The threat posed to the promising local food movement by major federal food safety reform legislation was the subject of an informal meeting recently held between S. 510’s chief sponsor, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, Montana’s Senator Jon Tester and YVCC-Northern Plains members and staff.
The typical local food consumer knows that buying from non-industrial nearby sources is her best strategy for obtaining safe, wholesome food for her family. She may be personally acquainted with her suppliers or else buys at a local farmers’ market, grocery, food club or restaurant where others have direct knowledge of their local vendors’ production and processing practices. She knows that state and local requirements provide adequate public oversight of local suppliers. She understands that a lot of extra federal regulation and red tape would probably put her small, local producers out of business. In short, she (or he) is part of a local, non-bureaucratic response to food safety and quality concerns more effective than a whole building full of FDA regulators.
Billings Good Earth Market’s general manager, Perry McNeese, explained to Durbin what a hardship new FDA regulation would put on his dozens of local food suppliers. Extensive licensing, assessment, accounting, reporting and recall requirements add up fast both in money and time spent, and none of his area producers deal in enough volume to afford such extra costs. Besides, he has been hired by the Good Earth Market’s 5,900 member-consumers to serve as the store’s local food quality and safety watchdog among his other duties. Extra FDA regulation would be an unnecessary burden on his current local suppliers and be likely to kill off all interest in new start-ups vital to a healthy local food movement.
On the other hand, the conventional industrial-and-fast-food consumer is clearly isolated and helpless by herself. YVCC-Northern Plains members and staff voiced support for stronger federal oversight of the gigantic centralized industrial food system with its long supply chains and serious product mixing and amalgamation risks. Consumer-driven local food systems are organized to avoid those very problems, and an exemption for the kind of micro-businesses that supply them only makes common sense.
Montana Senator Jon Tester arranged the meeting with Durbin and participated himself along with several staff members. Tester has firsthand experience with local food suppliers’ economics since his family operated an on-farm custom butcher business in Big Sandy for many years. Durbin has a long standing interest in food safety ever since working in an East St. Louis packing house in his college days and to keep faith with a constituent who lost a child to e coli- contaminated hamburger.
At the meeting’s conclusion, Tester and Durbin agreed to team up to make S. 510 friendly to the local food movement with Tester volunteering to take the lead in working out appropriate local food supplier exemption language. We encourage everyone interested to contact Tester’s and Durbin’s DC offices about how “one size does not fit all” in food safety. Please let us know about any feedback you receive...by emailing charter@midrivers.com
