The Complete Patient

It would be nice to think that Michelle Obama’s interest in nutritious food possibly portends good things for the future of sustainable agriculture.

I worry, though, because of the swelling hysteria over food safety.

From what I can see, there are two political food buckets. One is the feel-good so-called “slow food” movement (as opposed to “fast food”) Lots of people can get behind that—it’s family farming, sustainable agriculture, locally grown food—almost the new mom and apple pie.

Unfortunately, the second bucket is food protection, and that’s the bucket where all the political activity is going on right now, and it borders on hysteria.

If you read blogs like Obama Foodorama, you can easily conclude that America’s food protection situation is totally out of control, that people are falling like flies. They use the data about 76 million people getting food poisoning, when we know that that data full of extrapolations and reporting holes, among other weaknesses.

Unfortunately, the stories about peanut butter and melamine have only agitated the situation, with so-called progressives looking for the government to make it right. When government becomes involved to resolve hysteria, we nearly always get into trouble, and wind up with excessive controls and intrusions into our lives. We saw it in the 9-11 aftermath.

The hysteria over food safety inevitably focuses on the drama of serious illnesses to whip up popular sentiment for quick and simplistic solutions.

After my previous posting about how the problems over raw milk are essentially political in nature, one reader wrote me, requesting I “show a bit of sympathy for the victims.An acknowledgment that there are illnesses and that many raw dairies work diligently to promote food safety.” And cp posted a link to a sad story about a young girl with kidney problems from food-borne illness.

I don't deny that people can become seriously ill from food-borne illness. The big problem with the desire for a simplistic solution—a single government agency with far-reaching powers to demand lots of forms and mete out major penalties (National Animal Identification System in disguise?)—is that it overlooks the complexity associated with food-borne illness. Food-borne illness can result from careless and unsanitary conditions, like in the recent peanut butter contamination, as well as over-use of antibiotics that are breeding E.coli 0157:H7 in cattle, and now MRSA in pigs. And sometimes, when regulators can’t determine the cause, they blame raw milk producers.

I fear that one of the leading poster boys for this “get rid of the germs” campaign will be raw milk. We’ve seen it happen repeatedly over the last three years of the government’s campaign against raw milk.

There is already legislation to satisfy the food-borne-illness hysteria—one such effort is HR 875 ("The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009"). Tough legislation won’t just place misguided pressure and cost burdens on small sustainable producers, but will be used to justify expansion of agribusiness (the only ones capable of conforming to “standards”) and push wider use of pasteurization and irradiation of our food.

Can supporters of raw milk stand up to the coming onslaught? It’s always difficult to stand up to hysteri