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?

Reclassify Salt?

The medical community (who are they, exactly?) is asking the FDA to reclassify salt. Right now, salt is considered GRAS – Generally Recognized as Safe. The new classification would make it a food additive tied to limitations.

Why, you ask?

It turns out the medical community is tired of treating our excessive-salt related illnesses. They consider excessive salt intake to be a public health hazard and want the government to force limitations of it.

Lest we forget: salt is essential for humans. We’ll die if we don’t have some in our diet. But like a lot of other essential nutrients, too much is poison. That skittish happy medium is once again in the spotlight.

The medical community is focusing on processed foods, which of course, makes me want to jump up and down in joy. The food industry has known for decades that they put a dangerous amount of salt in the processed food, but they’ve done very little about fixing it. Because after all, processed foods taste perfectly horrid if they aren’t loaded up with salt and/or sugar. Nobody would buy the stuff if they had to eat it with a sensible amount of salt.

Wait, let me repeat that. Nobody would buy the stuff if they had to eat it with a sensible amount of salt.

Can we all say “D’oh!”?

Government regulations can force the industry to lower the amount of sodium in their food products. But they will want us to buy these products, so they’ll have to do something to help the taste. I shudder to imagine what they might come up with.

We’re in bad shape on this, too, because salt is addictive. We have three or four generations that have grown up on this heavily salted diet of processed foods. If that’s what you’ve eaten for most of your life, you’re going to have a hard time learning to like Real Food. Cutting back on salt is like quitting smoking.

Most people have no idea what Real Food is supposed to taste like. And when they’re forced to eat processed food that is low in sodium, they HATE it. The good news is that, like quitting smoking, it gets easier over time. If you start eating Real Food, your mouth gradually forgets the overly salted taste of the fake stuff and you begin to actually TASTE the food you’re eating. Stick with it for a year or two and you’re probably home free. I know when I try to eat processed food, I’m not usually successful. I can’t stand the taste of the stuff, whether it’s a can of Campbell’s soup or a frozen meal from Lean Cuisine.

So we’ll see what happens. The food industry is fighting the doctors' recommendation and the food industry has a lot of money. I’m not going to place any bets on what the FDA will decide. In the long run, it doesn’t matter. Like I said earlier, the food industry will have to put something in the food to make it palatable and that something will probably not be good for us. The answer is to stop buying and eating processed foods.

That’s always the answer.

Food ingredients

Just a quick note cross-posted from my writer's blog. An article in the Contra Costa Times recently pointed out the difficulty of tracing contaminated food back its source. This is one reason I don't buy any produce in bags and why I severely limit purchases of processed food. Here are a couple of quotes from the article (and the link. Hope it works):

http://www.contracostatimes.com/search/ci_6791221?IADID=Search-www.contracostatimes.com-www.contracostatimes.com

"Companies increasingly are paying others to make the foods we eat - or the ingredients in them - and then selling it under multiple brand names.""Generally, the identities of contract manufacturers remain secret for reasons of commercial confidentiality.So how can consumer learn where their food comes from?The truth of the matter is today, to a large degree, you can't. ...and efforts to improve on it have been beaten back," said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives for Consumers Union."

See, this is what gets my goat. I prefer to know what's in my food. I like knowing, at least in a general sense, where the ingredients came from. 'Secret for reasons of commerical confidentiality'? Your contract manufacturer's have to be secret? What the hell for?