In my opinion I don't think the answer is either one. The problem is society in general has been to far removed from the earth, to many people living on cement in steel buildings. Nobody gets dirt under their fingernails anymore and therefore don't have the opportunity for their bodies to build up resistance or antibodies to anything.
When I was a kid, my eight siblings and I were a rough and tumble bunch of farm kids who milked cows by hand. We always set a pan of ground corn in front of the cows to get them stanchioned. We had one cow that, as soon as she was done eating she was ready to leave and would always let me know by giving me a kick after she finished her ground corn.
I won't go into details about the Attitude Adjustment that followed, but for this topic I'm recollecting how one time she managed to step her foot into the milk pail-sh!t n all. After another round of AA the milking resumed and the milk was taken to the house floaties n all and we never had a second thought about it.
My point is, when exposed to such things, the body builds up a natural tolerance for them so most city folks, not having the same exposure, just can't hack it. When eating in the field, we would use the same jackknife to cut our food as we had just used that morning to cut up gophers or stab a frog and never thought a thing about it or got sick. All you had to do was wipe the dirty blade on your dirty pants first. Today kids have the "3 second rule". If you drop something and its on the floor for less than three seconds before you pick it up, then its deemed ok. To this day at our house, its the "clean dirt" rule. If your sammich falls on the ground in the house yard or the floor of the pickup its ok, its "clean dirt". Just brush it off and eat it and all is fine. If it fell in the barn yard or the bathroom floor then maybe not considered clean dirt (depends on how hungry you are). Point being that dirt in itself is not necessarily dirty.
I'm sure farming with no cabs and coming in the house blacker than Toby's arse after eating dirt all day helped build up a resistance to many soil bourne stuff too.
So other than the common cold or occasional flu, we never got sick. According to the sky is falling crowd, we should have been dead before we reached puberty. We worked with pigs, cattle and chickens daily. We handled manure daily, the occasional dead animal full of flies and maggots, rotten egg fights, butchered all manner of animals and so handled every part of the animal inside and out, handled every kind of vegetable from the garden and crop from the field, often with tons of rust or smut in our noses and mouths. Shoveled spoiled grain. Exposed to all sorts of molds and bacteria. We drank from artesian wells, surface wells, rain barrels, creeks and when swimming in the stock pond (and sharing it with the cows)on a hot day, a fair amount pond water (albeit involuntary). We ate stuff raw, we ate stuff under cooked, sometimes we ate stuff we didn't even know what it was. I'm sure you all know of some kid (not me) who ate bugs, worms or grass, usually on a dare, they never got sick. Seems to me a dead mouse wasn't even something to be handled gingerly by the tip of the tail with rubber gloves. It was something the brothers and I would pick up and throw at each other or be made to "eat" if you were not the elder or stronger sibling.
He11, I don't even remember using a bar of soap unless my mother was standing over me or it was Sat. night and we had to clean up for Sun. church. If it didn't come off with water it just had to wear off. Now days there's a bottle of disinfectant soap for you to use not only in every public restroom but on every checkout counter at the stores, restaurants and at the door of every church or gathering place heaven forbid you might have shook hands with someone and need to run for the antiseptic hand wash so you don't get cooties.
So my answer is no on both counts. It isn't how our food is grown or handled. Its how the latest generation as a whole, has become the next bubble boy afraid of breathing the air or touching anything outside their house and their natural immune system doesn't know how to handle it when they do. And when it comes to natural antibodies, don't get me started on Mothers who won't nurse their babies with their breast milk because it interferes with their job being "on call" every few hours. They just as well drink and smoke while pregnant too if they care so little. Rant over!
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Today's Featured Article - The Day Mom Drove the 8N - by Brian Browning. My Dad was wanting to put in a garden but couldn't operate the 8N and handle the old horse drawn plow he had found and rigged up to use with the tractor. Well, he decided to go get Mom out of the house and have her drive the tractor while he walked behind the plow. You got to understand that while my Mom is a hard worker who will always help whenever she can... she had never operated farm machinery before that day. Dad got her out there, explained how the clutch was the same as in our o
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