As all we food subversives know, our food system has been hijacked by designer-suit-wearing CEO’s who make a lot of money by paying farmers a pittance, processing the heck out of raw ingredients, and then shipping their “food products” vast distances to retailers like Wal-Mart, who are quickly replacing our community grocery stores. Nor does it come as a surprise that companies such as Wal-Mart, Con Agra, Cargill, Archers Daniel Midland (ADM) and Phillip Morris (owners of Kraft Cheese and Camel cigarrettes) don’t care much for people like us, people who raise their own food or buy it from their neighbors. Folks who support local food systems are a threat to them, so they try to paint us with either a radical brush, making us out to be food terrorists who would snatch the McNuggets right out of children’s hands, or the hippie brush, likening us to 60s flower-children living in communes and raising pot with our tomatoes. In reality, we’re just people who give a damn about what we eat.
So if you care about what you eat and want to see the local foods movement grow, please read the following action alert from my friends at the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC). While the bill S. 510 is purported to make our food safer, what it really will do is make local food systems harder to sustain.
Please call or email your U.S. Senators to urge them to fix flawed Federal Food Safety Legislation (S.510) so it does not stall the newly emerging small businesses built around fresh, wholesome local foods, direct market farmers and small local processors processing local foods for local markets.
WORC and its member organizations just delivered letters from a coalition of 21 grassroots farm, ranch, organic consumers and producers and holistic health organizations to 100 members of the U.S. Senate.
The House passed H.R. 2749 in July and in the Senate, S. 510 is pending. Both bills impose an onerous federal regulatory regime on small direct market farmers and small local processors processing local foods for local markets.
The problem that needs to be addressed by federal regulations is not fresh local foods marketed transparently, but the huge industrialized agribusinesses and the long supply chains that they utilize to move food thousands of miles from multiple sources to markets. The long food supply chain of industrial agriculture is where foodborne pathogens have created hazards that have moved Congress to act.
Fresh, wholesome local foods are an alternative to the huge industrial agribusinesses where foodborne pathogens have resulted in sickness, injuries and deaths.
Federal legislation to address traceability and increase record keeping to ensure food safety should not be directed at emerging new sources of fresh, easily traceable, local foods that are already governed by an existing framework of state and local health and sanitation and inspection laws.
The message to Senators:
One size does not fit all when it comes to food safety. Please amend S. 510 so it does not undermine small businesses involved in direct market farming and processing local foods for local markets.
You can contact your Senators on WORC’s Take Action page.
Black Hills Local Foods 
Leave a comment