Government Doesn’t Protect Our Food

 

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.

About the same time our government started requiring refrigeration for eggs, it also started requiring producers to WASH all eggs intended for sale in the US. It is actually illegal to do so in some other countries, because of how important that protective layer is on the outside of the eggshell, in reducing food contamination. But because our government seeks to encourage factory farming and mass production, it determined that in order to keep the playing field level for larger companies (which cannot survive without government intervention), they would intentionally ALLOW a contamination issue to survive – then not only to ALLOW it, but to REQUIRE it.

YOU think that eggs require immediate and continuous refrigeration because our government has told you so. But they lied. They created a problem, then insist that you take action to keep that problem under control – only you can’t. You will still have more contamination issues from your refrigerated eggs than you would have from unrefrigerated eggs that had been unwashed.

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 wells. 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. The irony here is that the preservatives do NOT reduce foodborne illness. They merely extend the shelf-life so bread can be shipped across the US and stay on store shelves longer before it develops HARMLESS mold, that looks unsightly, does not taste good, but which poses no health risk.

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 (many regulations are in fact written to EXEMPT larger farms from food safety laws – the very farms that cause the problems are the ones exempt from them). 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. Their increasing regulations in the name of “food safety” have served consistently to protect large farmers, chemical corporations, and to persecute and harm both small farmers, and consumers. Every time. It has invariably done the opposite of what was promised when the legislation was proposed. And it was designed to. If there were no more serious issue of foodborne illness, there would be no more capacity to use this issue for political gain, and that is all it has been used for.

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, and sell wholesale through costly distribution chains.

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 2-5 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.

Small farms also typically run livestock and crops side by side, providing a synergistic environment that more closely mimicks nature, and which reduces the costs of outside purchases for both fertilizer and feed. This more natural way of farming is advantageous to the farmer, the crops and livestock, to the land, and to the community, and it has a powerful effect on reduction of harmful pathogens due to the increase in helpful microbes in the more natural environment.

Small farms 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.

All of this means that with small farms (the kind the government wants to put out of business), not only are the initial risks lower, but 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. With industrial ag, crops and food often spend many weeks in the distribution chain, or on store shelves, often exposed to moisture, in conditions which allows a small contamination to become a massive one.

Many of the regulations which our government declares to be necessary 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, for example, 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, because once pasteurized milk becomes contaminated (and it always does, just a matter of time), there is nothing to slow down the growth of the harmful pathogens – which is why raw milk left on the counter gives you good tasting and healthy buttermilk, but pasteurized milk left on the counter gives you nasty vile stuff that will make you sick if it stays out for too long). Organic farming requirements which make true organic farming disqualified for the label are the brainchild of our government under the guise of “protecting” us. Another law involves 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.

And lest we mistake this for capitalism run amok, it is not. This is NOT capitalism. If it were, the government would not be involved at all. True capitalism lets the buyer learn for themselves, instead of expecting the government to protect them. This is socialism creeping in – preferring one industry over another, handing out money taken from one source to benefit another. Redistribution of money to benefit favored classes of industry. That is not capitalism.

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.