Must. Stay. Positive. During. Lent.
And I will. But you should know that a bill has been introduced by Democrats in Congress called HR 875 which would establish a new agency called the Food Safety Administration to “ensure the safety of food” and “prevent food-borne illness”.
We already have the USDA and the FDA and the NAIS (sadly, being implemented), but apparently our government leaders think that the creation of yet another agency will solve the food-borne illness problems that have killed and sickened thousands of people over the past years.
What is scary about this bill? It gives the government the power to regulate every food production facility in the country and demand that extensive records be kept on animals and plants to micro-detail levels. What is a food production facility as outlined in the bill?
(14) FOOD PRODUCTION FACILITY- The term ‘food production facility’ means any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation.
I have a vineyard in my backyard and two chickens confined in a coop. I qualify.
But the bill does say that I will have suitable time to comply with the law. It doesn’t mean I can get a waiver from this expensive and needless regulation as a small farmer; it just means I will be given an extra few months or a year to comply with the micro-regulation.
Salvation by regulation. How is this post positive? Because, the solution that I propose (which others have proposed before me), is to truly change the system, slowly, by letting these huge food companies crash to the ground when they poison Americans (the most recent one being the peanut company; last year was the huge Westland/Hallmark meat recall and the tomato-jalapeno one). We Americans will realize that buying our food from farmers who we can actually meet and talk to and visit with on their farm is a better way both relationship-wise, food-wise, environment-wise, and economy-wise.
Could you still get poisoned from food from a local farmer? Of course. I could get poisoned from eating the eggs my chickens lay in the backyard or the vegetables that I grow in my garden. However, it is very unlikely that I will get sick from them because I strive to keep things reasonably clean and don’t process tens of thousands of chicken eggs a day in a confinement operation where poultry manure and ammonia are concentrated.
Life is “dangerous” in the sense that any of us may die tomorrow for any number of reasons and all of us will die one day. Putting our faith in the government and it’s capability of regulating large factory food-processing companies to make them make the food as safe as possible has failed; otherwise, why would someone be proposing this bill? So let’s recognize that danger exists and do our best to mitigate it with personal responsibility. If I get sick from local Farmer Bob’s food, I let him know that, and if he doesn’t respond appropriately, I let everyone else know it, and Farmer Bob either cleans up his operation (which I could of course go visit and hopefully had visited to make sure I agreed with his animal husbandry and the way they processed the animals), or Farmer Bob goes out of business and needs to go do something else.
We don’t need the government to micro-manage every farmer; let’s do that ourselves by good ol’ fashioned personal accountability and relationships of trust built locally.
Or, let this bill (if it becomes law) affect only the small number of massive food corporations and leave the small farmer’s alone.
I know this change will not happen overnight, but I hope that it does happen, even if only slowly.
