Last Thursday was Food Day.  What is Food Day?  Is it like Administrative Assistants’ Day or National Doughnut Day (These are both true “holidays,” the latter dating from 1938)?   I guess so, at least in the sense that nobody seems to know about it.

Skinny men...

But Farm Aid, (which has a pretty great picture of Neil Young just not giving a damn on its web site) dropped an email noting Food Day’s existence.  It did so in the context of the Food Safety Modernization Act, pending legislation that aims to address situations like the recent cases of melamine in baby formula, e. coli-spiked spinach, etc.  There are a variety of things to learn about current food safety (including the fact that 15 federal agencies now share responsibility for it) as well as about the Act, and it’s worth reading about them here, but here are a few key things to keep in mind.

1. Proposed legislation currently mandates on-farm safety standards that dramatically favor industrial-sized farms and threaten the ability of small and mid-sized farms, the very farms that more effectively get fresh produce to all of us and the very farms more likely to be run be people we know and can thus trust, to compete.
2. The overwhelming source of the pathogens finding their way into our food come from factory farms, where animals and produce are exposed to massive lakes of animal shit, and the antibiotics that are pumped into those animals (70% of the country’s entire use of antiobiotics) so they can remain “healthy” while standing around in that shit, in turn making those pathogens resistant to antibiotics.
3. The Act currently makes zero mention of those two primary sources of food contamination.
4. There were an average of 100 food illness outbreaks a year during the 1990s.  George W. largely left safety regulation up to the industry and the average yearly outbreaks during his tenure numbered 350.

So guess who has their hands in the current legislation?

Less-skinny men

Not that that’s a surprise.  But there are proposals to at least keep the local and regional guys from getting buried, including the Growing Safe Food Act introduced by Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow.  Read more about it and help Farm Aid support that and other small-farm protections here.  You can fill out seven boxes with your name and zip and such and hit “send.”  Easy.