Mike Tabor Gives Tour of his Fruit Orchard to Customers and Friends
The most wonderful aspect of going local with your diet, is the opportunity to meet pioneers of organic, sustainable agriculture. There is tremendous work being done by farmers like Mike Tabor. Yet, a gross lack of understanding by public interest groups on what really constitutes food safety has led to increasing federal control over our food supply. Now, the FDA is dictating farming practices, packaging and sterilization steps that threaten to choke out small producers. Here is what two farmers have to say about these food safety laws and this ominous regulatory trend.
STRAWBERRIES, RASPBERRIES AND BAGGED SALADS
By Michael Tabor, Farmer, Needmore, PA and Nick Maravell, Farmer, Buckeystown, MD
Reprinted from Lancaster Farming, Photos added by Kimberly Hartke
Mike Tabor’s Licking Creek Bend Farm, is among the tens of thousands of farms at risk due to the new U.S. FDA Food Safety Modernization Act
Each week at my farm stands in the Maryland area, we try to explain a peculiar situation to our customers. On the one hand, they want to buy our fresh fruit and vegetables. However, I tell then, that in a few years, these will all be illegal to sell!
Why?
Because they have some degree of dirt and bacteria on them. The strawberries for instance, have some trace amount of straw and soil on them. As do the tomatoes, beans, and cucumbers. We do rinse them before leaving the farm – but we won’t put them through a disinfectant bath nor pack them in antiseptic plastic containers and put “PLU” labels on them. That’s not what consumers want at a farm market—nor is it something we’ll ever be able to do.
Regulations for new food safety laws – FSMA – the Food Safety Modernization Act –, administered by the FDA are currently in the process of being finalized. Although the Act originally had protections for family farmers like myself, we see those being ignored or phased out over time.
Common sense and following the data of recent food safety scares lead us to a very strong conclusion: the further the food travels from the farm to the consumer, the more opportunities it has to become a food safety problem…the current cyclospora food poisoning problem in bagged salads is a good example.
This is one reason why 20 million consumers come to farmers markets like ours and want fresh produce from our fields – preferably grown without pesticides, herbicides or GMO seeds. And sadly, protecting consumers from these synthetic perils is not addressed by these FSMA food safety laws.
Farm Fresh Food is trucked to City Farm Markets by Local Farmers
Nor does FDA address what is common sense to many scientists, doctors and parents: our bodies are dependent on the good germs and bacteria. If anything, rather than developing the antiseptic globalized industrial-style food system FSMA food safety laws seek, we should be searching for ways to increase the amount of good bacteria in our bodies. In fact, fecal implants to repopulate the gut with bacteria are not science fiction—the medical profession is now performing them every day.
So, why is this bad science becoming the law of the land? First, it is partially due to corporate profit. Corporations depend on a global supply chain, and in doing so they are finding it increasingly difficult to deliver safe food. At the same time they are losing market share to the local food systems that customers are demanding—witness the sharp increase in farmers markets, community supported agriculture (CSAs), and restaurants offering “farm to fork” menus. To avoid legal liability, the corporations want to legitimize an industrial approach to sterilizing everything, without regard to the unnecessary and costly burden placed on local farmers. If your local farmer goes out of business trying to comply with the costs of hundreds of pages of new federal food safety regulations, well that just leaves more customers without a local alternative.
Tomato Picking Volunteer Helps during Farm Field Day
Second there is the misguided advocacy of the consumer organizations, like Center for Science in the Public Interest,(CSPI). They mean well, but they think that throwing regulatory words, food safety laws and paperwork burden at a problem will solve it. This approach is overly legalistic, and it ignores the realities of nature and the practical fact that over-regulating a sector that is not causing a problem—small farmers—cannot possibly lead to safer food.
And, finally, there is this Administration’s commitment to the bio-tech industry. It’s no accident that FDA’s deputy commissioner responsible for food safety laws, Michael R. Taylor, is a former Monsanto Vice President. That partially explains why the “safe food” mandate does nothing to protect us from genetically engineered food, and the harsh chemicals that are necessarily paired with it.
Farm Patrons Enjoy Potluck Lunch on Farm Field Day
Food safety laws will, however, put many of us farmers, who are committed to fresh, healthy and sustainably-grown food, out of business. We note a recent issue of Lancaster Farming (7/13/13), on page A10, that Don Bessemer, a third generation farmer, whose family farmed his land for 117 years in Akron, Ohio, has already closed his Bessemer Farm Market and specifically named FDA and FSMA as the reason. He had to lay off his 30 employees. He estimated that with the “many layers of government red tape and paperwork” the requirements would cost him at least $100,000 to comply with the regulations and $30,000 a year for inspections. He said in 117 years, they have never poisoned anyone and, “I can fight the bugs, I can fight the lack of rain, but when the guy comes with a clipboard what are you going to do?”
We can all see the future. It is those antiseptic, theoretically bacteria-free plastic containers that will soon become the only way we will be able to shop for all of our produce.
And that is why these food safety laws should be an issue of public outrage!
Michael Tabor of Licking Creek Bend Farm has been farming for 41 years and supplies Baltimore-area universities and colleges with GMO-free, sustainably grown produce. He is being honored this September for running his farm stand in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in Washington, DC, for 40 years. Michael is the lone farmer who testified on FSMA before Congress last February (click link to read his testimony in full).
Nick Maravell serves as a farmer representative on the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board and has farmed organically since 1979, raising grain, livestock and vegetables.
Kimberly Hartke and another volunteer help to plant a tree at Licking Creek Bend Farm
I couldn’t agree more that there is a problem with governmental laws violating our freedom of contract in regard to food and our self-sovereignty in regard to what sources of food/nutrition we seek out — but I could not disagree more with your reasons.
You yourself identify in your title that laws are the problem, yet turn around and blame violations of “food freedom” on companies. What a mistake, one that will not help us. The problem is clearly government overreach: bad philosophy and cognitive corruption since the early 1900s has resulted in a lack of understanding of individual rights and a contempt for definitions (such as that of commerce, which, I have heard, meant strictly “trade” or “exchange” (the commerce clause was supposed to apply only to trade between states) originally in our Constitutional history, but which has since been stretched and abused by our government to cover every type of economic activity, whether between states or by an individual (even in his own private sphere!)).
Presidents like Wilson and Roosevelt tried to bypass constraints based on individual rights, leaving government free to regulate and chain us — which they have done with abandon, regulating many aspects of our lives.
This abuse of governmental power and this power lust are the problem. Some companies and individuals are trying to get their share of the power, and are wrong for it, yes, but the “gate keepers” and the holders of the power of gun and jail are the government officials.
Get rid of the abuse of power, and those companies that are parasitic have no means to carry our their bad motives — and, more importantly, neither do the government officials!! No more IRS, NSA, FDA, USDA abuse.
Demand that individual rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness be upheld, and be the sole reason for government.
Okay. This is a huge problem. What do we do about it? Sounds like a need for coordinated action, but whom do we target to undo this outrageous power-grab by the authorities?