Food Politics

The oversight by the USDA is unsettling. How can the purchaser also be the police? I wouldn’t be surprised to see this sort of thing happening all over the country. The industry purposely keeps these procedures under wraps. If the public were to see the way animals are really treated, they wouldn’t be able to stomach it. Out of sight, out of mind.

“tragic anomaly”: or S.O.P.? We’re led to understand that this place was chosen at random just because it was close by – why would downer cows be processed everywhere?

I still want to see the USDA tell us who, besides the national school lunch program, got this meat. Name stores! Name restaurants! Until then, this whole think is huge cover-up.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the USDA does not have recall authority. Certainly, they have a lot of influence, and probably some legal sway. But from what I understand, they have requested from Hallmark/Westland a voluntary recall, and they got it. I can imagine without more authority, information like which stores and restaurants, and which brands of commingled products (e.g. canned beef chili) will not be given up easily, voluntarily.

I have friends who are libertarians. They believe in less government, less FDA, less USDA, less EPA, etc. They believe that market forces can prevent incidents such as this. (I don’t know about that.)

I think market forces could help in two ways–but they both require information, which the companies are unwilling to share.

First, better disclosure on labels–like “natural” really meaning what people assume it means–as well as more information in general–would allow consumers to make decisions. There is a reason that companies don’t want to share information (and it’s not because it’s “proprietary”): the market would use it effectively and many people would abandon their products.

Second, more transparency would allow outside certification groups to put their seals on quality on foods, much like many organic trade groups do today. This is implicitly what people believe the FDA is doing through regulation–even when it’s not doing it well.

It’s hard to have meaningful transparency when the food source is multi-tiered, multi-national corporations. So nothing is going to change if people keep buying their food the same anonymous way, in the same anonymous places, with the same strangers producing and monitoring (or not!) the products. That is true if the buying is done at Piggly Wiggly or Whole Foods.

I know it sounds radical, impractical, and downright backward, but there is a high degree of transparency when sourcing locally produced food from local folks (food with a face). That requires a bit of forethought, networking, and investigation, some change in buying habits, cooking at home more, and perhaps some additional cost (but not always, especially if all the “junk”, convenience, and impulse costs are stripped away). Greater transparency without the need for excessive regulation could happen, at least to a greater degree, if people even just changed a few sources, a few items, and cut back on their consumption of anonymous, processed, convenience foods. That would go a long way toward greater transparency and trust *that is earned* in the nation’s food supply. Farmer’s markets and Community Supported Agriculture are two of the easiest ways to buy local and increase transparency. Keeps the dollars local, too. Buying direct from the farm is another option, but the inspection and regulation system is increasingly rigged for the big guys and against the small producer (big ag business is actively working to suppress the “buy local” movement, makign it harder still for small family farms to compete).

The irony is that we know *so little* about our food and its production (with a few exceptional glimpses like the downer/forklift incidences that shock our senses and force us out of our “microwave & serve” stupor now and then), yet the multi-national corporations know *so much* about us, down to tiniest detail about how and where we spend our money (even “buying power” of infants), with the grocery store buyer’s cards, the market focus groups, the Nielson ratings, the data mining from electronic payment transactions, etc. That’s very frightening, in a way that short farm-to-table routes, even unregulated but transparent, could never be.

I now have a personal file that alerts me to product recalls. I also receive timely notices when one of my products has is an update. You can acesss the recalls and update notices at the product blog page.