Photos of recipes from the new book Tender Grassfed Barbecue
Photos of recipes from the cookbook Tender Grassfed Meat
Save Our Food Freedom and Right to Privacy! Stop S510
By Stanley Fishman, Author of Tender Grassfed Meat
photo credit: Chuck “Caveman†Coker
I never wanted to blog about politics. I wanted to blog about the cooking and benefits of grassfed meat and real food. I wanted to share the joy of these wonderful foods, the kind of food that saved my life and restored my health. The kind of food that not only tastes delicious, but gives our bodies the fuel we need to enjoy robust good health.
But there is little point to writing about real food if nobody will be able to get it.
Our very ability to raise, buy, and eat real food is seriously threatened.
Senate Bill S510 comes up for a cloture vote this week, quite possibly Wednesday, November 17th. This vote could result in the quick passage of the bill. If that happens, real food as we know it may be gone from our tables—forever.
One of the most basic human rights is the right to privacy. This gives us the right to decide what to do with our own bodies. No decision we can possibly make about our own bodies is more important than what we choose to eat.
If we cannot grow, import, or buy the foods we choose to eat, then we lose all freedom to choose what food to put in our bodies.
S510 gives the FDA the absolute power to control what we eat.
If S510 passes, we will lose our freedom to choose what we eat, one of our most basic human rights.
S510 Will Not Improve Food Safety, but Will Destroy the Small Farmer
There is a food safety crisis in the United States. Many people have died from tainted food. Many millions of people have become ill. We do need effective food safety laws. Just as important, we need those laws to be enforced. The laws that already exist would make our food much safer—if they were enforced. But they are not. Now we have new “food safety†laws proposed like S510.
But a law does not improve food safety just because they say it will. When you actually read the law, all two-hundred-plus pages of it, you realize that it has nothing to do with making food safer, and everything to do with giving total control over the food we eat to the FDA. The very same FDA that is controlled by Big Agriculture and Big Pharma. Rather than inspections, S510 relies on huge amounts of paperwork. Paperwork never made anything safer.
But the paperwork burden can easily be made impossible for small farmers and sustainable farmers, as the FDA has total control over what paperwork to require. The large companies can hire specialists to do the paperwork, but the small farmers cannot afford to do so. If you look at what the bill actually does, it provides a way for Big Ag to use its influence with the FDA to crush small, sustainable farms under a mountain of regulations and paperwork requirements.
This has already happened in the meat processing industry, where the imposition of crushing paperwork burdens caused most small processing plants to go out of business, leaving a handful of companies with more than 90 percent of the market. If only a few large industrial agricultural organizations are left, we will only be able to choose industrial food, and will have lost our freedom.
S510 Gives the FDA Complete Control over the Growing of Food
It is very puzzling that S510 chooses the FDA to have complete control over how crops are grown, stored, and processed. The FDA knows nothing about growing crops. The Department of Agriculture has a lot of farming experience. Why choose the FDA?
The FDA is a strong supporter of chemical-heavy industrial agriculture; genetically modified crops; irradiating food as the preferred method of making it “safeâ€; the heavy use of pesticides; and banning all food that has any life in it, such as raw milk. S510 would give the FDA the power to impose these methods on all farmers, bringing an end to real food.
If the only food allowed is industrial food, we will have lost the basic human freedom to choose our food.
S510 Will Include Heavy Prison Terms and Fines that Can Be Used to Crush All Resistance
It is expected that S510 will have S3767 included as an amendment. S3767 includes prison terms of up to ten years for violating various food safety laws. These laws could be used by the government to imprison people just for selling raw milk, as explained here on Hartke Is Online.
If raising real food is punished with years in prison, nobody will dare to raise real food, and we will have lost our basic human right to choose our food.
What We Can Do to Save Our Freedom
We can call and write and email our senators, demanding that they do not pass this freedom killing bill, or, as a minimum, vote for the Tester Amendment that will protect small farmers from the worst part of the bill.
The time to act is now. We all have an opportunity to fight for the freedom to choose our own food. If we stay silent, we will lose that freedom.
Related Posts
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Stop Senate Bill 510—Save Organic Food
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday Blog Carnival.
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Save Farm Freedom Friday! - Kelly the Kitchen Kop posted on May 12, 2015:
[…] 3. Stanley Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat, has written on his blog about the latest SCARY legislation that is working it’s way through the senate right now. Find out what YOU can do: Save Our Food Freedom and Right to Privacy! Stop S510! […]