Flip of the Coyne

Published Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Vol. 61 Issue 6 Page A4

Inspect yourself. The Federal government has proposed that poultry processing plant employees would be responsible for policing themselves under the proposed “poultry rejection program.” The program would make processing plants responsible for monitoring the birds as they pass down the line, and according to veterinarians who monitor food safety, the plants would no longer have to publicize the reasons that the birds were rejected.

This is mind-boggling to me. We have an avian flu outbreak in the Fraser Valley, an ever growing peanut recall, and recalls on some products for listeria and our government has turned over the safety of our food system to someone who may have just started working in a processing plant making less than 12 dollars an hour. I just cannot wrap my head around it.

I have been talking about food security and the need for local, sustainable and safe food systems. I have begun to pay more attention to what is happening with our food systems and it is not good. All you need to do is turn on the evening news and you will hear of more health risks due to our factory farm system. Take the peanut recall; it now seems that the peanuts that contaminated the products being recalled were actually turned away at the Canadian border for being dirty and then taken to a plant in the US where they were processed and sent around North America. A handful of dirty peanuts have contaminated millions of dollars worth of products.

Food is a commodity because we trade it, but food is not like other commodities; we cannot live without food. We have allowed our governments to dismantle our agriculture in return for agribusiness. Agribusiness has centralized the means of production and has over processed our food stuffs to the point that when we have a small outbreak or contamination we end up with a large percentage of our system being compromised. Be it lack inspection or new unproven science or genetically modified seeds our food system is under attack twenty four hours a day seven days a week. Small family farms are swallowed up by larger ones that need to produce more to stay competitive and keep costs down so food processors can bring us the newest, cheapest and fastest way to make dinner.

Take a look at the products on the shelves at your local grocery store. How much of it is raw natural food? A bit of produce, some meat, and a bit of dairy and in some places there is natural flour. You can now buy a roast that you take out of your ice cream tub looking container put it in your slow cooker, add water and you’re done. It might have taken a couple extra minutes to add a couple spices and a potato, but a roast is a roast. The difference is the frozen one you buy has preservatives and has been prepared and frozen for you before packaging. I would wager the one you bought from the local rancher and some fresh vegetables would taste better and would only add five minutes to your cooking time. If we have fewer controls in these massive processing plants the chances of things going wrong shoot up drastically. So at a time when our food system is under siege our government has decided to take a page from Wall Street and let the processors police themselves.