people of faith engaging creation and justice
The food safety bill finally passed the Senate today, despite the obstructionist efforts of Sen. Tom Coburn (a guy who in other contexts has sounded very concerned about catching diseases!).
This is good news for all of us. Yes, it expands Big Government (in the form of the FDA). But the old saw that an industry like this self-regulates in a free market has been disproved so many times in recent years (think: peanuts, spinach, eggs, hamburgers) that the feds had an empirical mandate to step in.
Interesting tidbit for the locavores among us:
Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat of Montana, pushed for a recent addition to the bill that exempts producers with less than $500,000 a year in sales who sell most of their food locally.
Tester is a small farmer himself, and his addition went through in the final version of the bill. So, provided the House doesn’t meddle with that aspect of the legislation during reconciliation (it voted on a slightly different bill a few months ago), farmers’ market vendors and local co-op suppliers are exempt from the new FDA authority. Unless they’re really making bank, that is.
Will that give you pause next time you’re buying spinach at the farmers’ market? It may sooner be be safer, albeit less delicious, to eat it out of a plastic bag.
Sorry, Andrew, but I am going to trust my local farmer more than a transnational agribusiness person any day, regardless of how this bill goes down. Do you really think a federal agency is going to do a better job of ensuring food safety than your neighbor down the street? (Can you guess that I LOVE having a farmer literally down the street who delivers my CSA box weekly?) The FDA definitely is in need of an overhaul, and it is too bad that they can’t coordinate with the USDA who also has a role to play in food safety, but I don’t think the small farmer should or will be the loser here.
Latest news suggests that it is precisely this Tester amendment (and the protests of it on the part of big business) that might torpedo the whole thing in the House. That’s regrettable, and obviously a somewhat cynical move by the big farms. All the same, Stephanie, I don’t understand your grounds for being so sure that ecoli and salmonella cannot attach to produce from a local family farm. Vermin are no respecters of persons, sadly.
It is true that bacteria are equal opportunity infectious agents, but a small farmer has infinitely more control over vectors for infection than a giant factory receiving produce from a number of farms (all of whom employ large numbers of employees). Plus, the strains of e.coli that have been so dangerous are a by-product of the insanely unsanitary conditions of factory farmed animals – i.e. high levels of antibiotics given as a preventive measure leading to resistance and growth of “superbugs”. In a healthy ecosystem, just as in a healthy body, low levels of bacteria are present but do not cause sickness. Also, if a small farmer does have a problem, the number of people affected will be much lower and in a much smaller geographic range. I’m still voting for the local spinach.