P.e.a.c.h. Blog - Musings from the Farm

By Chrys Ostrander

On Tuesday, January 4, 2011, President Barack Obama signed into law the Food Safety Modernization Act. The signing of this law culminated over two years of congressional wrangling and Internet buzz as this country came to terms with a rising tide of food-borne illness outbreaks linked to tainted food. Most, but not all, such outbreaks are traced to failures of the large-scale, industrial food system that we Americans are quickly learning not to trust. Certainly the vast majority of the victims who became ill from outbreaks were victims of industrial-scale outbreaks, simply as a factor of the mass production involved. In response to this perceived barrage of outbreaks, consumer groups beseeched lawmakers to “do something!” So, even though many experts believed that simply enforcing existing food safety regulations more aggressively would go far in improving national food safety, the political reality was that lawmakers felt compelled to draw up new laws instead. The enforcement route is too wonky, too hard to understand and hidden from public view. Passing a new law makes it easier for politicians to be perceived by the public, through the media, to be responding to the crisis (doing something), even if that something is unnecessary and redundant. So, several congresspeople introduced various versions of what would ultimately become the law that was signed by the President. While the details of the eventual bill were being hotly debated, no one with much understanding of political pragmatism doubted that some new law would be passed. The only real question was: What was going to be in the bill?