan

> made food a lot more dangerous You are almost certainly too young to remember it in the United States, but it wasn't that long ago that food was terribly dangerous. Start at non-sterile meat, bad canning practices (botulism killed 2,000+ per year in the United States until around WWII, down to a handful today) and go all the way to pellagra (an easily-solved Vitamin B deficiency that still killed 7500 people per year in the US in the 1930s; effectively 0 today). Remember Wonder Bread? It seems like evil simple carbs today, but it was initially popular precisely because the color and texture proved that it wasn't adulterated like many local bakers did at the time (flour was expensive, sawdust was cheap and could stretch meager supplies). Food was not safe for a long time.

craigwblake 12y ago
Let's put those numbers in perspective, though. The CDC [1] claims that 600,000 people die per year due to heart disease, most of the causes of which (again according to the CDC) are people's choices in food and drink. That's pretty good evidence that food, on the whole, is not safer now. 1. http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm
- schoen 12y ago
  Seems to be an interesting difficult in terms of whether the dangers in food are ones that people consuming it can expect to perceive. In an era when food poisoning was more common, maybe a lot of people knew quickly whether the food they ate had harmed them; now folks eating junk food might have to wait years to experience some of the adverse effects, and can't really relate those effects to a particular purchase or product or vendor. I worry about a similar thing for computer security. A lot of the threats that we used to think about in terms of, say, viruses, wanted to get the user's attention either through innocuous mischief, or by showing off with spectacularly destructive behavior, like deleting files or crashing the machine or even erasing the hard drive. "Look at me, I infected your computer!" And later we saw adware which tries to get the user's attention for marketing purposes (which is definitely still a thing). But now a whole lot of attackers have a goal of long-term, pervasive, convert compromise, to be used selectively later on -- botnets for DDoS attacks and spam, keyloggers for delayed financial fraud or government surveillance, "advanced persistent threats" to compromise infrastructure, maybe in service of transitively compromising other infrastructure. http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/Norway/NordicConference/Documents/14.pdf http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/Norway/NordicConference/Docum... So in the past there was a common expectation that a virus would do something that the user could notice, or else what's the point? Whereas nowadays if someone says "the government is spying on me, my computer displayed a weird security warning message" it tends to reduce the credibility of the claim, because we expect that botnet developers and government hackers are as covert as possible, delaying the moment when victims of compromise would notice anything's wrong for as far as possible, trying to break or obfuscate the link between the attack and its results as much as possible. So in one sense computers have also gotten more dangerous because there are more powerful and pervasive attackers, but in another sense there may be a trend away from risks of getting any kind of malware whose effects you will notice any time soon.
beachstartup 12y ago
an interesting side note: this is exactly what's happening in china today.
jp555 12y ago
Sterile meat? Yuk! Why would someone want sterile meat? The best beef for example has been tenderized by bacteria for several weeks before being butchered. There's maybe a couple dozen kinds of bacteria that pose a threat, the vast majority are either benign or good for us. Attempting to eliminate food danger can paradoxically increase the danger. If you go to a grocery in Europe you'll see eggs sitting on shelves instead of inside the fridge as you'd see in the US. This is because eggs in the US are cleaned so much that the egg's cuticle is washed away, which is the egg's natural barrier to bacteria. In Europe they do not wash the cuticle away and eggs store safely on room-temp shelves. I'd suggest that sterile meat is more dangerous as it is devoid of the natural bacterial "cloak" that provides protection from the nasty bugs.
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  > Why would someone want sterile meat? Maybe because they've had a nasty encounter with food poisoning? > I'd suggest that sterile meat is more dangerous as it is devoid of the natural bacterial "cloak" that provides protection from the nasty bugs. I'd like to see a reference to a scientific study that demonstrated that.
  - jp555 12y ago
    I can understand that one might seek sterile meat after a bad experience, but unless they went CSI on everywhere they were for the time around the incident they cannot know exactly what the source of the poisoning was. It might have been a doorknob at work that was contaminated by someone who didn't wash their hands and had contaminated fecal matter on their hands. Deciding henceforth to only eat sterile meat would not solve that problem.
sowhatquestion 12y ago
Yes, this is an excellent point, although it doesn't contradict anything I said. In fact, it might help explain the demographic trends: older generations might be more likely to see food innovations as benevolent, because these innovations formerly played a legitimate role in increasing the supply of food that wouldn't make you sick. Schoen's comment below makes an excellent, related point: older generations might have a lower, or at least different standard of what constitutes "dangerous" food. It used to be that dangerous food would immediately give you an infectious disease; whereas today, dangerous food very slowly gives you a chronic non-communicable diease.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> It seems like evil simple carbs today, but it was initially popular precisely because ...it was the first bread sold to consumers presliced, and that (and before it was preslicing, its quality for slicing) was heavily and effectively marketed. Ironically, Wonder and other cheap white bread -- and other mass produced foodstuffs of the same period of mass industrialization of food supply -- and their popularity contributed several of the deficiency-related diseases you refer to as evidence of food being dangerous (later, they were enriched specifically to address the deficiencies that diets heavy in the them produced.)

