Are We Better Off Without Food Regulators?
Have you read Joel Salatin? Listened to him on YouTube?
We’re HUGE fans. This man has lived the life for decades, and has helped so many people figure out better ways to live for themselves with his many books. If you haven’t read You Can Farm, we highly recommend it. If you think you can farm, he’ll show you the good and the bad so you can figure that out before you get yourself in a bind.
Seriously, if you’re interested in this homesteading lifestyle, this man’s books are required reading. He truly is a pioneer. He’s gone through all of the headaches and heartbreaks to build his farm to the success it is. He’s fought with the federal food regulators over seemingly everything. ‘No, you can’t butcher your hog here, it wasn’t castrated, so you must throw it out, I don’t care if its a gift to your church for a picnic, trash it. Right now in front of me. No, trash it as in put it in the trash.’ This is my short rendition of his version from You Can Farm (affiliate link); he offers many other examples. Had he known the regulator would regulate as such, he could have just processed the hog at home, and his friends and neighbors could have enjoyed his organic, locally grown pork. Nope, he broke some rule only a bureaucrat would know, but one the food police must enforce… (who would have thought that an un-altered animal would be impossible to butcher?)
“Everything I want to do is illegal”
I really cannot stand these government regulations that tell me what’s ‘safe’ when almost every week in the news there’s an article about a food recall. No one cares more about your money than you. No one cares more about your health than you. No one cares more about your food than you. If your food was grown over 200 miles away, sprayed regularly with chemicals, harvested and processed with chemicals, wrapped in chemicals, and shipped around on trucks running on petro-chemicals… you can see why perhaps there might be issues with contaminated food.
From our garden to our kitchen, there are no chemicals. There’s water to rinse a little dirt off. But if there’s still a little dirt when we slice up whatever we grew we’re about to eat, guess what... It doesn’t bother me at all. I know that soil is from a living microbiome. I know that my gut’s own biome is regularly struggling to maintain balance. So I figure a little extra something-something isn’t worth the hassle of scrubbing the turnip until the skin comes off.
Certainly, I don’t rinse our produce in bleach. Nor do I coat them in wax. Nor do I walk more than a few yards to collect, process, and prepare the food.
We can use our grocery budget dollars support local growers, not this factory farming system.
“The FDA has approved a variety of foods for irradiation in the United States including: Beef and Pork, Crustaceans, Fresh Fruits and Vegetables, Lettuce and Spinach, Poultry, Seeds for Sprouting, Shell Eggs, Shellfish, and Spices and Seasonings” -United States Food and Drug Administration
You’ll be amazed at what you find once you start reading about what you’re eating. ‘Eating clean’ is a great idea. But it can be really hard to actually do when you’re beholden to the stores for your ingredients, or commercial kitchens for your prepared meals. Cooking every meal from scratch is a lot of work, especially if you’re working 9-5, let alone with kids and other activities!
I get not everyone has time to grow and process a garden. It can feel like a lot of work, especially in the heat! But loads of people, like myself, would love to buy homegrown and canned pasta sauce from someone I knew who canned amazing homemade pasta sauce from their garden produce. Full of only food, no mystery, from someone local. What could be cleaner than this?
But without a $15,000 federally inspected food police kitchen, this can’t happen. I’m serious. IF you were lucky enough to know someone who made all his or her own sauce, and then had a bumper crop and made some “extra,” he or she couldn’t legally sell this to anyone. Never mind the hours of growing the produce, or processing the tomatoes, or skills and knowledge this individual processed to turn raw tomatoes into pasta sauce you could enjoy months from now… If it wasn’t made in a federally inspected kitchen, it’s a no-go.
Having the food police around means I can’t feed people foods they want to buy if I’m able to turn my skills, raw materials (aka actual food), and time into a product demanded by the local market. Why? This doesn’t make sense. If someone wants to buy it, why couldn’t you sell it? It’s not like there are taxes on food….
Hmmm… perhaps its because the food police are protecting the market shares of Big Ag… who perhaps don’t want to bother with local competition? Maybe these giant food-stuff companies are threatened by the transparency that would come from neighbor supplying neighbor with healthy, nutritious food.
Nah… surely we don’t have an entire bureaucracy to prevent individuals from choosing healthy options for themselves and their families. Surely they have our best interest at heart in establishing food pyramids that aren’t funded by lobbyist-backed programs… It doesn’t make sense that they would favor such massive, factory-farming operations over the clean, organic operations of small-scale individuals…
True. Logic says this doesn’t make sense. It’s just too bad that logic isn’t the foundation of bureaucracy.
Sound like a group of cronies collecting the same amount of “neighborhood protection” money, regardless of the size of neighbors business? Hmmm. Perhaps mom and pop shops disappeared because they couldn’t keep up with big box stores for being charged the same operating expenses by the food police. Requiring the cattleman to have a digital ear tag on each animal while in transport might be “only” $2 a tag for the big corporations, because they have sales in millions of dollars every year. But when you think about the mom and pop rancher, you don’t imagine wealthy folks. Farming as a profession is generally associated with just scraping by, unless you think of Big Ag. Then they’re doing just fine.
The FDA says this is a source of healthy chicken…
We all know this. We all know the big name brands who sell us chicken legs or frozen vegetables, with nice scenic packaging on it help us associate their commercial farming with farming as we all believe it should be done—out in the pasture, on the grass, under the open sky, with clean air, clean water, and healthy feed. Not squished in a chicken concentration camp “chicken house” where those chickens don’t have room to ever lay down in their life. Not kidding. Don’t go researching this on your lunch hour because you’ll immediately lose your appetite.
Healthy permaculture methods
AKA chickens raised on pasture!
