Walter Olson at Overlawyered sounds the alarm about what Washington's proposed food safety reforms may do to small farmers, farmers markets and suchlike. Excerpt:
What could possibly go wrong?The answer, it seems, is "plenty". Patrick, and the other writers linked just above, warn that the law may drive out of business local farmers and artisanal, small-scale producers of berries, herbs, cheese, and countless other wares, even when there is in fact nothing unsafe in their methods of production. Many informal makers of ethnically or culturally distinctive food items will go off-books or simply fall by the wayside, overwhelmed by the reporting and batch-tracking paperwork. Many foreign producers who ship in less-than-mass quantities will give up on the U.S. market rather than try to comply with challenging standards that differ drastically from those imposed by European markets or their own countries of origin, which in turn will mean that many interesting and safe specialty foods will simply no longer be available for purchase, at least legally.
The catch-phrase one keeps hearing is "CPSIA for food".
Read all of Walter's piece -- great links, too. This is a big deal.
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iw, has good points, personally i think nais is far more worse and speaks of the matter of scaling i mentioned.
Food regulation is already ridiculous here. Whenever I leave Europe I have to scarf down the last of the unpasteurized cheese on my ride to the airport like some college kid in Amsterdam with his last hash brownie. That's just insane. Free the cheese!
Hooray! finally a thread on something other than ssm.
If this HR passes, and small farmers are affected, then perhaps those of us who are concerned about the crunchy-con life will finally be forced to take action. A return to living in agrarian clusters wouldn't be so bad...and if I'm "trading" you vegetables for your meat or dairy products in return, and none of the "money" changes hands, then are we really doing "commerce"....I'd look for the loopholes... I'm ready to move back to the country...anyone else?
I have to pay $175 per head for carbon footprint
You've got to be kidding me. So, instead of actually charging the people who use lots of oil the true price of the oil, we're assessing a "carbon footprint" tax on raisers of cattle? Holy crap, we're unreflective.
"A return to living in agrarian clusters wouldn't be so bad...and if I'm "trading" you vegetables for your meat or dairy products in return, and none of the "money" changes hands, then are we really doing "commerce"....I'd look for the loopholes... I'm ready to move back to the country...anyone else?"
I'm in. I've already started trying to wrangle up my Benedict Option crew. :)
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