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It's a lot like AWS. Yes, the uptime is likely to be better than your on-prem solution. However, unlike when yours inevitably falls over and has zero impact on anybody else, when AWS falls over it wipes out entire swathes of the internet. Except now it's our food supply that's wiped out by the consolidation. I haven't bought bagged lettuce in months in response to this outbreak. Smaller organizations means redundancies and options. Redundancy is the same thing as saying inefficiency. Redundancy is good.

I’ve seen where a local butcher slaughters the cows for local farmers, and it’s definitely nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for. It’s not dirty or unsanitary by any means but he just doesn’t have the man power to wash every surface several times a day whereas the plant shuts down one line at a time to do a full daily cleaning with power washers and this foam stuff that gets into every nook and cranny and then gets washed down a central drain. My limited experience with fresh produce isn’t much better (omg the flies).

There's a common pattern with other safety improvements that as safety controls improve, people simply push the envelope further. Cars get safer but then the drivers also get more confident doing things that nobody would get close to doing on an old car because it would spin out before then. With the elevated standards of megascale agriculture you have the issue now where diseases from a lettuce farm in Mexico could affect somebody's health in NYC a month later in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in a previous era. There's no complete solution but in this particular case it's important to remember that salads are actually pretty serious foodborne—illness vectors and they need to be heavily rinsed and ideally cleaned with a bleach or vinegar solution. It's one of the reasons that salads are traditionally on the no-eat list for pregnant women.

Also, I don’t think people have realized how much farmers markets now suffer from “dropshippers taking over Etsy” syndrome. Unless it’s a stand selling one or two specific things from a named farm or local producer, it’s likely you’re getting a lot of the same stuff that goes to the grocery stores, just at a markup. Direct-from-farm delivery boxes are a better bet, at least the mainstay ones, but they’re certainly more expensive and the variety is more obviously seasonal (as you would expect). Neither of these is a solution to nutrition at scale. It’s difficult to balance the economies of scale that consolidated distribution brings against the corruption that comes along with increased supplier leverage. Monopsony is just as pernicious as Monopoly (and they tend to feed each other, with large grocery and restaurant chains preferring large distributors).

Here's a pretty good video about the problem in general. https://youtu.be/nyG-np0S0ZQ The jist is that a lot of this is from consolidation at all levels. There are fewer grocery stores and distributors which has ultimately made hard to know where food ultimately comes from. Couple that with deregulation and the dismantling of the government regulatory agencies under DOGE and we get what we have.