Archives for the 'usda' tag
Quick Bites
North Korea’s first beer celebrated in absurd 3-minute ad. [Reuters]
Least shocking thing ever: USDA organic labeling scheme is a failure. [MSNBC]
Stodgy Brit slags bacon. [Times of London (HT Jake Dupont)]
Bittman and Jose Andres blather about sustainability for an hour. [Slow Food LA]
Hindu extremists toss pig on mosque construction site in India. Riots ensue. Can retaliatory cow tossing be far off? [CNN]
Kitchen Confidential clone doesn’t quite cut it. [The Onion]
Regulations Don’t Beget Safer Foods
On Friday, NPR-voiced podcaster Caleb Brown of the Cato Institute interviewed Peter Van Doren of Cato’s Regulation** magazine about the myth of food safety. As Van Doren puts it:
The problem is that government overpromises… The left points out [USDA & FDA are] underfunded and don’t have enough inspectors to actually do a good job. And the left is correct. It’s true.
But that’s a chronic problem. Instead of the answer to that being, “Oh, we could add more money to the budget and somehow solve the problem,” if you do the math, you’d find out you can’t have enough inspectors to actually adequately provide assurances of the sort many voters want.
More here. Cato podcast index here.
The Federal Times on food safety issues here. The U.S. government’s own food safety website — which, as the image above shows, proves the feds aren’t wasting a blessed penny of their food-safety inspection budget on web design — here.
**I’m guessing that Regulation is the only magazine published by a think tank that boasts a former Dancing with the Stars contestant as a columnist.
