2007 Farm Bill

The Farm Bill is up for reauthorization this year, and there is much buzz in the food community. My main man Michale Pollan recently hosted a teach-in at Berkeley on the matter. (Yes, I am still perfectly happy going to u-dub and have no regrets that I did not get into Berkeley... at least that is what I will keep telling myself.)

You can watch the whole thing here, and I plan to after work. I'll report on anything interesting. (That's just the kind of dedicated nerd I am. If there were an equivalent D&D scale for to gauge my own level of nerdiness, I'd probably be somewhere between Grand Master Wizard Dragon Slayer Dude and Lieutenant Wizard Dragon Slayer.)

ANYWAYS, Over at The Ethicurean, they've begun a discussion of Pollan's teach-in, which included a discussion with George Lakoff, issue-framer extrordinaire. I disagree with their assertion that he is merely the Left's version of Frank Luntz, but it is a debatable point I suppose.

In related news, I also saw there was another outbreak of E. Coli, this time associated with ground beef sold in Byerly's and Lund's stores in the western metro area of the Twin Cities. To my friends out there who may shop at one of those stores, please throw away all meat you may have in your fridge from them. It is possible it is confined to ground beef, but I wouldn't chance it.

Tying the Farm Bill (or food policy anyways) back to food borne disease, we see that today in the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee (chaired by MN re Collin Peterson) will take up the issue of whether all food inspection should be handed over to the FDA. As it stands now, the FDA inspects everything not coming from an animal, while USDA takes the meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs side of our menus. The fractured structure of oversight, and the lame and incompetent Bush Administration, has lead to an environment where its basically a crapshoot whether or not that 7-layer burrito is going to maybe kill you or that lakeside BBQ will lead to trip to the emergency room. The odds are still on our, the consumer's side, but the scales are tipping.

My delusional hope is that the next Farm Bill will address food borne disease by placing requirements on food production, namely on large factory farms. As with the peanut butter in GA, the spinach in CA, the meat in MN, the lettuce in Taco Bell, (fill in your favorite food related illness outbreak here... mad cow anyone?), it is the nature of and specific processes involved in factory farming ("industrial agriculture") that leads to the persistance of these cases. Sure, more oversight would help. But not nearly as much as cutting funding from the Farm Bill to CAFOs with dangerous practices (CAFOs are feedlots, or, big beef "farms" where cattle stand shoulder to shoulder and knee deep in pens of their own manure, see more from the good folks at Free Range Graphics in their short peice called The Meatrix). Or including funding for hazardous waste (read manure) cleanup so that runoff doesnt affect downstream crops (as was the case in CA). The real problem is not the lack of oversight, its the way that the current Farm Bill pays for these shitty practices that are leading to a slew of health problems for us all.