Tumbledown Farm .9 Acres (give or take an acre or two)

While I was on vacation I noticed yet another New York Times editorial (When 1,000 People Get Sick) calling for new rules to improve food safety in the wake of the recent salmonella outbreak. The editorial expressed concern for the tomato business because of growing consumer anxiety. ...and for the producers of jalapeño peppers and cilantro and salsa. The call, as it always is with NYTimes editorials, was for a national (or world-wide) tracking system from farm to plate.

The problem is that the safety provided by such a system would be an illusion (probably also a delusion) and would come at an intolerable expense. In short, the logic of the editorial requires a humongous monopoly in food production. I happened to be re-reading Wendell Berry's The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural

at the same time that I saw the Times editorial. Already in 1977 in an essay on "Sanitation and the Small Farm" Berry was lamenting the demise of small producers of milk, eggs, chickens, and prepared foods (pies, bread, butter, biscuits, cured hams and the like). The culprit? Food Safety regulations. Way back then Berry questioned the validity and honesty of the nation's "sanitation laws" (laws that have since become more draconian)--not because he's against cleanliness (which is next to godliness), but because such laws always require expensive equipment and bureaucracy, an expense that is impossible for the smallest producers to afford. In other words, the beneficiaries of such regulations as are being touted by the Times would be the largest farms and warehouses, shippers and retailers--the ones who could afford the technologies required for implementation--and, of course, the government agencies, inspectors, and regulators.

The specter of terrorism is also always raised in such discussions (and in the editorial), but the logic is again flawed. The assumption is that more governmental control and inspection of the chain from producer to consumer would allow rapid intervention in the case of a terrorist attack on our food. The irony is that the system itself would require fewer and larger producers, warehouses, shippers, and retailers--a concentration that increases the numbers of people who would be exposed to a single attack and increasing the opportunity for collusion between "irresponsible producers and corrupt inspectors" (which is the biggest threat...oh, and, yes, also for collusion between terrorists and corrupt inspectors).

Perhaps such a system of "protection" would be warranted if there weren't obviously a better, cheaper (and safer) way already available to track food from producer to consumer. If you really want to know where the food came from, how it was produced, and how and where it was processed, cut out the middlemen and require consumers to purchase their food directly from millions of small farmers or to produce it themselves.

Now there's a safety regulation I could support! It would remove the in-sanity from the current system.