Food Safety
Having been on both sides of the food safety issue, as a corporate consultant and now as a Local Natural producer, I can state unequivocally that the safest food, by its very nature, is Local Natural Food.
For 25 years I worked as a consultant and engineer in the production, processing, and distribution of nearly every kind of commercially grown fruit, vegetable, fiber, and nut in association with many of the largest and most important farms in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. From this I have come full circle now as the owner of Jacob’s Cove Heritage Farm.
The regulations imposed by the FDA especially as part of the recent Food Safety Act, as well as decades of other legislation and mandates, condone inappropriate and unhealthy actions on the part of agribusiness. Rather than legitimatizing these with more regulation, they should be outlawed. Why must consumers and local wholesome producers together suffer from this travesty?
The agricultural chemical, processor, and producer giants spent millions lobbying for this legislation. The Washington Post reported recently that the very industries who were to be regulated were writing the legislation! Can we truly believe that these people have our true food safety at heart? I assure you that they do not. What these regulations do ensure is slow poisoning from chemicals used to bail out bad behavior and an increased risk of losing non-chemical local natural food.
Quality, natural food is produced locally through time-tested practices synergized with modern technology, free of chemicals, and in harmony with nature. History confirms that the local, natural approach, combined with the opportunity for the consumer to “know your farmer”, represent the best policy by its very nature.
On the other hand, the agribusiness food model requires exhaustive regulation because its very nature is an adulteration of nature and reason.
So, why do we continue to support the agribusiness high risk food model?
First, our country’s food system has, for decades, subsidized cheap and highly-processed food products which have largely destroyed local food production, leading many people to think we can’t feed ourselves locally. This is absolutely false.
Second, we are indoctrinated to think that without genetically modified crops, without animals living out their lives from birth to slaughter wallowing in their own ***, and without massive processing plants we would starve. Not true, in very fact the converse is true. We are dying a slow chronic death being pickled with contamination condoned and legitimized by these new regulations.
The contamination constantly present in big agriculture is mostly due to the extreme unnatural consequences of mass processing and producing food to ship and sit for consumption days and even weeks later. Many people mistakenly interpret this that if there are such food safety issues with sophisticated agribusiness then certainly food produced by some local farmer must be unsafe.
Is not the motive clear for perpetuating falsehoods and brand the local producer as incompetent and scare the public with food poisoning, which history and logic confirm is an agribusiness and not a local producer problem?
The ideal for food safety and public health is a local, natural approach. This is where we should be headed. Big agribusiness and government should take note and change their behavior.
If this latest mandate is not sufficiently compelling for local action against such gross incompetence and manipulation we have truly lost our way as well as our food and community. return
