By now I'm sure you've heard plenty about the McDonald's e.coli outbreak that killed one and sickened 49 folks in multiple states.  Attributed to sliced onions from Taylor Farms in Colorado, I got on their website to see what I could find. 

                  As you can imagine, this is a huge outfit.  The homepage picture is a Rocky Mountain backdrop with a field of leafy greens too big to see across.  Taylor Farms, which aspires to be "America's favorite maker of salads" has 20,000 employees, grown "with care and purpose like we do our products."

                  Interestingly, the website shows no pictures of their employees and doesn't say one thing about how they grow anything.  The only thing you can find are pictures of prepared, packaged salads.  They don't show any pictures of their planting crew, picking crew, processing facilities.  Nothing about their soil. 

                  The only aspirational sentence is a desire to be "America's favorite maker of salads."  That's it.  Nothing about caring for earthworms.  Nothing about nutrient density.  Nothing about taste or safety or community responsibility.  They just want to be big. 

                  According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) right now 48 million Americans suffer food-borne pathogen sickness each year and 3,000 folks die from one.  Isn't it fascinating that all of these come from facilities overseen by government food safety inspectors and none comes from backyard operations and direct-to-consumer smaller farms?   

                  Life is not mechanical.  Life is biological, and in biology scale matters.  This fundamental difference doesn't enter the mentality of the industrial food system.  Food is biological, not mechanical.  Our microbiome is fundamentally biological, not mechanical.  The most significant difference between biology and mechanics is that one lives and one doesn't.

                  Your car can't love you back when you hug the hood.  Your computer doesn't care a lick if you had a good day or bad day.  Our western reductionist disconnected Greco-Roman parts-oriented linear segregated compartmentalized mindset decreases the magic and mystery of life to an inanimate machine.  Machines generally become more efficient at scale.  A guy driving a 200 horsepower tractor can accomplish far more than a guy driving a 50 horsepower tractor, and the cost of building the bigger machine is not linear to its size.  Each horsepower becomes cheaper and cheaper. 

                  But biology doesn't get more efficient, or cheaper when it gets bigger.  A mouse the size of an elephant wouldn't be a very successful mouse.  And an elephant the size of a mouse wouldn't be a very successful elephant.  Nature tends toward balance and living things achieve this through survival adaptability. The cattle industry keeps trying to create bigger cows only to find problems with feet, fertility, and feed efficiency. 

                  The average NFL football player dies before 60 years old because they're mostly freaks of nature.  Scale matters. 

                  If you want to get your onions at McDonalds from a 20,000-employee farm, go ahead.  Just realize such a platform is probably way out of nature's balance and nature tends to bat last . . . with e. coli. 

                  How long has it been since you ate at McDonald's?