Victor Rawls
Food Freedom
The two SWAT team raids ordered by the FDA on Rawesome, an organic food coop in LA, represent “food safety” come home to roost, in all its vulture reality. First time, they used armed FBI; the second time, having faced such still resistance from non-resisting people, they multiplied their attack using armed LA police, Ventura County Sheriffs, the California Department of Ag and several other agencies.
People across the country are stunned and enraged, but most are not aware of the one small thing which has allowed this to occur. To understand how key that little detail is, one must go back to how “food safety” got its power and how it works its magic.
“Food safety” was promoted by Bill Clinton during the 1990s in classic Monsanto language – it would be “science-based”! Modern science could move beyond stopping contamination after the fact by being “preventive,” seeking out potential sources of contamination and eliminating them in advance. Clinton urged implementing HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) ostensibly to deal with increasing contamination by the big meat packers. But when one remembers Clinton was put in office by Tyson, one of the top meat packers, with some help from Monsanto and Walmart, something starts to smell.
It was sleight of hand. “Watch the paperwork, folks, keep your eye on the paperwork! Are you watching?” HACCP relies on a morass of rules, regulations and paperwork around pipes, temperatures, flooring, water sources, bathrooms, counter materials that is so huge and imposing and so “science-based” one has trouble noticing the one thing not included – the food itself.
HACCP eliminated inspection of the meat and substituted paperwork. The paperwork was so onerous for small operators and the system so shot full of traps (despite their producing clean food), that it shut down small slaughter houses across the country, an essential piece of any localized food system.
HACCP is applied intensely to small plants, notes John Munsell of the Foundation for Accountability in Regulatory Enforcement (FARE):
“USDA blithely walks away from obvious contamination problems at the huge slaughter plants, and we must remember that the biggest four packers slaughter 88% of our feedlot steers and heifers. USDA statistics show that 93% of federally inspected plants are small, yet they produce only 10% of our meat. This means that although the big plants represent only 7% of all Federal plants, they produce 90% of our meat. This agency policy now insulates 90% of our meat from adequate inspection, while the agency intensely monitors 10% of our meat production at the small plants, which are easier enforcement prey for USDA.”
HACCP really stands for “Have A Corporate Consolidation Party” and thanks to Bill Clinton, that is just what the big meat packers did. Contamination and deaths went up; the number of slaughter houses went down.
RELATED ACTIVIST POST ARTICLE
8 Reasons Raw Foodies are Dangerous Extremists (Satire)
linkwithin_text=’Related Articles:’
Be the first to comment on "A National Response to Two FDA Armed Raids on Rawesome"