Egg-ulations: the cure may be worse than the disease
credit: Pikaluk
You’ve no doubt heard about the massive recall of over half-a-billion eggs produced at a couple of Iowa “farms.” You’ve also no doubt heard the commentators, politicians, and even farmers calling for better oversight and regulation so we can “prevent this from ever happening again.”
I’m here to tell you, the cure may be worse than the disease.
Salmonella outbreaks are serious business. In an age where you never meet your farmer, let alone your food, we put all of our trust in an unseen system of producers, shippers, and middlemen. We sacrifice transparency for lower prices at the grocery store, often ignoring the very high costs of our migration away from the local family farm.
In an age where the government and corporations “never waste a crisis,” advocates will call for reform – of inspection practices, antibiotic use, and food safety measures. All of these “cures” attack the symptoms, but ignore the diease: the factory farm.
Joel Salatin
If you’ve read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” or watched any talks by the author, you’ll have heard of Joel Salatin. He’s a farmer in Virginia who practices an incredibly elegant and lively sort of farming that enhances, rather than degrades, the Earth and its habitats. He sees the push for new factory-farming regulations as one more way for agribusiness interests to push out the little guy who can ill afford the expensive systems governments mandate.
His book, “Everything I Want to Do is Illegal,” covers his constant battle to stay outside of the factory-farm firing line:
Despite all the hype about local or green food, the single biggest impediment to wider adoption is not research, programs, organizations, or networking. It is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices. From zoning to labor to food safety to insurance, local food systems daily face a phalanx of regulatory hurdles designed and implemented to police industrial food models but which prejudicially wipe out the antidote: appropriate scaled local food systems.
So before you hop on the “keep our eggs clean” bandwagon, consider for a moment how they got so dirty. Instead of trying to make industrial egg production slightly less bad through regulation, lets open the field to competition from sustainable family farms.
Have you met your farmer or your food?
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