Bad eggs and bad regs

Tainted eggs came from factory farms.

With the latest dustup over unsafe food from factory farms and the Food and Drug Administration’s recall of more than half a billion eggs possibly tainted with salmonella, the health and quality of our food is again in the news.

It’s scary that America’s industrial food system continues to fail at providing families with healthy food. But it’s reassuring that the watchdogs at the FDA are looking out for the safety of the American eater. Right?

Not so fast there, pardner. America’s food is indeed under threat, but it’s not only from big, dirty factory farms. Ironically, our food is also under threat from the federal regulators themselves, those very watchdogs who are supposed to protect us.

Big ol’ softies or jack-booted thugs?

If you ask Joel Salatin and other small farmers, those regulators are truly Janus-faced.  One face is all smiles, when it comes to Big Food. But if you’re a small local producer trying to sell less processed food to your neighbors, you’re likely to get the FDA’s stern face, as their agents strap on their holsters and get ready to raid your field of non-certified corn.

The FDA may not be as bad as the Minerals Management guys before the Gulf oil spill who liked to party down with the oil workers from BP who they were supposed to be regulating. But the FDA has shown that it enjoys being pretty cozy with agribusiness, acting against industrial producers only in the most extreme cases, such as the current egg recall. Otherwise, from GMOs to CAFOs, the FDA has shown that cares less about the consumer’s health than about the financial health of Monsanto, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland.

Read what Salatin told Mother Earth News:

I think it’s amazing that in a country which promotes the freedom to own firearms, freedom to worship and freedom of speech, we don’t have the freedom to choose our own food. If I can’t choose the proper fuel to feed my body, I won’t have energy to go shoot, preach and pray anyway. Half the alleged food in the supermarket is really dangerous to your health. In fact, if we removed all the food items in the supermarket that would not have been available before 1900, the shelves would be bare. Gone would be all the unpronounceable gobbledy-syllabic industrial additives, irradiated, GMO, cloned pseudo-food.

Regulation yes, but at the right scale

First, let’s hope that those bad eggs don’t do much harm. But then, let’s not overreact.

We must not allow the FDA to use this episode as an excuse to blame the wrong people and further hurt small producers. The tainted eggs did not come from small family farms but from big factory operations. Yes, the FDA must regulate Big Food — that should be their job. If they weren’t so cozy with industry they would have been doing it by now. Time to step to it!

But we can’t let the FDA impose more onerous one-size-fits-all regulations that put unnecessary burdens on local producers and thus make it even harder for all of us American eaters to choose the healthy, local, organic food that we want.

Good regulation is all about scale — large scale farms need lots of regulations. But the local farmers of America already have a system of quality-control in place that’s worked well for hundreds of years. It’s called customer satisfaction and reputation. Word has always gotten around a local area if some farmer’s food was good or bad. Today, with the internet, reputation can spread at lightning speed around the world.