Safe food
The TCS daily (technology, commerce, society) has an interesting article on making our food safer.
Americans are wondering who will protect us from future outbreaks of contamination and food-borne illness.First, it's clear we can't rely on growers of fresh produce to protect us 100 percent of the time. Modern farming operations - especially the larger ones -- already employ strict standards and safeguards designed to keep food free of pathogens. And most often they work: Americans' food is not only the least expensive, but also the safest, in the history of humankind.
However, there is a limit to how safe we can make agriculture, given that it is an outdoor activity and subject to all manner of unpredictable challenges. If the goal is to make a field 100 percent safe from contamination, the only solution that guarantees this is to pave it over and build a parking lot on it. But we'd only be trading very rare agricultural mishaps for fender-benders.
