President Obama last week accused the Bush administration of creating a \u201chazard to public health\u201d by failing to curb food contamination problems. Mr. Bush\u2019s successor announced he will form a \u201cFood Safety Working Group\u201d to \u201cupgrade our food safety laws for the 21st century.\u201d <\/p>\n
Money came up. The president will ask Congress for $1 billion in new funds — for starters — to add FDA inspectors and modernize laboratories. He further announced the Agriculture Department is moving ahead with a rule change banning sick or disabled cattle from the food supply. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere are certain things only a government can do,\u201d Mr. Obama said. \u201cAnd one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat, and the medicines we take, are safe and do not cause us harm.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cFood safety\u201d sounds like an issue everyone can get behind. Getting \u201cdowner cows\u201d out of the food chain certainly sounds like a no-brainer. But in fact, the history of government regulation of food safety has been far from perfect. After all, no one shut down or even reduced the budget of the FDA, the USDA, and a score of other regulatory agencies in recent years. If \u201cgovernment is the answer,\u201d why have there been recurrent problems? <\/p>\n
Furthermore, the assertion that \u201conly government can do it\u201d flies in the face of common sense. <\/p>\n
Imagine you pull off the highway late in the evening in a strange part of the country. On one side of the exit rises a lighted sign for \u201cGreasyburgers — locally owned and cheapest in town. Our last customer is now out of the hospital and doing fine.\u201d (My apologies to the real \u201cGreasyburgers,\u201d should there prove to be one. This is intended to be a hypothetical example.) <\/p>\n
On the other side of the exit you spot the familiar, lighted logo of McDonald\u2019s, or Burger King, or Wendy\u2019s. Which do you choose? <\/p>\n
The adventurous are always free to try the locally owned eatery. But we all know the majority of motorists will choose the well-known brand name, not because the food is necessarily a gourmet delight, but because we realize that corporation has millions of dollars invested in a brand name, and thus a vested interest in protecting that brand by delivering a consistently wholesome product. <\/p>\n
Should budget shortfalls require federal food regulatory agencies to shut down tomorrow, do we really believe manufacturers who have spent billions building up the reputations of things called \u201cCheerios\u201d and \u201cCampbell\u2019s Soup\u201d would immediately start ignoring the long-term costs of adding harmful adulterants to make better short-term profits tomorrow? <\/p>\n
\u201cBranding\u201d is a free-market device, requiring government action only to protect the trademark, through which consumers reward providers with their repeat business for maintaining high standards. Most recent problems in the food chain have involved products which consumers could not readily identify by brand name. Maybe we need more \u201cbranding,\u201d rather than less. <\/p>\n
When we fail to recognize the brand, instinctively, despite a solid century of government \u201cfood safety regulation,\u201d we don\u2019t always act on the presumption: \u201cGovernment regulators would already have shut down any eatery that was below par, so it\u2019s equally safe to eat at Greasyburgers.\u201d <\/p>\n
Yes, the American public (whether or not their confidence is well placed) have long since accepted a role for government regulation in the food and medical supply chains. So long as they\u2019re in the business, of course we want those jobs done as effectively as possible. <\/p>\n
But it\u2019s also fair to ask President Obama if part of his new food safety initiative will include HR 875, introduced by far-left Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro, chairwoman of the Agriculture Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, whose husband, Stanley Greenberg, is a leading Democratic political strategist and consultant whose clients have included pesticide and fertilizer giant Monsanto. (Though both Mr. Greenberg\u2019s outfit and Ms. DeLauro\u2019s office tell me, rather insistently, that the Monsanto relationship ended a decade ago.) <\/p>\n
Now, bills that start out overly broad are sometimes narrowed and improved during the hearing process — that\u2019s what hearings are for. All the current Internet hyperventilating over Rep. DeLauro\u2019s proposed \u201cFood Police\u201d may turn out to be a tad overblown. <\/p>\n
Nonetheless, the bill does appear to define \u201cfood producers\u201d so broadly as to invite suspicion that even a small, backyard gardener growing food for his or her own family — or for local sale at a roadside stand — would be subject to uniform federal regulations (enforced by state agricultural police) requiring pesticide use and so forth, all in the name of \u201cpublic safety.\u201d <\/p>\n
Would HR 875 effectively ban seed banking and small-scale organic farming? Would it allow the Food Police to trespass on private property to \u201ccheck our vegetables\u201d? Would it mandate 24-hour GPS tracking of farm animals? Could lands and crops be seized for \u201cnon-compliance\u201d? <\/p>\n
A lot can be justified under the rubric of \u201cfood safety.\u201d Do we really believe granting a monopoly to large-scale factory farms, with their standardized artificial fertilizers and pesticides, is safest for our health and nutritional needs in the long run? <\/p>\n
As H.L. Mencken said, \u201cDemocracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Obama last week accused the Bush administration of creating a \u201chazard to public health\u201d by failing to curb food contamination problems. Mr. Bush\u2019s successor announced he will form a \u201cFood Safety Working Group\u201d to \u201cupgrade our food safety laws for the 21st century.\u201d Money came up. The president will ask Congress for $1 billion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-science"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-2L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":172,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}