Tough Shoes To Fill
Imagine if shoe manufacturers only made their styles in a few sizes. You might have difficulty finding a pair which fit your feet at different stages of your life. The one-size-fits-all approach would certainly be cost effective for the shoe industry, and because every one needs footwear, the customer base would be captive. Consumers needing different sizes, or having special requirements would be out of luck. Many people would have to go without shoes all together. This is the sort of situation that several new bills before Congress seek to leave our food system with–a one-size-fits-all system geared towards the majority, large scale AgriBusiness’, while leaving the rest of producers faced with adopting an oversized system or being out of luck and out of business.
However, there is no one solution to our current food safety issues. In fact, our current food safety issues are so unique, and so problematic that they have rarely, in history, been faced before. How is it that the size and scale of the most recent food borne illness outbreaks and product recalls keeps increasing? Why haven’t such problems been faced before? Sure, there was the problem with the meat industry back in 1906 which Upton Sinclair brought attention to in The Jungle1 but since then American’s have had a relatively safe, secure food system. What has changed and why?
For one thing, the farming situation has changed. The source of raw ingredients comes from fewer and bigger farms. Ingredients for manufactured foods are treated less like nutritional foodstuffs and more like commodities, such as steel or coal. Imported ingredients have made their way into a food chain that never needed to import anything before. The more steps in the process, the more potential for problems to arise. The more substances and ingredients in food, the more manufacturing which goes on, the more chances for disease, industrial hardware, or rat feces to enter the product. Hence the cry of “Regulate! Regulate! Trace, Track and Tamper proof!”2
But how is a one-size-fits-all approach going to help? How do my free-ranging organically raised hens and their 250 eggs a year equate with a commercial battery farm, egg factory which produces 250 eggs a second? My flock of, at most, 30 hens is easy to manage, gets quality care, fed a variety of low-impact feeds in addition to some grain, and is kept clean, healthy and alive for longer than one year. The egg factory is so far from the realm of natural reality that it defies reason. Why should the meat I raise and sell locally, to customers who know me personally, and have seen how I keep my livestock, be treated in the same manner as if the livestock had been shipped hundreds of miles, mixed with other animals and then ram-rodded through a production chain at one per minute? This is commodity versus food. Abstract industrialism versus food with a face, story and connections.
Somewhere along the way personal responsibility and common sense have left the building. Rules such as “no livestock within 2 miles of a vegetable production facility” make no sense in any way other than reactionary. This rule was brought in after the 2007 Spinach fiasco when wild animal dung was blamed for a massive salmonella outbreak. The fear of manure, soil and germs has become epidemic. Bio-dynamic, organic, and small, diverse mixed farms could never follow this rule. The break up of farms into corporate owned entities, devoid of a real face–a known farmer with a reputation willing to stand behind his crops–has led to an era of food-irresponsibility. While I advocate and see a need for a return to agriculture that is “the scale of a (wo)man”3 I fully realize this is going to take time, as we have to re-train a whole generation which has been removed from the farm. I also realize that even in this Locavore movement of small farms there need to be stringent safety requirements for the food produced. But I also strongly feel that these regulations must be scale-appropriate. One-size-fits-all does not work. Not in shoes, clothing, or food standards.4
Rather than build a robust, secure food system, one which can withstand climate and fuel fluctuations, these proposed rules seek to limit the power of creating such a resilient situation in order to repair and maintain a flawed status quo. Worse yet, many of the proposed rules are so broad and open to interpretation that they may, at best, achieve nothing, and at worst, tilt the tables further in favor of Industrial Agriculture at the expense of small scale, local producers.5 We need open dialogue and solutions for the problems our food system faces. It is time for our policy makers to change tack and alter a course for sanity by involving more organic, sustainable & alternate-method farmers in the discussion. I am hopful that the time has passed when the food industry could pull the wool over consumers’ eyes. I am hopeful that the time for transparancy in corporate America and our Federal Governement is Now. But we can’t wait for these things to become a reality. As farmers, consumers, backyard growers, we need to weigh in on these issues if we want them to go our way. We need to organize. To study the proposals and not stop shouting until our voices are heard.
Technorati Tags: hr875, food safety, food security, local food, locavore, farming, food regulation, scale approprite regulation
- a problem which was solved, but not fixed by congress allowing the meat packing industry to police itself and write its own rules–rules they largely ignore..The reaction to The Jungle eventually led to the formation of the FDA. Large Slaughterhouses are still in the news, both for working conditions and animal health. [↩]
- Traceability is a joke. How can we trace ingredients through the entire chain of manufacturing? Meat from animals through the slaughterhouse, cold storage, shipping, grocer or restaurant to consumer? The tag is only as good as the record keeping, the honesty and practices of the middle-man. The farmer in good faith raises a product. The consumer in good faith buys the product. Cut out the middle-man–or reduce the steps between farmer and consumer–and traceability is solved, not by software and hardware, but by real human interconnection and networking. [↩]
- The amount of land one person and his immediate family can work without recall to extra full-time labor and machinery which cannot be paid for with the proceeds from one season’s harvest. [↩]
- Wasteful food grading requirements in the EU led to the rejection of tons of perfectly edible vegetables based on rigid standards for how the vegetables should look. [↩]
- Although at this point the chance of backlash is so great that lawmakers should look to a future beyond their own terms and tread carefully. [↩]
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Great post Neal! I think you should send this to your representatives and local papers (if you haven’t already!) Well-said!
I wrote recently about a bill in Congressional committee that is likely one of the ones you refer to. Sometimes the logic is so flawed it is almost comic. But then I think more outlandish things have become law before. I wrote to our Representative just to make sure he had at least one opposing voice in his mailbox.
One size fits all is a common approach these days. In most cases there is some absurd reference made to increasing food safety, Really what it usually turns out to be is large agribusiness trying to stem the tide of healthy food, grown on smaller farms close to the consumer.