Food Safety Bill: WTF?

S. 510: Friend vs Friend

If you like your food safety discussions with equal helpings of policy and common sense (and ample sides of snark and sauce), get thee hence to Grist and read the, ahem, Food Fight on the S. 510, AKA the Food Safety Bill, currently before Congress.

This is a tough bill to summarize since there is wide and deep disagreement about its basic intent and how it will be enforced. Reasonable people (and noted allies) are reasonably disagreeing, so Grist was smart to bring so many respected voices to the discussion.

If you can’t stomach much policyspeak, though, read the italicized intro, then I’d personally steer you commentary by Tom Philpott, Patty Lovera of Food & Water Watch, Mark Kastel of Cornucopia Institute, and Fred Hoefner of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

My own take on S. 510 is that it’s an imperfect bill, it might suck, but if executed correctly, it could place traceability requirements on the food system that we currently don’t have — and that we desperately need.

But that’s a very dumbed down version of a very complex issue. When the bill was first introduced, I was still working at the Wedge Co-op in Minneapolis, well over a year ago now, as the “research and development” guy, and it was my job to sift through issues like S. 510 and digest them for managers, staff, and shoppers alike. I’m not the smartest guy on the planet, but I know food policy well enough to see that I couldn’t make heads or tails of this bill. It was too nuanced for me.

Making matters worse, emails were starting to fly claiming that this bill would shut down organic farms, kill farmers markets, and even outlaw gardens. You’ve probably seen them yourself and wondered if S. 510 could possibly be as bad as people were making it out to be. Worse still, these emails were often coming from credible sources.

What to do?

At the time, I contacted two people whose opinions on sustainable food policy I trust almost implicitly: Mark Kastel  (you can read his thoughts at Grist here) and Jill Richardson of La Vida Locavore. Back then, Jill seemed to see the opposition to S. 510 as a tempest in a teacup and took an “everybody chill” stance. She has since acknowledged that the issue is very complex: Jill wrote an excellent piece about S. 510 for Bill Marler’s Food Safety News site — it’s a long article, but if you want solid info that will get you up to speed on S. 510, I strongly recommend it.

I’m still very divided about S. 510, even after reading the many opinions of allies and experts. The libertarian in me doesn’t trust the federal government (here’s an example of why), and the anti-corporatist in me thinks its laughable to assume that an empowered FDA can be entrusted to bulldog Big Food and leave small farmers and producers alone. The populist in me, however, believes government regulation is our only means of democratically protecting ourselves from an unhealthy and corrupt food system. I appreciate the traceability requirements that S.510 would impose on big players, CAFOs, fast food chains, etc. When food recalls weigh in at twenty million pounds beef or literally billions of eggs, we’re absolutely required to take significant action on behalf of public health.

The compromise between these arguments, in my mind, is the Tester amendment (links to actual language at Grist), which would exempt small farmers from the most burdensome elements of S.510. Some are skeptical of the Tester amendment. They think it could open loopholes through which CAFOs and fast food franchises could fit, and public health would suffer as a result. My read is that the intent behind the actual language of the law and amendment are clear: Their goal is to undo a “one size fits all” approach to regulating the food industry. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with, and these pieces of legislation do speak to curtailing the bureaucratic burden on small farmers.

So here’s what I am going to do about S. 510. The bill may come up for a vote tomorrow, Wednesday, November 17, so:

I’m going to call my U.S. Senators and ask them to support S. 510, but only WITH the Tester/Kagan amendment. I’m going to ask them that they specifically vote against S. 510 if the amendment is not adopted.

When I call Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken,  I’m going to tell their staff people that S. 510 will help protect Americans from outbreaks of food-borne pathogens by adding needed regulation in the food industry, while the Tester/Kagan amendment will protect small farmers from overly burdensome regulation. Without Tester/Kagan, S. 510 will actually hurt small farmers and lucrative regional food markets.

If you want to join me, do this:

Go to Congress.org and type in your zip code in the box in the upper right hand corner. Click on your Senator’s name, and then on the contact tab for their phone number. You can also call the Capitol Switchboard and ask to be directly connected to your Senator’s office: 202-224-3121. Once connected ask to speak to the legislative staff person responsible for agriculture. If they are unavailable leave a voice mail message using the language I’ve provided above if you wwish. Be sure to include your name and phone number.

Like Health Insurance Reform earlier this year, S. 510 either doesn’t go far enough, or goes way too far (as Jill Richardson says, depending largely on your politics). Either way, S.510 represents a compromise, and compromise is becoming an increasingly bad word in our democracy, unfortunately. I wish S. 510 more rigorously and specifically protected public health while shielding small farmers who are creating a dynamic little economic engine for themselves in the local foods market.

But I’m willing to start somewhere. And I think S. 510 is the beginning.

How about you? Tell me what you think and what you’re going to do. I can see many sides of this issue, so I really want to know what you Fair food Fighters think about this bill.