"Safety"
By Monica @ 9:08 AM   
Here’s the website of Colorado’s sole supplier of heritage turkey, Eastern Plains. (A heritage variety is a breed that was commonly grown during earlier periods in human history, but which is not used in modern large-scale agriculture.) It’s an interesting farm and it looks as if they sell all sorts of interesting heritage meats, including beef, pork, turkey, goose, duck, chicken, and lamb. I’ve never yet tasted any heritage meats but am quite eager to, particularly based on the taste tests done here. Unfortunately, Eastern Plains specifically mentions that the USDA processing adds to their cost. I'm sure there would be some increased cost to them just due to the fact that economies of scale producing grocery store food are more efficient, but just imagine how much cheaper their meats would be, even if more expensive than grocery store meats, if they didn't have to process in a USDA facility. Now imagine what would happen to this farm if the USDA slaughterhouse that they use in Colorado were to shut down or if they had increased transportation costs due to a shutdown in order to drive to an approved slaughterhouse further away. Either of those scenarios is entirely plausible given my previous writings on the matter.
Requirements for slaughter in a government-approved facility are in the name of "Safety." I can say it no better than someone else I read recently: “Safety” is a word that stops all rational conversation in its tracks. "Safety" brooks no give-and-take. It is the trump card people play when they don't want to have to bother thinking a little harder about which rules really make sense, what effect they're having on us all, and who those rules are really protecting. I’m confident that meat inspection regulations are not about safety. It’s about adherence to a code that has ballooned out of any proportion to common sense. If it is really about safety it would be illegal to personally eat or to give away meat you’d slaughtered yourself, whether hunted or farmed. (Oh. As I write this I’m thinking I shouldn’t have put that last sentence up there for all to see and given the USDA any more nutty ideas.) These regulations don’t really protect consumers. How many outbreaks of food-borne illness have we had from mass-produced meats and vegetables in the past few years? A ton. And because of the scale of production, tht means that when there is an outbreak it’s enormous. Despite common germophobic beliefs to the contrary, no one is endangering their life from exposure to germs by killing and processing a chicken or a deer in their backyard: When a Virginia state inspector 12 years ago declared that the Polyface poultry slaughter area was unsanitary because it was not enclosed, Salatin fought that decision. A university lab conducted swab tests at Polyface and on government-inspected poultry purchased from a supermarket, and found that the supermarket birds averaged 10 times more bacteria than the Polyface samples. Salatin won the case. Michael Pollan, food journalist, has suggested that the USDA support local slaughterhouses rather than letting them be bought by large conglomerates and then shut down. I regret the shutdown of local slaughterhouses, too, but we need to question the premise that approved slaughterhouses are a valid type of government spending (read: theft from taxpayers) in the first place. And for what purpose, anyway? “Safety”? Would that be the “safety” of the USDA-inspected supermarket chicken with ten times more bacteria than the locally processed chicken not meeting government “safety” standards? We have to stop kidding ourselves, stop evading reality, and stop accepting the premise of government regulations and agencies as things that should be “reformed”, as opposed to abolishing them altogether. Sound radical? Maybe, until you consider the fact that somehow Americans survived for 130 years without federal inspection of meat. We have to start thinking about challenging everything we're up against. A society that encourages and rewards ridiculous lawsuits. A society that treats adults as if they are babies. A society that divorces people from their own rational judgment, incapable of making choices without a federal bureaucrat’s approval. And especially adults who throw around the word "Safety" more frequently than a 2-year-old uses the word "No!" Labels: "Safety", Conventional Wisdom, De-regulation, Government Idiocy, Meat Inspection, Rants and Whines, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend
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