Everything done to industrialize a product — to mass-produce it in large numbers, minimize the unit cost of production, maximize cash profits –at the same time concentrates risk of harm. The profit, however, is immediate, while the risks are almost always delayed, and this fact skews the judgment of the people involved. They come to believe that a healthy profit in hand today is worth any number of sick people down the road tomorrow or the day after. Industrial food is certainly no exception.

Scaling up food production requires the handling of plants and animals in enormous numbers, subjecting them to numerous chemical and mechanical processes performed by regiments of people using battalions of machines. Every chemical, process, person and machine presents multiple opportunities for contamination, a delayed risk for the eventual consumer of the product. Indications are that the risks are getting worse, fast.

Any doubts that this is so should have been laid to rest by the events that made news just this summer. Consider a partial list:

We cannot blame our collective ignorance of the threats posed by processed foods on the corporate news media — they actually do a pretty good job of reporting incidents of contamination, recalls, and the like. As to our collective persistence in demanding, buying and consuming ever more processed foods, who can be blamed for that? I mean, for crying out loud, are we actually going to try to avoid a few minutes of effort by buying chunks of watermelon that have been cut up into bites for us by unknown underpaid people in an unknown under-maintained facility in an unknown under-regulated country? And we’re going to be surprised when we get sick?

Repeat after me and memorize, please: with food as with anything else, if it is industrial, it might be cheap and easy, but eventually it’s going to make you very sick.