Obama and Food

The outcry of the demos brought some changes yesterday. I read here that President Obama, in the wake of the most recent salmonella scare, wants to change the way foods are regulated for safety. Now this is a good idea, one I am not opposed to. But notice what Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack wants to do: create one regulatory entity to handle ALL foods, rather than the eleven which currently do a marginally satisfactory job of it. Again, from a regulatory standpoint, a great idea - one entity should be able to do a much better job of communicating with itself and effecting consistent regulation than eleven entities could do.

However, there is one little problem with this scenario: Vilsack is bought and paid for by big-ag interests. To some degree that is reasonable since he comes from big-ag Mecca - he's the former governor of Iowa. The problem comes when someone who represents the interests of industrial agriculture wants to consolidate all food regulation under one agency - then, the big-ag companies need only to influence a few people to keep their interests protected by policy. Consolidation of oversight is a good idea; consolidation of power is not.

Food safety was also the central issue of Obama's weekly YouTube address. I must point out one glaring omission of President Obama's teleprompter-read take on the issue of food regulation: recalls are voluntary. Public safety policy has been written to protect the profits of food processors. It came out quite some time ago that the peanut plant so recently in question knew it had tainted product in its facility, but chose to let this go unreported, believing they had dealt with the problem. Another bad policy problem we have in such situations is this: if a processor does issue a recall, it is extremely difficult to legally hold them responsible for sickness or death, since it is assumed they did what they could to correct the concern. If we want to ensure food safety, we either must have inspectors active at every single one of the 150,000 domestic processors (AND all the foreign ones, or at every port of entry) OR we must make it clear that companies and involved individuals will be held legally responsible for EVERY case of food poisoning. Since neither of these alternatives is practical or economical on such a level, perhaps we should seriously look into the idea of a decentralization of food safety regulation. There is no reason to believe the private sector could not do this well; otherwise, how did private organic labeling work so well for so long? Some groups think we should require mandatory labeling of ALL pertinent health information (origin, GMO content, pesticides used, etc.) on all packaged foods; at the very least, we could simply allow this labeling to even be LEGAL, as some of it now is not. Informed consumers acting through a market-driven demand for information on their foodstuffs could strongly enhance safety, and likely enhance overall health at the same time.

One last little note - the banning of "downer" cows from the food supply is a no-brainer. This should in no way be seen as some great achievement, but I suppose I should thank President Obama for finally doing it. Such laws should have been in place decades ago, and likely would have been had not big-ag interests had such a hand in crafting public safety policy. Now we should also ban "downer" chickens and pigs, as the lines bred for industrial-ag use and the confinement operations which raise them create animals which often cannot even stand under their own weight since their bones, muscles, and joints are so underdeveloped for their size. Some may say here, "That doesn't mean they're sick or at all dangerous." True, but how does the slaughterhouse worker tell the difference in the couple seconds he takes to kill the animal and put it on the line?

If you think I'm overreacting, or if you have doubts about how our food is processed, take a look at this video. Unfortunately, it's from PETA, an organization whose leaders have some very screwed up views, and unfortunately also, the intent of the video is to encourage vegetarianism through pity and shame rather than to expose the practices of industrial farming. Anyway, it's worth a look, and I hope you come away from it with a desire to encourage and give patronage to local small farmers who raise their animals with genuine care.

Food safety for the nation does not begin with government, but with the individual reinserting himself into the food production process and making informed decisions in his own self-interest.