Enjoy getting your grassfed steak at your local butcher? Take action!

I hate to write too much about food policy, but the truth is that if you are eating paleo, the government is a major threat to the freedom to fill your plate with grassfed local meat. While the government buys loads of the crappiest factory farmed meat and grains devoid of nutrition and feeds them to the nation's unwitting children in public schools, it sees no problem in regulations that disproportionately affect farmers that get no government help whatsoever. The local food movement is small and many farmers already struggle getting their meat to market. What is the government doing to help? Oh, it's making more regulations that are easy for Conagra to comply with, but would probably put your local butcher out of business. Great.

The sad thing is that local small scale meat producers have never been involved in a major impact and if they were the government wouldn't need to spend a year figuring out where the poisoning came from. Direct purchasing is 100% tracable.

What can you do? 

The major threats these days are a HACCP proposal, which is a food safety protocol obviously built for Kraft and not for your local farmer, and the Food Safety Modernization Act, a dystopia of paperwork and burdensome rules.

How has local food, particularly meat, impacted your life? What regulatory challenges have you witnessed your local farmers, butchers, and processors dealing with? Why should the government treat small producers differently? 

Read about the HACCP plan at Fair Food Fight and write a comment to: DraftValidationGuideComments@fsis.usda.gov

My comment: 

I urge the USDA to consider the impact this HACCP system would have on the growing movement of small butchers, meat farmers, and farmer's markets. Many people now look to this small, but burgeoning, market to purchase specialty meat products valued for their contribution to the local economy, taste, and health properties connected to grass finishing. When I wrote my honors thesis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on the impact of HACCP on small local food businesses, I couldn't find any studies that analyzed the impact. Despite their small size, they are part of the business landscape and deserve to be informed on the details of this proposal so they may participate in commenting. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that regulations such as this disproportionately impact such businesses. This impact deserves to be further studied as we weigh the costs and benefits of further HACCP implementation. Not doing a full economic impact analysis would be unconscionable.

I would also like to see recognition of the obvious fact that small local food businesses are fundamentally different in their risks and challenges compared to large agribusiness, the source of most large outbreaks this proposal was created to respond to. Such a recognition would allow for specific regulations that are appropriate for small business, further study on less capital intensive HACCP programs, and exemptions that take into account the unique consumer-producer relationship inherent in direct purchasing. Small local food businesses, regardless of their risks, are more traceable and therefore more accountable to the consumer. There is no year long manhunt for the cause of outbreaks when it comes to direct purchasing.

Read up on the Food Safety "Modernization" Act and call your senators. Farm and Ranch Freedom has some great information on how to take action.

We don't want empty farmers markets and boarded up butchers- we want the right to direct purchase food that makes us and the local economy healthy.