This is actually a rather involved topic, so I’m gonna have to see if I can be concise, and coherent enough to get a few points across, without covering the entire spectrum… Hmmm…
First off, we have a myth in society that if the government did not protect our food, that we’d all be slain in a matter of days by foodborne illness, harmful chemicals, or deadly plants or substances masquerading as food.
This is purely a myth. In fact, the truth is precisely the opposite.
The government SUPPORTS, and actually MANDATES that our food be polluted with harmful chemicals, it PAYS growers to ENSURE that your food is contaminated with superbugs, and it approves for human consumption, chemicals and substances which are provably deadly. Yes, all of these statements are substantiated, and completely unexaggerated.
The myth that food is a dangerous thing without government involvement is a lie which has been perpetuated BY the government.
Here’s an example: On every box of eggs, there is a notice that you need to keep eggs refrigerated. And government legislation requires that eggs be refrigerated from the time they are gathered, until the time of sale.
While this is a great boon to refrigeration suppliers, it is completely unnecessary. Eggs have a natural protective coating. If the eggs remain UNWASHED, they will keep for two months or more at room temperature. After they are boiled in the shell, they’ll keep for about 4 days. The eggshell is a marvelous natural protective container, which is much better than any manmade device at keeping eggs fresh.
Now, it IS true that eggs, once broken, or cooked out of the shell, will pick up contamination, as will any other food. They DO require refrigeration at that point.
But up until the mid-1900s, fresh eggs were kept on the counter, boiled eggs were carried in pockets as travel food, and the human race not only survived, it thrived.
YOU think that eggs require immediate and continuous refrigeration because our government has told you so. But they lied.
Another myth is drinking water. A whole nation of people now think that if the government did not mandate safe drinking water, and require chlorination, that we’d all die of cholera. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Polluted drinking water is caused by careless handling of wastes, and by overcrowding in population centers, NOT by failure to chlorinate. And drinking water in the Middle Ages (when it was completely unregulated) was actually SAFER than it is today. People lived more spread out, without the huge densely populated cities of today. They drank from wells, rivers, springs, streams, and ponds, and nature is a wonderful cleaner of water. The bacteria they did ingest was typically of low concentration, and merely served to strengthen their immune systems. In fact, today, chlorination itself causes far more harm than contamination by pathogens ever did.
Chlorine is a poison, and when consumed daily in glass after glass of water, it slowly kills you. It is a prime causative factor in all forms of Irritable Bowel Disease, and causes auto-immune disease over time as well. Long term consumption of small amounts of chlorine contributes to heart disease, diabetes, persistent obesity, chronic fatigue, cancer, asthma, and many other conditions which are on the rise.
Our government not only disseminates false information about our risks, it mandates and supports harmful actions in many other ways, besides just chlorine in your water.
Commercial baked goods are REQUIRED to be treated with preservatives. Preservatives are just like chlorine – poisons, which slowly destroy the human body, one cell at a time. They contribute to the same long term disease processes.
Factory farming is supported by the government, while safer small farming is actively persecuted. Government subsidies are only available to large farms, not small ones (which they were originally designed to help). Large scale factory farms COULD NOT financially sustain themselves without government subsidies and without regulation enforcement entities being willing to ignore compliance requirements for larger farms. They can ONLY exist because of dishonesty and funneling of taxpayer dollars into the corporate farm coffers. And yet, virtually ALL serious food contamination issues stem directly from factory farms.
The conditions which cause the development of superbugs, or which cause mass-contaminations in serious enough concentrations to actually make people sick, only occur in large scale operations, with the attendant supply chains.
Hence, our government is CAUSING the very safety problems they are claiming a NEED to prevent.
Foodborne illness was simply NOT a serious problem prior to the 20th century. It became an issue precisely when the government became involved in promoting mechanized farming.
Mechanized farm equipment is expensive. In order to make a mechanized farm profitable, the farm must be many times larger than a man and animal powered farm. Thus, mechnization of a farm creates a large scale factory farm, where things get seriously out of balance.
Don’t believe me? Most people scoff at the idea that horse farming can be profitable, yet we have living proof that it is more profitable than factory farming, AND without government subsidies. The Amish are probably the most visible example – they have horse farmed for centuries, and still do. The average Amish farm is 80 acres. This is the maximum amount that a family can manage successfully. Most Amish farmers make a good living from their acreage. No, they do not have Television, or cars, or other expenses which we consider “necessary”, but they do have financial security, nice homes, are well fed, and their communities thrive.
Many other small farmers have returned to horse farming, and are profiting more from their farms now than they did with a tractor.
It is not only POSSIBLE to profit more from a small farm, it is MORE LIKELY that a small farmer will profit without intensive mechanization.
In contrast, the average factory farm is thousands of acres of land, and the debt load is crushing. They typically have literally a million or more dollars worth of un-paid for equipment being used on the farm – and it may not be paid off before it reaches the end of its useful life. Profits per acre are very low as well, because mechanized farms produce less per acre than horse farms.
To scale it down further, a farm that is managed by hand – without either horses or tractors – is statistically even more productive per acre, with even higher profits per acre than horse farming (up to 20 times more productive than a factory farm, and up to 10 times more productive than a horse farm). Generally, only 2-3 acres can be managed this way, but it is enough land to provide a comfortable single income within a family.
These smaller farms do not market through supply chains (the supply chain – from farm to store shelf – is responsible for 90% of the store shelf price), they market direct to the customer, and therefore can earn a higher amount for their labor than larger farms are able to do. If you can sell your eggs for $3 a dozen on the farm, you can earn far more by your labor than a factory farmer who has to sell his eggs for $.30 per dozen to a packing house.
All of this means that with small farms (the kind the government wants to put out of business), the customer and producer are close together, and very little time passes between production and consumption. That alone is responsible for a 1000 fold reduction in foodborne pathogens. Bugs simply do not have time to develop.
Small farms also do not develop superbugs – they typically use far less antibiotics, and their stock runs in lower concentrations, which reduces incidents of widespread contamination. Since superbugs and high concentrations of contaminants do not develop, cross contamination to vegetables and fruits is not a problem.
Many of the regulations which our government declares to be necessary (such as washing of eggs – which destroys the natural protective coating on eggs, making them MORE susceptible to contamination) are NOT supported by governments in other countries (putting the lie to their claim that “science” is the basis for the regulations). In fact, in France, washing eggs is forbidden. They recognize that more harm than good comes from washing eggs, yet our government requires this dangerous procedure.
There are many other examples – pasteurization of milk, which kills all beneficial bacteria which would normally help in keeping harmful bacteria in check, while all sales of raw milk are becoming criminalized because the government has declared raw milk to be “dangerous” (more foodborne illness occurs yearly from contamination of pasteurized milk than does from raw milk). Organic farming requirements which make true organic farming disqualified for the label. Requirements for “grading” eggs, which merely measure size, yolk age, and shell quality and which have NOTHING to do with food safety, yet which our government routinely labels as a safety issue – all it does is increase the price of your eggs, hinder farmers, and keep the egg graders employed in a useless trade. And many more illogical, stupid, and harmful regulations.
Government regulations and enforcement do not keep our food safe. In fact, they CAUSE foodborne illness and food related disease, and then use the resulting chaos as an excuse to burden the industry with more regulation, which invariably lets the offenders ride, while punishing the farms which were not the cause of the issue in the first place.
Hence, government regulation of our food is making the situation WORSE, not better.
We would be much better off with no regulation of the food industry at all, because what we do have is either ineffective, or counterproductive.