Meat Versus Plants in the Food Safety War

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One can come down with a Foodborne illness eating almost anything. Fruits, vegetables, meat, and even spices can harbor harmful bacteria and viruses that may cause nausea or even death. Food activists often blame meat for harming people, but it often seems like fruits and vegetables can be just as deadly. So what is a greater danger: meat, dairy, eggs, fruits, or vegetables? To answer this question I collected several sources indicating the percent of all foodborne illness attributable to each food group, and used the data to construct the following graph.

Figure 1—Rate of Foodborne Illness from Various Foods

This graph shows that we get sicker more often from eating meat than any other food, but is this a fair comparison? What if we eat a lot more meat than produce? Even if one serving of meat is less likely to make you sick, the fact that we eat many more servings implies meat will make us sicker more often. It hardly seems fair to criticize meat because it is so popular! Instead of asking which food makes us sicker, we should also include information about how much value that food delivers. It might be the case that we prefer food that has a higher likelihood of making us sick simply because we like it better, or perhaps because it is more nutritious. After all, boiled water will never make you sick, but it also has no nutrients—nor is it pleasing to eat!

Figure 2—Rate of Foodborne Illness from Various Foods

Figure 1 simply doesn't give us the information we need. For a better comparison I created a better graph where I divided the percent of illnesses by the amount of money we spend on each food type (in hundreds of dollars). This prevents unfairly penalizing a food because we eat more of it, and takes into account how much we value the food. The resulting graph below shows that it is really eggs that poses us the most danger. Although we rarely get sick from eating eggs that is only because we eat fewer eggs than other foods. For every dollar spent on eggs we will get sicker than a dollar spent on any other food. Meat still remains just slighly more dangerous than produce, so adjusting for the value of food does not make meat less safe than fruits and vegetables.

Figure 3—Rate of Foodborne Illness from Various Foods

Video 1—Food Safety Scare From Onion News
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