Food Safety Modernization Act – An Assault on Sustainable Agriculture?.
The sustainable agriculture movement, and its complementary local food movement have become, over the past several years, one of the fastest growing and most concrete demonstrations of a cultural challenge to American values of consumerism, corporate power, and the belief that complex technology is always better than simple.
Concerned over a possible threat to their dominance, and to the broader challenge to consumerism that this movement represented, the corporate (pseudo) food industry has responded with every strategy in its book, including greenwashing, coopting the local image, and legal and regulatory assault on the movement rising in opposition.
The Food Safety Modernization Act, overhauled supervision of food safety under the FDA for the first time in 70 years, and arose in part out of public concern over the repeated examples of widespread food borne illnesses. These illnesses, which included a number of deaths, were usually the result of contamination of vegetables or meat with fecal bacteria in factory operations, and were hard to trace and control because of the national distribution of produce and hamburger. These outbreaks helped the food movement, since it made eminent sense to many people to know where their food came from, to insure its quality.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
