Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

@meat guy
"I believe you are confusing quality with personal taste"

Perhaps, but no more than you are confusing it with utility in my previous example. There are sundry connotations associated with the phrase "quality" and perhaps I have crossed the line into personal preference. For the vast majority of people outside of production based industry the definition of quality differs vastly from "conformance to standards" (though most recognize that definition in the phrase quality control) and is more generally assumed to mean "excellence" - its like the difference between precision and accuracy.

"Under cooked food and unpasteurized milk are risky"

They are indeed, which is why I used them as example to refute your assertion that a public company would never provide a "hazardous" product to the public - which has absolutely no bearing on my personal preference to consume said products (with the exception of course of my contributing in a micro-economic sense). Of course there are outbreaks of problems from time to time, in a long enough time line all things that are possible become reality, but there is no doubt that public (and large private) companies contribute on the retail level to the consumption of these. There is no need to name names, the fact that sushi and raw milk products are available inside the US and elsewhere is testament enough that "companies" are willing to provide "hazardous" products, if they can turn a buck on it. Not even to mention the ol' Fight Club saying which may, in fact, be colloquial but brings home a message which has been independently corroborated by several named and unnamed sources since : "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times
B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

That is just how business is done, very few companies/people feel a genuine ethical responsibility to anyone else, and until more people understand that, they are going to continue to look the other way while they are spoon fed potentially hazardous products by somebody trying to turn a buck. The food industry is certainly no more immune to this than any other. Why do you think the cost of litigation and insurance has skyrocketed in the past 20 years?

"Trust your life to a chef with an associates degree in restaurant and hospitality, rather than a product that is cooked safely accoding to the USDA and FDA.."

For the most part I do not. I buy a lot of my food directly from the producer, especially my beef, lamb and pork. I have the ability to physically inspect the premises if I so desire and trust that the living conditions for the animals are such that my chances of becoming ill are extremely low. I can name the restaurants I'd eat a medium piece of pork or a beef from on one hand. Oh and, the USDA "cook to" temperatures are absolutely ridiculous and considerably higher than their associated agencies in other countries. You have your $60 piece of beef tenderloin cooked to 145F to feel safe and completely ruin the dish, not to mention waste your money. I will continue to eat my (mostly) naturally produced meat at under the recommended temperature and if I get trich. or salmonella and what not, then so be it, I'd rather something easily treatable than to a) eat food that taste like crap for the rest of my life or b)worry about all the unnatural additives slowly building up in my body until they reach a level that causes some horrific problem that modern medicine is not yet capable of solving.

Look, we can agree to disagree- but I will continually chose to buy products of superior quality (read: handled by the fewest people) and cook it to its maximum potential. You can continually chose to cook your pork to 165F and beef to 145F, ruining both. Enjoy

"THe definition of quality is the conformance to standards, so the mas [sic] market uniform products are the highest level of quality " is a patently false statement. The conformance to standards is indicative of producing a uniformly consistent product and nothing more - whether it is a safe, high quality product, or an unsafe, horrible product will depend, of course, on what those standards are and metric by which they are measured.

In the food industry, conformance to standards that produce unsafe, or sub-par results is a major contributing factor to the proliferation of mundanity across the board and in some cases, unhealthy or even unsafe products. This is besides the point that it would be fool's errand to tout the "quality" of mass produced industrialized foodstuffs compared to some types of similar products being made on a small scale by a SKILLED artisan producer. Of course, there are cases where the opposite is true, as some products lend themselves to overall better results through the uniformity brought about by industrialization, (canned tomatoes and flour come immediately to mind) but this article is dealing specifically with bacon and jam - two things that are unequivocally of a higher "quality" - in both taste and nutritional value - when produced PROPERLY in small batches, without addtiives, by a SKILLED artisan. The increased prevalence of less than stellar "artisan" products is intrinsically tied to the widening public desire (and marketplace) for those types of products, caveat emptor.

I'm glad that you have done your homework and can reap the rewards of making your own jams and jellies without risking giving yourself botulism etc. and do agree that buying anything from someone with zero training in food handling and safety will increase one's chances of both a) getting a crappy product, and b) becoming ill from consuming it, but again, the due diligence and responsibility for insuring one's safety is something everyone should care about and take seriously enough to put forth the requisite effort to educate themselves on, instead of lackadaisically relying on the imposition of "quality standards" in industrialized food processing plants for their own safety. If one is not willing to consider anything other than a "World's Best Bacon" sign to make a decision on what to buy/eat, one is better off living with the generally mediocre quality industrialized pre-packaged foodstuffs, and hope for the best that they have a) implemented standards that produce, at least, a safe product and b) said standards were followed completely throughout the production, storage, shipping and retail processes.

Those look awesome. There is no substitute for the taste of hot, homemade pancakes slathered in real maple syrup. We're gonna post some blueberry soufflé pancakes we had over the weekend later this week.