I’m not sure I like the way this one smells. It was spurred by a string of food recalls coming out of our big industrialized food system, so I’m hesitant to believe that you can fix big business with big government. The opposition to it seems to align with everything I consider healthy. Grass fed associations and whatnot. It’s supposed to give the FDA more oversight and control of farms, among other things, but the opposition is worried that it will crush small farms under bureaucracy.
I’ve got to go read the text myself. Has anyone else paid any attention to this?
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.
That should help the local guys you’re worried about. I like it. Giving big government a check on big business should help. We did a case study on the tainted food cases in grad school and it was sick, the FDA had no teeth to their powers on food. (No pun intended) They could issue suggestions but they were more or less at the mercy of the companies to actually listen to them. Most of the time they did, but they would draw out the process and limit scope as much as possible, making a lot more people sick in the meantime.
Not to mention, the lame duck session is the last chance for any regulation of any kind to get passed until 2013.
the only thing i really liked about Food Inc. was the suggestion at the end of the docu to treat your dollars like your votes.
just get enough people to buy their way into a proper system. buy food that is produced the way you want your food produced and the policy and processors will adapt to suit it.
in the meantime, whatever you’re talking about here
Are you’d thinking gov’t regulation will increase the quality and nutritional value of your diets? In terms of mass produced processed foods, I’d wager that this might increase the use of preservatives and genetic modification to ensure more consistency in product.
For smaller, local farmers, this could really fuck up the process of getting food to market while it’s still fresh. I dont want my diet subject to bureaucracy. This sounds like the good intentions will probably just clusterfuck into a bunch of bullshit that will make it harder for consumers to know what’s in their food. But I guess it’s nice that the government is at least trying.
From what I hear, there is a provision in the bill that by 2014, it will be illegal to grow sell or trade crops on land that is not considered a farm, aka your back yard. Of course I cant confirm this because I havent read it yet. I will read it later tonight, unless it a real long one, then it will take me a couple days, anyone know whow many pages it is? Also, its been shown time and again that the larger the industry the governemnt tries to regulate, the worse it gets. More beauracacy, more confusion, higher taxes for people who work in said industry, with mediocre if not complete failure of results alltogether.
