If there’s one thing everyone loves doing, it’s eating. A meal is a social experience, a chance to come together and exchange stories after a day of living separate lives. And the food we put on the table is just as important as the people who congregate around it; American food culture, once a beacon of Wonder Bread and trans-fat, is increasingly becoming more balanced, organic and safe. We’re cutting out GMOs and regulating our factory farms much more than we ever have in the past. In 2011, for example, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act completely overhauled American food safety regulations, subjecting large factory farms to extremely tough growing and harvesting standards. While it’s a good thing to be cautious about what we eat, we need to draw a thick, black line between safety and paranoia.
Food safety regulations target midwest factory farms that have very little oversight over what they produce. The standards range from regularly testing water to training employees how to compost manure a certain way — all very reasonable for a huge, multimillion dollar farm. However, a small farmer, who has significant oversight over her crops and livestock, doesn’t need to do those things. She applies her manure fresh, letting it compost in the soil rather than on the side. She integrates her livestock with her farming system, raising crops and animals together rather than apart. She makes her cheese in wooden barrels, embracing the good bacteria produced by the wood rather than conceding to more harmful, FDA-approved stainless steel barrel. For centuries, we’ve been making good food with old-world, traditional processes, and these processes work when you’ve got a great team of farmers and food artisans devoted to the craft.
You can’t replicate the practices of small farming and food processing on a large scale because it just doesn’t work and, quite frankly, it’s not safe. Factory farm employees aren’t agriculturalists or cheese artisans — they’re cheap, assembly line laborers, often underpaid, impoverished and undocumented. They’ve been hired to do one thing by the factory farm management, and that is to work an unskilled job. Farming and food processing, before the Industrial Revolution, was a skilled job. Take it from someone whose entire family grew up on a small farm in Poland; you have to know what you’re doing.
The logic of modern food safety goes like this: if it can’t be done safely in a factory farm, it shouldn’t be done at all. The debate and all its rhetoric is defined under the guise of “safety,” but that’s not what it should be about. Of course safety is important. We need to trust that what we’re putting in our bodies is safe. But we’ve trusted small farming for the bulk of our history and we’re still kicking. It wasn’t until large-scale factory farming — and Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” — that food safety and contamination became a point of national concern.
Another important thing to understand is the high cost of abiding by these food safety standards. Multimillion dollar farms can do it; it’s no skin off their backs. But small farmers? It’s much harder for them to abide by new regulations because their profit margin is significantly less than that of a factory farm. They have to install new water testing systems. Buy FDA-approved fertilizer. Keep their animals and produce separate when it’s more profitable for them to raise them together. They will lose money; they are paying for the incompetence of their larger counterparts. Without small farms, large factory conglomerates will monopolize the food market and, trust me, you don’t want that.
We are what we eat. To limit our dining experience to what can be done safely in a factory farm is why American food culture is significantly less innovative than its foreign counterparts. The small farmer and food processing artisan keep us tied to a past we’ve unfairly deemed barbaric and antiquated. It is our last attempt at a food culture that has not yet been plagued with hysteria and sterility. To regulate them as strictly as we regulate our factory farms is unfair and, literally, distasteful.
