It’s no secret that I’m a supporter of the FDA Modernization Act. In fact I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who says our food system is as safe as it can be and that changes aren’t needed. There are, however, some provisions in the bill that worry small scale farmers and growers that should worry fellow Food Fighters as well. For this reason Senators Jon Tester and Kay Hagan are sponsoring two amendments which would remove smaller growers and producers from federal oversight.
Pay attention to food recall warnings for any amount of time and you’ll start to see just how unsafe our food supply really is. These problems can usually be traced to foods from very large-scale producers. Most of the food on American tables still comes from industrial sources, which is changing thankfully, but not fast enough that things can be allowed to continue as they are. Smaller producers argue that since the problem is an industrial food problem the new regulations in the bill should apply to industrial food production only. The worry is the broad approach government will likely take will place an undue burden on smaller operations. Carol Ann Sayle, co-founder and co-owner of Boggy Creek Farm in Austin, Texas, writes that the upside to the recent spinach scares is they illustrate perfectly that dangerous food is more likely to come from a national supplier than a local farmer. She writes
The contrast of our production of food for our community to that of produce grown in monocultures and shipped from one side of the nation to the other, and from other countries to ours, is drastic. Yet our government, responding to food safety concerns, wants to dump a little farm like ours—where our friends, the customers, walk our farm and look at the crops growing—into a big pot full of giant farms, huge processors, and transportation systems, and create laws that regulate us all as equals.
What you end up with is the need for a safer food supply running smack-dab into the need for small scale practices to become part and parcel of how we grow all of our food. There are a few Senators who recognize this problem who have proposed amendments that would exempt smaller operations from the FDA rules. There are precedents for such exemptions in federal and state laws already. The Federal Egg Products Inspection act has exemptions for farmers who sell eggs directly to consumers, as well as for those with flocks of 3000 or fewer regardless of who they sell to. The current language in the Tester amendment would exempt farms with incomes of $500,000 or less, but Alex Ferguson writes that isn’t enough since that would still include 95 percent of domestic producers. Supporters of exemptions argue that farm size should be measured in acreage, processing methods and reach of distribution as well as sales.
Addressing food safety in this country is a must-do, but we should also begin to examine the scale at which our food is produced.
