Food regulations are about controlling market access, not safety; exempting producer-patron interactions from government interference is the best way to help farmers — and to make food healthy again
With all the petitions swirling around in the ecological farming movement to ban chemicals, switch crop insurance (subsidies) to finance organic transitions, or tweak other aspects of farm and food policy, I’ve become a one-string banjo.
What one thing would accomplish the most change the fastest with the least policy wrangling? If you ask for more pesticide regulation, the Farm Bureau Federation screams “we’ll all starve to death,” creating a difficult messaging situation. If you want to help transition conventional farmers to ecological practices, you have to ask for more money and define what is acceptable or not. Government organic certification doesn’t offer a good track record for defining what is good or helpful for family farmers.
If you withdraw crop insurance, the opposition says more than 30 million jobs are at stake. Equipment dealers, exporters, breakfast cereal makers and soft drink companies pool their lobbyists to stymie any change in government support payments to the current system. It’s a labyrinth.
If you want to ban ractopamine in hog production, you’ll expend a lot of effort on just one obnoxious toxin. What about all the others? How do you get all of us in the ecological food/farming movement to agree that’s the worst offender of all the offenders? We’ll be years trying to finger the worst offender. Lost time; squandered effort.
Exempting Producer-Patron Transactions
After studying this quandary all my life, I’ve come to one request: a food emancipation proclamation. It doesn’t ban anything except bureaucratic tyranny between neighbors engaged in food commerce. While wordings vary, the general idea is to exempt direct producer-patron food transactions from governmental regulatory interference.
If two neighbors exercising freedom of choice as consenting adults want to engage in a food transaction to offer their microbiomes personal agency, they should be able to do so without today’s licensing shackles. I don’t ask to outlaw Monsanto or Tyson. I don’t ask to outlaw glyphosate or ractopamine. I’m not a chemical/conventional abolitionist. What I want is a functional underground railroad so we Americans who want to get off the government-enslaved food system can find our way to freedom if we want to.
Opponents argue such a policy would endanger food safety. What about dirty farmers? My response: have you checked government-approved junk lately? Some $10 billion of taxpayer money goes to soft drink companies via SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) payments. The federal government’s food track record is abysmal.
From the 1979 Food Pyramid that put Cheerios and Twinkies on the foundational bottom level to the recent determination that Fruit Loops are more nutritious than beef, the truth is that Americans would be much healthier today had the government never told us what to eat. Federal policy demonized lard and butter while extolling the virtues of Crisco and margarine. Policy currently favors Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and inordinately incentivized, chemicalized, soil-depleting monocultures of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, and sugarcane.
The MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has unearthed a plethora of pathogens, toxins, health-debilitating ingredients and practices in our government-approved food system. Loopholes in the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) process for food additives and manipulation are a travesty, leading to 10,000 U.S.-approved food additives, compared to Europe’s 400. Anyone who defends the U.S. food oversight system is foolish.
Opposing food freedom from a safety standpoint is to assume that direct-market farmers, building relationship marketing channels with their neighbors, are inherently filthier, more corrupt and less trustworthy than the current incestuous industrial agriculture/federal government fraternity. I submit that the inherent transparency and personal vetting (know your farmer, know your food) between direct-market players carries the same auditing protection as Uber and Airbnb.
The reason these two largely unregulated services prosper is because real-time internet auditing creates credibility for both parties. If you’re a poor passenger, you don’t get picked up. If you’re a poor chauffer, you don’t get clients. Yesterday’s village-imbedded butcher, baker and candlestick maker are resurrected today in the democratized real-time audit of internet ratings. Neighbors know who the shysters are. When the industrial food system erects “No Trespassing” signs and you have to put on a hazardous material suit and walk through sheep dip to visit your food, neighbors can’t check up on the system. The opaque industrial food system must give way to an Uberized option; we’re not in 1970 anymore.
Enslaving the food system with an industrial regulatory system is as barbaric and outmoded as outlawing Artificial Intelligence. The food regulatory system needs to catch up to the 21st century.
Our Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture several years ago told me, “We can’t give people food choice. If we did, we couldn’t build hospitals fast enough to handle all the people sick from tainted food.” Can you imagine? As if our hospitals aren’t already full of people eating government-approved and subsidized food.
