Everyone should read “Everything i want to do is illegal“. It’s shocking to find out that the vast regulatory apparatus governing food in this country doesn’t do assessment of infectious, sanitary or bacterial risk in practice. Eggs are checked solely for uniformity of look. A hundred thousand white eggs full of salmonella would pass inspection, but a hundred non-uniform brown eggs do not (because some of them will ‘look weird’).
Industrial slaughterhouses are crawling with bacteria and infectious disease and are totally signed off as acceptable with the poor quality meat dumped into the stores. Sanitary small slaughterhouses are forced to shut down for not having a bathroom. It’s illegal to sell that cleaner, healthier meat except in very specific conditions.
We still have “The Jungle” conditions, even down to exploited immigrant workers being forced to work unsafely and with sanitation risks, but we don’t have any recourse except to patronise smaller guys. The very laws passed to clean up the food supply have become the means by which that unsanitary, poor quality food production is hardcoded into the American dietary system.
Yet people keep falsely claiming a nation of mostly smaller producers of clean, sanitarily produced, environmentally sound food cannot scale to enough production, but that’s not true. The baby boom, among other things, happened among a population of adults who were still getting a lot of their food that way and had grown up doing so. The birth rate statistics since 1910 are pretty interesting.
In any case, it is demonstrable that the current diet of mostly corn, soy, animals fed corn and soy, and hydrogenated vegetable oils (also mostly corn and soy– I feel like there’s some kind of pattern here…) is not really working, despite whatever ‘efficiency’ statistics can be cobbled together for this current industrially produced diet.
Going local means less variety, but then again, eating out of packages is not all that varied either, though one cannot get people to see it that way. As to it being more expensive, I am increasingly thinking that it could be competitive to the fake-cheap food out there now. It is really hard to know what the honest market price for clean food would be since it is regulated nearly out of legal existence and is steadily going greymarket.
I wish people were out in the streets campaigning for our right to clean food production and healthy plants and animals. Clean food production and healthy food does reduce health costs.
Is it really worth it to spend 10% or even less of income on food and 15-20% out of pocket on health insurance or care expenses because you’re sick all the time from the crappy diet that passed visual inspection despite being produced in literal fecal stew?
I’d rather spend 15 or 20% on food and 5% or even less on health insurance or care expenses because i’m not sick all the time. Although again, if industrial food production had to pay their actual costs, and weren’t subsidized, it might well be that we could all still be spending 10% on food and 5% on health stuffs and rejoice at all the extra money we’d have.
Anyway Salatin’s book is really eye-opening. A few thousand people trying to keep their jobs are daily ensuring that the other 300 million of us cannot eat clean, environmentally sound, healthy food.
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