By David Gumpert
The Complete Patient
I keep asking myself, how did we ever get to this point, where political and economic control of America’s food system is on the verge of being turned over to a government agency whose leaders declared early this year we have “no absolute right” to “any particular food” or to “bodily and physical health.”
I keep thinking about the old Soviet Union’s control of food system, where, in the interests of the revolution (food safety), farms were turned into collectives (facilities), which produced grand five-year plans (HACCP plans), reinforced by centralized standards (Good Agricultural Practices), and there were special exemptions for private peasant plots (Tester-Hagan exemptions). It all led to chronic shortages, terrible quality, and eventual collapse.
I keep wondering how smart informed people from all segments of the food rights and sustainable food arena got themselves engaged into supporting a hopelessly complex set of rules to maybe, possibly, depending-on-how-you-interpret-them allow certain small farms exemptions from this governmental takeover of the food system.
And I marvel that a bunch of other smart people are willing to trust the FDA, and hope that it will suddenly transform itself from a bunch of hardasses who take pleasure in driving small food producers out of business into a sensitive agency dedicated to sustainable food production; you can see the skewering I took for contradicting that logic in a new posting about the food safety debate at Grist.org (although most of the comments are skeptical of the FDA apologists).
Read the full post at The Complete Patient
Food Freedom 
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Where it comes to the “food safety” types, my term for them is myopics.
Those are activists of some sort who focus so intensely on the forms, propaganda, and process of their own cause that they become incapable of seeing the big picture. Perhaps the most extreme example we’ve seen recently was free speech activists like the ACLU who supported Citizens United, which is of course a severe blow to the essence of free speech (since it’ll further empower corporations to shout down citizens), but was punctilious with regard to a crackpot fetish of the “process” of it.
So it is with food safety (which, incidentally, these advocates seem to be rather ignorant about).
As for support from the likes of the NSAC or NOFA, whose interests are directly counter to the bills, that’s a mystery to me (unless people were flat out bought off; it happened with “progressive” support for the health racket bailout). I posted comments on a few threads asking people like that: “How could you possibly think this bill is in our interest? Why would you think any such bill is desirable at all?” Crickets.