In response, people are setting up their own alternatives to the physically, environmentally and socially unhealthful industrial food system by developing an array of farm-to-consumer networks. The rapid increase in farmers' markets, community-supported agriculture schemes, community gardens and home gardens reflect this growing understanding. People across the country are taking steps to shorten food miles and the food supply chain itself.
Their story is told in a video produced by Ruell Chappell, the founder of Springfield, Missouri's Well-Fed Neighbor Alliance, that underscores why it is so important that communities, once self-sufficient, organize local sourcing for their food.[14] In essence, the Well-Fed Neighbor Alliance, like countless other groups around the country, is striving to re-create what CED's "Adaptive" Program for Agriculture destroyed.
Of course, the localization movement, though still in its early stages of development, hasn't gone unnoticed by agribusiness, which recognizes that the movement directly competes with the highly consolidated retail chains for the consumer dollar.
The Return of Monsanto's Public Policy Strategist to Government Service
While Michelle Obama's organic White House garden is a testimony to the importance she places on safe fruits and vegetables in her family's diet, her husband is ignoring the fact that our food supply is overflowing with FDA-approved unsafe, toxic chemicals pumped into it as pesticides, sweetners, colorings, preservatives and flavor enhancers. Rather than address these more far-reaching food safety issues that affect everyone's long-term health, the Obama administration has made a far less pervasive problem its central food safety cause. And -- remarkably -- it named Michael Taylor Senior Advisor to the Commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration to oversee the implementation of new food safety measures.
Many people have expressed shock at this development, as Taylor, it can be argued, has done more than almost anyone in recent memory to undermine the safety of the food supply. He was instrumental in implementing biotech-pleasing policies that forced unlabeled genetically engineered food on an unwilling public. At the time Taylor bid the wishes of vested interests to get this product commercialized pronto, the government's own scientists warned of the dangers GMOs could pose.
But Taylor ignored the public interest scientists' objections, as well as the precautionary principle, insisting that his former client's product was safe by virtue of a pseudo-scientific conceit of "substantial equivalence." Almost two decades later, there's now a tall pile of studies showing GMOs harm to public health, though these studies are routinely ignored by the corporate-owned media.[15] The silence on the subject is such that many people still don't know they routinely eat processed foods containing GMO ingredients and animals fattened on GMO fed.
In an earlier article I described how vested interests are behind the bumper crop of food safety bills we saw in Congress in the first part of 2009. I asserted that their unstated purpose is to harmonize US food safety laws with Codex Alimentarius, and identified Michael Taylor as their chief policy architect.[16]
Taylor worked for a good part of the last decade in an assortment of establishment think tanks to develop a consensus among the food safety crowd for a set of policy changes that now underpin the 2009 food safety bills. HR 2749, the version the House rammed through, likewise contains the requirement that all food "facilities" employ a "science-based" Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) system to prevent human pathogen contamination at all stages from farm to table.
Will the Real HACCP Please Stand Up
Author and professor Marion Nestle is surprisingly enthusiastic about the return of Michael Taylor to government service. Given his troubling history, she admits her endorsement of him may sound like she's been drinking Kool-Aid, but she nevertheless advises us to give him a chance. Specifically, Nestle credits Taylor with requiring that meat and poultry processors use "science-based" HACCP plans. She also thinks it's a fine idea to apply HACCP to all foods.[17]
But not everyone shares Nestle's enthusiasm about Taylor or about applying HACCP to all foods.
In fact, one of the world's foremost experts on food safety, Dr. William H. Sperber, the microbiologist responsible for making the HACCP system a reality at Pillsbury in the early 70s, doesn't think it's so hot an idea. It was Sperber's approach to food safety that the space program adopted so that its astronauts wouldn't get sick from an onboard meal.
Prior to the development of HACCP, food manufacturers used quality control protocols relying on end-product testing. But these methods were proving inadequate to the task: testing small amounts of product simply cannot provide a high level of assurance that the entire product batch is free from contamination. To obtain a high assurance level that a large batch of product was safe, an enormous amount of end-product would have to be tested, a costly, wasteful and not necessarily useful tactic, as low level of contamination can escape detection. A better way was needed.
A real HACCP system does away with testing and instead builds food safety into the production process itself. In other words, food safety is assured by employing certain production methods that serve to kill certain identified pathogens that may be present during the production of the food.
Sperber, currently serving as Cargill's Global Ambassador for Food Protection, writes in "HACCP and Transparency," published in Food Control, that the policies implemented by Taylor, who he does not identify by name, are more legislation-based than science-based. The policies, according to Sperber, do not resemble a real HACCP approach and have been counterproductive to achieving food safety goals.[18]
