Saving Us One Snack at a Time

It’s ironic that lawmakers in Washington are negotiating both health care and food safety bills this week, while new evidence shows that treating diet-related diseases like diabetes and heart disease is costing the country more than $140 billion a year in health costs. While legislators try to give us health coverage with one hand, they are threatening our health in The Food Safety Enhancement Act (H.R. 2749). A number of nonprofits who defend the ability of small farms to stay in business have put out an all-points bulletin this week that the food safety bill, in its current form, would make it impossible for small-scale and local food systems to survive. Many consumers depend on these alternatives as their way to insure the health of their families. The new food safety regulations, in terms of fees, inspections and traceability requirements, would simply make small-scale direct marketing too expensive. Anyone who has seen Food, Inc. would know the result: the monopoly that large scale agribusiness has over our stomachs would get even stronger, giving consumers little choice but to buy from the big guys who are part of the problem.

In my book, Nature’s Perfect Food, I showed that the industrialization of our dairy production system and the imposition of certain food safety regulations in the 1920s went hand-in-hand. And it led to the kind of industrial dairy foods we have today – Velveeta and pizza cheese. But it didn’t have to be that way: regulations could have been different and could have created a more diverse dairy system while still protecting consumers. Many of the nonprofit supporters of small farm systems are taking a “no government” attitude towards the new food safety bill. Alternative food system activists tend to be suspicious of government in general, like libertarian the organic farmer Joel Salatin, featured in Michael Pollan’s Ominvore’s Dilemma, who talks about his wish for “government-free” relationships between him and the people who buy from him. Some food politics observers, like myself, are more like the “goo-goos” (good government advocates) of the 1900s: we believe government can get it right, if they work on it. Legislators, however, aren’t doing it right when it comes to HR 2749. They are trying to pass this bill “under a suspension of the rules” that is, without allowing negotiation over amendments such as the Farr-Kaptur Amendment, which provides some regulatory relief for smaller food producers.

Yet, in the Senate, legislators are intensively negotiating the health care bill, trying to balance interests and get the best bill possible. They may fail, giving us yet another indication that government is not longer capable of governing. But if Congress is trying so hard on health care, why not the same kind of in-depth conversation on food safety as well? Isn’t getting food safety regulation right as important as making sure our health care regulations actually give us better health at a reasonable cost? This is an important question, since, if we hand our entire food system to large-scale industrial processors, we may, in fact, cancel out whatever benefits health care coverage will give us. As Food, Inc, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and other food activists have shown, large scale industrial food businesses have an economic incentive to convince us that food created from various forms of corn actually comprise a balanced diet, a diet as balanced as the one the New York Times reported as on the table at the health care negotiations: chocolate-covered chips, beef jerky, and other salty snacks. Which is more risky for our nation’s health, the Senate Room Snack Diet or spinach salads?

The fact is that “interests,” in terms of food safety, have their undemocratic factors, the powerful lobbies, as much as we’ve seen in the health debate. The Organic Trade Association, a captured lobby group that claims to represent the whole industry but is mostly funded by large organic processors, has not come out in favor of the Farr-Kaptur Amendment. In fact, there is no mention of the amendment on their website at all. More grassroots groups are asking their members to call their representatives in favor of Farr-Kaptur. The amendment can provide the beginning of a larger conversation about getting government regulation right in terms of food safety.