Archives for the 'farmers' tag
Joel Salatin, and the Best Book Title Ever
Joel Salatin has beaten us all to one of the greatest titles ever for a memoir. But Salatin’s version of Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal isn’t about the joys of drugs, or deviant sexual practices, or even tax evasion (alas). Instead, it’s about being a small farmer in America.
Salatin’s disdain for government bleeds into his dislike for big companies. (To be fair, sometimes it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other end, especially in the food industry.) But unlike many other advocates of organic and local foods, he knows where to draw the line. As he says in an interview this month with The Portland Mercury: “I’m not saying we should outlaw industrial food. What I am saying is that we should have a freedom of choice option for those who want to opt out. If you want to live on Fritos and coca-cola, that suits me just fine.”
The rest of the interview is full of Salatin’s off-kilter views as a self-proclaimed “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic.” Enjoy!
What are the biggest barriers [food safety bill H.R. 875, currently in consideration in the US Senate] presents for farmers?
The biggest one, in my opinion, is a provision to give the FDA unprecedented power to make warrantless searches on any American farm to determine if practices are “science based.”
“Science based” is a very subjective term. I think that what we do is science based but the USDA, [he pronounces it U.S. “duh”] does not believe that what we do is science based. When they say “science based” they’re talking about drugs, and vaccines, and pharmaceuticals, and cloning, and a host of other things. That’s science based.
Again, this is a perfect example of the pushback as our system gains credibility and acceptance in the marketplace. This is an example of our industrial food system manipulating our lawmakers and the USDA to keep us on the fringes—to basically put this heritage food “in the teepees,” if you will, so it can’t continue to erode market share. It’s not about food safety, it’s about controlling market access.
Here’s another good bit:
What’s interesting to me, is that in order to have consistent political philosophy on [freedom on choice], then we need to stop our War on Drugs. It’s not reasonable to say, “Give me the freedom to drink raw milk,” when all of the public health experts say that it’s not a safe thing, and then tell them, “I don’t want people to be able to take cocaine or marijuana if they want to take it.” And I’m a pretty conservative religious-righter. Boy it’s an amazing thing when I tell my buddies that they have to give up the War on Drugs. But if we give it up and gain food freedom, it would be a great trade-off. The fact is, when the government gets between my mouth and my stomach, that’s a pretty intrusive government. The only reason our founding fathers did not give us the right to food freedom, is because they could not have foreseen the day when a neighbor could not get a t-bone steak or a glass of raw milk from a neighbor.
When I spoke with Salatin last year, he gave me a list of three illegal products he’d like to sell to you—farm stand jam, custom slaughtered meat, and raw milk.
“Illegal Eggs Taste Amazing”
“Famously succulent” homemade summer sausage can only be had under the table in Toronto, reports Maclean’s, in a great quick article about locavore black markets in Canada:
The sausage is verboten because it’s made on the farm, and any kind of meat product must be prepared in a kitchen that adheres to provincial safety regulations, even if it uses meat slaughtered in a government-inspected facility.
The microbial risks taken by raw milk nuts are nothing compared to the legal risks faced by their suppliers.
The farmers who provide foodies with their fix are taking a risk. Last year, a man in eastern Ontario was fined $3,000 for selling un-graded eggs to restaurants. And the Saturday-morning farmer’s cows aren’t even part of the quota system. In Canada, dairy farmers must sell their milk through provincial marketing boards, not on the free market. If caught, she could face serious penalties.
A recent study found that $10 wine tastes better if the drinker thinks it’s $90 wine (”with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure”). The same phenomenon is probably at least partically responsible for raptures over illegal duck eggs and summer sausage. The price is only part of the cost, and an egg custard that might land you in the pokey is bound to be more delicious than a legit dessert make from supermarket eggs.
Still, I tried (legal) duck eggs last summer on Long Island, and (controlling as well as I can for my own neurological quirks) I think they they were legitimately above average in their sapidity. It’s shame Canadian farmers have to slip their best customers sausage on the sly.
Via Overlawyered
This Little Piggy Was Subsidized, But Now He Goes to Market
Newsweek has a great piece up on European farmers’ newfound embrace of the free market. Why the dramatic shift from their earlier support of subsidies? I guess most EU farmers–though not all–finally herd that subsidies and protectionism don’t work.
Not all that long ago, it was hard to use “European farmers” and “markets” in a single sentence, unless perhaps you included the words “dumping” or “distorted.” Now, thanks to the global surge in the price of food and farm products (buoyed by a new emerging-market middle class), plus a series of important reforms to Europe’s 50-year-old subsidy system, market forces that haven’t been felt in ages are stirring in the continent’s fields, barns and meadows.
[...]
Thanks to a new crop of muckraking European NGOs, more and more EU voters are also starting to see through the shroud of myth surrounding agricultural aid. Transparency groups like UK-based Farmsubsidy.org have dug up lists of subsidy recipients, showing that the biggest profiteers are actually corporate and aristocratic landowners such as Nestlé, Unilever, and the queen of England. In a sign of the changing public mood, Dutch EU Agriculture Minister Cees Veerman barely escaped having to resign in 2005 after his undisclosed subsidy income showed up on the list. New figures also show that 80 percent of the aid goes to the largest 20 percent of farms, exposing as a sham the argument that the system is needed to support small, traditional farmers. A fresh wave of outrage will likely come in 2009, when transparency holdouts Germany and France will be forced to finally publish their lists, thanks to a new directive from Brussels.
Though EU policies are hardly perfect, the Bush administration could learn a thing or two about the free market from Europe–which says as much about how terrible Bush is as it does about how far Europe has come.
