Food Safety

Several years ago there was a fatal beef-related e-coli outbreak in the United States. No problem, some thought, we'll just stick to vegetables. No such luck, however--as the spinach-related e-coli outbreak of September 2006 has made clear. These kinds of problems are generally associated with the improper, breakneck-speed methods of food production, processing, and distribution that exist today, explicitly designed to maximize profit, at the expense of safety. Add to that the tiny number of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) food inspectors, and the stage remains continually set for every manner of food-related illness.

Indeed, as of 2007 the FDA inspection force is adequate to inspect less than 1% of the food coming to America from other countries. Thus did we see, for example, the China pet food/melamine scare of April 2007.

Well then, Why don't we just pass laws that more strictly regulate the food industry?

Because industries of every kind hate regulation--and they make substantial financial contributions to political candidates that de-emphasize regulation. In our modern capitalist society it is corporations that possess the bulk of the ruling power, and they use it to advance their profit interests. It is very difficult for ordinary folks, even when acting together, to counter the corporate grip.

Moreover, when regulation does pass it often costs corporations money (which is a large part of why they hate it), raising their total costs. The normal way capitalism works is that corporations typically offset those increased costs either by laying off or firing workers, by raising their prices, or both. Either way, we lose: if the former, we lose as workers; if the latter, we lose as consumers.

And there's more:  new regulation, even when occasionally passed, is often less significant than we might think, because after passage industry is continually using its powerful influence to have the new laws reversed or diluted. And oftentimes they succeed; when a new presidential administration enters office, for example, it often eviscerates or even repeals the laws passed under its predecessor administration.

In other words, even the improvements to our health, safety, and welfare me manage to have enacted--often with great difficulty and only after many years of suffering with a problems--frequently prove fleeting.

In the United States, perhaps the answer to the problem of too-few FDA inspectors is to elect a Democratic politician to office (as opposed to a Republican), who would be more inclined to increase the number of inspectors. In fact, this is a problematic answer, or no answer at all, because hiring more inspectors will cost the taxpayers more money, and as we know, taxpayers--us--often resist paying more money in taxes, making it more difficult for government to expand its services, even though we need that expansion.

(Why do we resist increases in taxes? Because we're all so economically-squeezed already. Why are we economically-squeezed already? Because capitalism is continually squeezing us with high prices yet low wages, itself occurring in the context of a massive advertising machine that continually goads us into desiring and purchasing an ever-increasing number of goods and services.

Thus, we are all kept in a state of continual wanting, producing continual buying--frequently beyond our means and thus requiring credit, producing continual and unending debt, producing an ever-greater dependence on our job and our "boss" (or bosses), producing a greater tightening of our chains of slavery. As these chains become tighter we lose more of our humanity, and experience the pernicious side-effects characteristic of this dehumanized condition, such as stress, anger, addiction, violence, and mental illness.

The Better Way

Under a Cooperative system, freed from profit constraints, all-food related production will be fully governed by the principles of health and safety, for those producing and those consuming. Moreover, because inspection systems will not require tax-dollars to exist, there will be no social or economic forces militating against developing them to their full required capacity, completely sufficient to the job. Food-borne illness and the death and suffering it causes will eventually become an unhappy--and increasingly distant--memory.

Please also see Alzheimer's Disease & Dementia, links at left, for further food safety-related information.