For those who want to do something about it, Salatin talks a lot about the sins of commercial farming, but he spends even more time going over better ways of going about growing our food, sustainably. No chemicals. Seriously. No drugs. Seriously. It’s almost as if he’s promoting them to grow up happily in their natural environment…
Maybe I’m crazy. But if I’m you’re a campfire crazy too, this nonsense of someone with a government ID telling you what is food and what isn’t, will only fuel your fire. Especially if he’s telling you to throw out perfectly delicious and nutritious food. Or else….
Being told I can’t do something is the fastest way for my creative juices to kick in to figure out another way. That doesn’t mean I’ll do it, I just want to solve the puzzle. Might be a character flaw. Might also be a challenge I overcome so I can laugh at the ridiculousness of the loophole once discovered.
The puzzle I’m working on now is a campaign for food freedom. We NEED to all be talking about how it’s our inalienable right to decide who medicates us with hormone-injected food, or who does not. I’ll opt for no thanks, but I demand to be informed so that I can make that choice. I demand my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To me, this looks like: growing, nurturing, and preserving life in the garden and on the pasture, while exercising my liberty to select foods that’s best for me and my family. Our pursuit of happiness is based on being self-reliant, which includes making an honest income in our local markets, sharing the spoils of our food-growing labor with those that honor quality, and who also want to chose real food for themselves and their families.
To me, this doesn’t sound crazy. But right now, because of the food police, it is.
The food police would insist that manure be dumped on a manure lagoon instead of composting it. Doesn’t that sound completely backwards to nature, to science? We think so. Compost makes our plants grow. I imagine manure water would fry the plants, like hot chicken scat would. Manure water sounds like pollution. Perhaps… it is?
Too much manure…
Not enough lagoon!
Oh wait. The manure lagoon isn’t meant to serve any functional purpose to improve the agricultural systems for growing food, just as a breakdown place. It doesn’t fit into the farm system. It’s a dead end.
For our readers who are more FIRE-focused, you’re probably a bit confused… how is this relevant to you…? Because you’re paying for it! Did you read about the costs of this “food” system in Non-Food In Our Food? Where the average person consumes 14 pounds of preservatives, herbicides, pesticides, artificial flavoring, etc every year? Not only are you being sold non-food as food, so you’re getting ripped off, that article also went into the health care costs associated with such food. So not only are you paying for the non-food, you’re paying the medical bills for care and treatment from eating the non-food.
To everything, there is a season. If you’re buying anything out of season, you’re paying an extreme markup. If you’re buying anything other that food in it’s raw state, you’re paying the convenience tax for processing and packaging. And to boot, you’re paying way more, for nearly non-existent nutrition! Oh, and you’re also paying for the transport of all of those factory-produced goodies.
Our food system is as broken as our healthcare system. We wait until we’re sick to get help. The help we get are drugs, not changing what we’re doing. Do you have bugs eating the garden plants? Spray it all down! With only a few easy applications, you can have your weekend back, bug-free! Why bother buddy planting something next to it when you plant, to scare the bugs away and prevent the problem in the first place?
But why bother changing your diet if you have high blood pressure when you could just take a medication? Life’s too short to pass up the margarine!
The kicker? Get ready for this one, it’s a kick in the pants. If you did change your diet because you wanted to prevent having to take the medication, you’re still probably changing your diet to yet another food that was sprayed. Might also have been grown on soil so depleted, the only way the whatever grows on that land is from chemicals applied, before the seeds wrapped in the chemicals are sown.
Yes. It’s that bad. Unless you know your farmer, that is.
The food police don’t want that. The food police don’t want you having a first-name basis with where you source your food. You, knowing where you food comes from and voting with your dollars… it’s a threat to their job security.
So. What.
They’ll find new jobs. Most will probably go back to the Big Ag company they worked for before their government regulator food police job.
Defund the food police. We don’t need the FDA and the USDA and all the other levels of bureaucracy telling us, grown, legal adults, what we can and cannot eat for dinner.
I’ll waive the risk and make my own choices. That’s my right. ‘Taking the risk” doesn’t scare me because at the end of the day, that’s what I do day in and day out. Being the little guy means I know I’m on my own and my consequences will be what they are for my actions, whether is driving my car, choosing my food, or working with my doctor to resolve a health issue. If something goes wrong, Uncle Sam isn’t going to be there to help me out. (Unless, by chance, I underpaid my taxes!)
I don’t need the food police “protecting” me by doing recalls for already-consumed products. Too little, to late, thanks. If I get cancer, I’ll have to deal with it, even if it came from food they sold me—even if it was that post-consumed but “recalled” food product! If I get food poisoning, I’ll have to deal with it. But at least without food police I could make my own choices to prevent both as much as possible. And without the food police, the cost of eating local would conveniently drop! And, not have to travel as far!
I want to grow ALL of our own food. But that’s unrealistic. That’s way too much for just us. We want a variety to keep our nutrition levels up, and just can’t source everything ourselves to do that. We know this. We try anyway. It’s our pursuit of happiness.
If I were able to find local options of growers with the same mindset, who eat what they grow, and grow what they want to eat, then at least I could have a larder full of nutrient-dense, locally grown and processed, healthful foods. No eggs washed in bleach, which bleaches the actual egg in the process, not just the shell. Pasture-raised eggs with yokes that are almost orange and that teeny tiny little blood spot in the egg white to tell you that the egg is fresh (good luck finding that in your fridge!!).
Defund the food police. Let’s see what happens. If we don’t trust the big corporations to feed us quality food without the in-house minders, maybe we’ll vote with our dollars and eat locally. Let’s skip the regulators and go to the source. Let’s get on a first-name basis with our famers, let’s learn where our food comes from, and how it’s grown. Let’s tour the gardens and pastures and learn from the wisdom of working with Nature, not against her. Let’s defund the food police, and watch our health and wealth improve.
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