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October 15, 2006
the catch-22 of food regulations
Michael Pollan showed up in the New York Times again today. Being the loyal reader I am, I read his article on the effects of the E. coli breakout in bagged spinach. The interesting catch-22 is that the breakout was a result of industrial food practices and will induce government to invoke new regulations on the vegetable industry (as they already do in the beef industry), increasing costs to producers and making it more difficult for local producers to survive. Here is an excerpt:
Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest on the smallest operations and invariably wind up benefiting the biggest players in an industry, the ones who can spread the costs over a larger output of goods. A result is that regulating food safety tends to accelerate the sort of industrialization that made food safety a problem in the first place. We end up putting our faith in RadSafe rather than in Blue Heron Farms — in technologies rather than relationships.
I guess I wonder if all it would take to accelerate a decentralization of our food system is two or three more outbreaks or just one terrorist attack aimed at our food supply.
in the world | By charity | 02:21 PM