Farm to Fork

The Local Harvest newsletter had a piece about this article in the New York Times, talking about the need for the government to establish a detailed tracking system for food. The Times editorial was written a couple of weeks ago at the height of the tomato scare. The author is pushing for this program, saying it's a good idea and the government needs to declare an emergency and get it set up immediately.

It's a lousy idea. It's worse than lousy. It's stupid.

The answer is not more consolidation, more paperwork, or RFID tags and barcodes on everything. The answer is decentralization. The answer is small community farms that feed the people around them. Most of the food in a grocery store is grown on large (huge!), monoculture farms, with fertilizer and pesticides and herbicides. The animals live in feedlots, are strictly confined, are fed corn (no matter what kind of animal they are) and are left to stand in their own feces until finally hauled away for slaughter. The food is shipped all over the country to central warehouses and processing plants where it is mixed with food from everywhere else, and from there to the kitchens of huge food conglomerates. It's prepped and processed and packaged and shipped again to supermarkets all over the country. Then to your kitchen.

By the time you get it, it's nearly impossible to know exactly what you have or where it came from. This is why misguided people are agitating for a strict tracking system. As if that will solve the problem.

I buy my meat from a CSA that is supplied by the ranches just over the hill. I buy my vegetables from a farm about forty miles from here. I buy milk from a local dairy that bottles it themselves without sending it to a central factory in Nebraska, someplace. If we get sick, it will be a simple matter to trace the problem.

No, I don't get everything from local producers. I know that's impossible. Humans have always traded for the things they need, but can't produce themselves. That will never end and I'm not suggesting it should. But our food system is a ridiculous example of carrying trade to the extreme. We need to rig a wrecking ball and tear it down.

A tracking system will fall heaviest on the small farmer, and be one more nail in the coffin for the hard-working people who are trying to grow healthy food for a local market. As usual, the conglomerates will just hire someone to take care of the paperwork and raise prices to cover the cost. The small farmer will go out of business because he can't afford to file all that paperwork or buy the electronic IDs to put in the food. It's all unnecessary for him - he can tell you in ten minutes where his product goes because he's supplying local restaurants and residents. There's no reason for a federal agency to track his food.

Farm to Fork is a terrible idea. It won't keep thousands of people from getting sick. We need to stop shipping our food to central plants and mixing it with food from everywhere else. If people get sick, the illness will stay localized and the source can be traced quickly.

Why is this so hard for people to understand?