craigwblake 12y ago

Let's put those numbers in perspective, though. The CDC [1] claims that 600,000 people die per year due to heart disease, most of the causes of which (again according to the CDC) are people's choices in food and drink. That's pretty good evidence that food, on the whole, is not safer now. 1. http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm

schoen 12y ago
Seems to be an interesting difficult in terms of whether the dangers in food are ones that people consuming it can expect to perceive. In an era when food poisoning was more common, maybe a lot of people knew quickly whether the food they ate had harmed them; now folks eating junk food might have to wait years to experience some of the adverse effects, and can't really relate those effects to a particular purchase or product or vendor. I worry about a similar thing for computer security. A lot of the threats that we used to think about in terms of, say, viruses, wanted to get the user's attention either through innocuous mischief, or by showing off with spectacularly destructive behavior, like deleting files or crashing the machine or even erasing the hard drive. "Look at me, I infected your computer!" And later we saw adware which tries to get the user's attention for marketing purposes (which is definitely still a thing). But now a whole lot of attackers have a goal of long-term, pervasive, convert compromise, to be used selectively later on -- botnets for DDoS attacks and spam, keyloggers for delayed financial fraud or government surveillance, "advanced persistent threats" to compromise infrastructure, maybe in service of transitively compromising other infrastructure. http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/Norway/NordicConference/Documents/14.pdf http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/Norway/NordicConference/Docum... So in the past there was a common expectation that a virus would do something that the user could notice, or else what's the point? Whereas nowadays if someone says "the government is spying on me, my computer displayed a weird security warning message" it tends to reduce the credibility of the claim, because we expect that botnet developers and government hackers are as covert as possible, delaying the moment when victims of compromise would notice anything's wrong for as far as possible, trying to break or obfuscate the link between the attack and its results as much as possible. So in one sense computers have also gotten more dangerous because there are more powerful and pervasive attackers, but in another sense there may be a trend away from risks of getting any kind of malware whose effects you will notice any time soon.

beachstartup 12y ago

an interesting side note: this is exactly what's happening in china today.

jp555 12y ago

Sterile meat? Yuk! Why would someone want sterile meat? The best beef for example has been tenderized by bacteria for several weeks before being butchered. There's maybe a couple dozen kinds of bacteria that pose a threat, the vast majority are either benign or good for us. Attempting to eliminate food danger can paradoxically increase the danger. If you go to a grocery in Europe you'll see eggs sitting on shelves instead of inside the fridge as you'd see in the US. This is because eggs in the US are cleaned so much that the egg's cuticle is washed away, which is the egg's natural barrier to bacteria. In Europe they do not wash the cuticle away and eggs store safely on room-temp shelves. I'd suggest that sterile meat is more dangerous as it is devoid of the natural bacterial "cloak" that provides protection from the nasty bugs.

AnimalMuppet 12y ago
> Why would someone want sterile meat? Maybe because they've had a nasty encounter with food poisoning? > I'd suggest that sterile meat is more dangerous as it is devoid of the natural bacterial "cloak" that provides protection from the nasty bugs. I'd like to see a reference to a scientific study that demonstrated that.
- jp555 12y ago
  I can understand that one might seek sterile meat after a bad experience, but unless they went CSI on everywhere they were for the time around the incident they cannot know exactly what the source of the poisoning was. It might have been a doorknob at work that was contaminated by someone who didn't wash their hands and had contaminated fecal matter on their hands. Deciding henceforth to only eat sterile meat would not solve that problem.

sowhatquestion 12y ago

Yes, this is an excellent point, although it doesn't contradict anything I said. In fact, it might help explain the demographic trends: older generations might be more likely to see food innovations as benevolent, because these innovations formerly played a legitimate role in increasing the supply of food that wouldn't make you sick. Schoen's comment below makes an excellent, related point: older generations might have a lower, or at least different standard of what constitutes "dangerous" food. It used to be that dangerous food would immediately give you an infectious disease; whereas today, dangerous food very slowly gives you a chronic non-communicable diease.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> It seems like evil simple carbs today, but it was initially popular precisely because ...it was the first bread sold to consumers presliced, and that (and before it was preslicing, its quality for slicing) was heavily and effectively marketed. Ironically, Wonder and other cheap white bread -- and other mass produced foodstuffs of the same period of mass industrialization of food supply -- and their popularity contributed several of the deficiency-related diseases you refer to as evidence of food being dangerous (later, they were enriched specifically to address the deficiencies that diets heavy in the them produced.)