New food safety regulations

Those of you who follow the news may have seen that the Obama administration is pushing for revised food safety regulations and the FDA is moving down that road. Concerns are obvious -- mad cow, salmonella, E. coli, etc. The fact that swine flew wasn't transmitted through eating pork was a disaster averted for the food industry (but, just like avian flu, it seems pretty clear that the disease originated and spread due to the absurd confinement and treatment of pigs and chickens in industrialized farms). And of course part of the scare is that the taint goes to more than just milk, eggs, and products that have traditionally been risky. Getting a potentially deadly disease from a peanut, a jalapeno, spinach or a scallion just seems to bring our confidence in food safety to its knees. So now your government is stepping up. It's unclear how this will be approached but sadly it is unlikely to be anything short of more of the same.

What's more of the same? Standards that fit in with the industrial system and provide oversight and band-aids rather than true, sensible solutions. It's well known that keeping animals in industrialized farms makes them sick and is a breeding ground for aggressive diseases. The new regulations are unlikely to try and change this -- rather perhaps we have to pasteurize our milk at higher temperatures, irradiate our meat further, and so forth. Diseases in vegetables usually stem from spreading un-composted manure on fields (composting heats the material to a sufficient degree to kill all bacteria). This is one attempt by industrialized farms to cheaply use excessive manure that is causing environmental headaches, to say the least. But done incorrectly, as it often is, it spreads the diseases from the diseased animals all over your vegetables.

The funny thing here is that we know the problem. The solution then has to be to fix or improve the problem. We'll see what happens but I'm not keeping my fingers crossed.

(Another time I'll discuss further how regulations are debilitating to small farms -- as standards for large industrialized farms are applied without flexibility across the board even when the make no sense for small farms that invariably produce fresher, healthier food).