"We've seem to have done well since 1906. If it's really such a horrible piece of legislation, surely we would've been worse off post-1906 instead of better off?"
This is again faulty logic.
If you start at 1 and then take action X which causes you to progress to 2 then 3 then 5 then 8 you are much higher on the scale than when you started. However it is possible that had you not taken action X that you would have progressed to 4 then 9 then 16.
You cannot say that without X we would still be back at 1, or alternatively looking backwards that X is responsible for us getting to 8, because you can never know what would have happened had you not done X
"How is the company producing safe food if they don't test it or use safety precautions? Even without regulations, I don't see how the food is safe without those. Pre-1906 producers just repeatedly misinformed their customers while using unsafe business practices to cut costs. Not all of them did this, but enough of them that it became a huge issue."
This is a flawed question however the answer is obvious, because in it's natural state most food is safe, that is why we call it food.
Testing does not and cannot ever make the food safe (true story, I work in Software QA and a common axiom in the field is you cannot test quality into the code), it can merely give you some level of evidence that it is. Precautions are similarly not axiomatically necessary because in the normal state the levels of bacteria and toxins in the food are perfectly in line with what our hunter gatherer ancestors consumed and therefore not harmful to us.
Then even to the extent that precautions are prudent as with most things in life you get 80% of the benefit with 20% of the effort. The simplest things like just washing the food off with water, washing the equipment down with soapy water periodically and making the prep crew wash their hands gets you the overwhelming majority of the benefit.
However, this is not where regulation stops and companies which produce perfectly safe food are continually shut down because they follow a process which does not line up with the regulation.
For an example of this there is a segment in the documentary Food Inc on this very issue where they interview a farmer who uses only natural growing and slaughter methods and sells directly to customers with no middle men, he has never had a customer get sick from his food because his process IS safe. However the government was at the time trying to shut him down because he was not using the same process which results in hundreds of people being sickened each year from contaminated food.
The problem with regulation is they are never limited to ensuring the food is safe, they are always written to ensure that a specific process is followed with no deviations, whether that process is the safest one or not.
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Date: 20/7/11 15:44 (UTC)This is again faulty logic.
If you start at 1 and then take action X which causes you to progress to 2 then 3 then 5 then 8 you are much higher on the scale than when you started. However it is possible that had you not taken action X that you would have progressed to 4 then 9 then 16.
You cannot say that without X we would still be back at 1, or alternatively looking backwards that X is responsible for us getting to 8, because you can never know what would have happened had you not done X
"How is the company producing safe food if they don't test it or use safety precautions? Even without regulations, I don't see how the food is safe without those. Pre-1906 producers just repeatedly misinformed their customers while using unsafe business practices to cut costs. Not all of them did this, but enough of them that it became a huge issue."
This is a flawed question however the answer is obvious, because in it's natural state most food is safe, that is why we call it food.
Testing does not and cannot ever make the food safe (true story, I work in Software QA and a common axiom in the field is you cannot test quality into the code), it can merely give you some level of evidence that it is. Precautions are similarly not axiomatically necessary because in the normal state the levels of bacteria and toxins in the food are perfectly in line with what our hunter gatherer ancestors consumed and therefore not harmful to us.
Then even to the extent that precautions are prudent as with most things in life you get 80% of the benefit with 20% of the effort. The simplest things like just washing the food off with water, washing the equipment down with soapy water periodically and making the prep crew wash their hands gets you the overwhelming majority of the benefit.
However, this is not where regulation stops and companies which produce perfectly safe food are continually shut down because they follow a process which does not line up with the regulation.
For an example of this there is a segment in the documentary Food Inc on this very issue where they interview a farmer who uses only natural growing and slaughter methods and sells directly to customers with no middle men, he has never had a customer get sick from his food because his process IS safe. However the government was at the time trying to shut him down because he was not using the same process which results in hundreds of people being sickened each year from contaminated food.
The problem with regulation is they are never limited to ensuring the food is safe, they are always written to ensure that a specific process is followed with no deviations, whether that process is the safest one or not.