Food Wants to be Free (like the network)

Today's NYT editorial touting the consolidation of food safety from 15 federal agencies to 1 is short sighted. It is precisely the sort of bureaucratic (and administrative, and technological) short term fix that addresses the symptom ("The single source of our food has been contaminated, so how do we stop the contaminated batch of spinach before it reaches everyone in the U.S.?") rather than targeting the real source and root cause of the problem (and the larger issue--"Why is there only one source of U.S. spinach, when spinach can be grown across the U.S.?"--i.e., the consolidation and specialization of industrial food production). A single federal agency with real POWER (in the language of the editorial, "the powers and authority it needs to control the American food supply"; emphasis mine), is a nightmare waiting to happen to small, diverse, local producers of farm food. Already, they are marginalized. Already, the only voices being heard in Washington are the voices that can pay to play. They are the large, consolidated agribusinesses. Their motive is profit and congress is all too willing to take their money and do their bidding. Tumbledown is not too happy with the way things are now, but consolidation of the bureaucracy into a single, powerful agency seems a singularly bad way to address these problems. It could lead to greater, not less, consolidation among food producers (only those large enough to comply--or to pay to write the regs--will survive). And it in no way addresses the fundamentals of the situation.

Where does the heavy hand of government regulation need to be felt today? Tumbledown thinks he knows: in the support of net neutrality. In other words, in insuring that the big boys stay out of the way of the little guy. Insuring that the little guy's voice continues to be heard and that the fees for the infrastructure are neutral, rather than advantageous to the big guy.

If food neutrality were the only aim of the one (1) proposed food safety bureaucracy, food might become both safe and free, and locally grown.

Naaah! It will never happen. But for a second, Tumbledown was living in a dream world!