The whole food-safety arguments falls flattest in its hypocrisy. All other hazardous substances are prohibited consistently across the spectrum. Cocaine, prescription drugs, fentanyl — you can’t buy it, sell it, use it, give it away, or feed it to your kids. But with food, the prohibition is ONLY on selling. You can buy it, give it away, eat it, and feed it to your kids. You just can’t sell it.
Clearly, food regulations are not about safety; they are about controlling market access. What is it about exchanging money for homemade summer sausage or a homemade chicken pot pie or a home-dressed T-bone steak that suddenly turns it from a benign, benevolent gift into a hazardous substance? Hmmm?
The Benefits of Emancipation
The food safety argument, which is the only real viable negative, is bogus. Once you get past that, what are the benefits? Many.
1. Food safety, security, and stability. Does anyone think that in the spring of 2020, when supermarket shelves went bare, that America would have had less of a hiccup had we been supplied by 50,000 community-scaled abattoirs and canneries rather than 500 mega-centralized industrial sites? That’s the rhetorical question; the answer is obvious.
Speed boats are much easier to navigate in rocky shoals than aircraft carriers, which take many miles just to turn around. A democratized, decentralized food production, processing, distribution, and marketing platform is far more resilient than the concentrated, centralized system currently plaguing our nation. When crisis happens, resilience beats efficiency every time.
2. Reducing the oligarchy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders travel the country demanding that we “stop the oligarchy.” The worst oligarchy, of course, is the one that controls the meat supply: four companies control 85 percent of America’s meat. These politicians’ solution, though, is a bigger bully government agency than the bully private companies. That’s been America’s go-to solution for everything for a century, and look where it’s gotten us: agency capture and hideous fraternities of public-private collusion.
No, the answer is to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit on the marketplace with thousands and thousands of small outfits feeding their neighborhoods. You don’t stop oligarchies with more government intervention (which is why they exist in the first place). You stop oligarchies with bottom-up freedom.
3. Diversity in food options. Ever notice how when food is recalled due to some pathogen, it’s never one brand? Often some 20 or more brands are listed; they all came from the same processing plant. In other words, all those brands came from the same funnel — somebody just slapped a different label on them.
The truth is that for all the pretty labels and bright lights in the supermarket, most everything in there is homogeneously squeezed from the same tube. Where’s Aunt Matilda’s chicken pot pie? Where’s the neighbor’s sausage? Where’s the friend’s small-batch homemade pepperoni? It doesn’t exist. But it would with a Food Emancipation Proclamation. Suddenly the marketplace would explode with options — real options.
4. Rural economic revival. One of the reasons flyover country is in trouble and rural America is in an economic depression is because for decades, government intervention has demonized and marginalized retail access to farmer entrepreneurs. The result is a steady economic drain from the country to the city, impoverishing and hollowing out rural America and enriching the urban sector.
Freedom to sell is the catalyst to reversing this devastating trend. If we want thriving, flourishing farmers, we need to offer them economic viability in the marketplace. Preserving farmland is a fool’s errand. A property is only a farm when a farm-er operates it. Preserving farm-ers is far more important than preserving farm-land. Greenbelts and other farm preservation initiatives sound wonderful until you realize they do nothing to increase actual farm-er viability. Market access is the ticket to economic prosperity.
5. Lower prices for higher-quality food. The single biggest price impediment in the clean-food, local-food, direct-marketed food sector is the cost of complying with industrial-scale food regulations. I co-own a small federal-inspected meat processing facility, and it costs us $500 to do what Tyson does for $100. Why? Because all food regulations are scale prejudicial.
The fact that a large slaughterhouse handles 5,000 cows a day and our small neighborhood one handles 50 a week makes no difference in the Hazardous Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) compliance and licensing paperwork. What the big guys get to spread across millions of pounds of output we must absorb in hundreds. Any regulation for which compliance is easier if you’re big than if you’re small is inherently unjust and unfair.
The price elitism generally foisted on the non-industrial food sector is not because our side wants to get rich; it’s the inherent lopsided cost of regulatory compliance. Absent that, we can go toe-to-toe with the big boys. As a result, small-scale suppliers could and would drop prices, enabling high-quality food accessibility to far more moderate-income patrons. That might actually start dropping hospital requirements.
What could be more Trumpian than a food emancipation proclamation to take the shackles off an enslaved food and farming system, releasing choice and entrepreneurship into a bureaucratic malaise? Liberty is always the pathway to options and opportunity. Release the farmers.
