re: #142 wahabicorridor

Next thing you know, they’ll be trying to regulate sunlight.

Yeah. I’ve done a little reading on this bill since the first post, and all I can say is that it’s a shame Waxman and his ilk got ahold of it, because there were a couple of things in there that I’ve wanted to see passed for a long time, but they got buried under a steaming pile of bureaucracy during the legislative process. Morons.

One amendment that got pulled at the last minute was strict regulation of antibiotics to livestock. Right now, there’s no regulation, and feedlots administer sub-clinical doses of antibiotics to all of their animals to stave off diseases caused by the close quarters and bizarre diet the animals are fed. With tens of millions of animals packed close together, all dosed with amounts of antibiotics that are strong enough to put off major infection until slaughter but not strong enough to actually kill the bugs involved, you’ve created a perfect breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant bugs of all sorts - a bad situation that is just waiting to go badly wrong. They don’t do this anywhere else on the planet, and animals manage to survive just fine.

Other measures - like more extensive labeling - aren’t a bad thing by themselves. If government is going to have a role, the role of providing information transparently is certainly a worthy one. I like to know what’s in my food; unlike a lot of hysterical worrywarts, most of what’s in it doesn’t concern me, but I like knowing about it. Labeling CO as an additive goes overboard, and throws it into the “Oooohh! Scary additives!” category, but simply noting somewhere that CO has been used to enhance color can be worthwhile; for one thing, I pay more attention to how my local butcher stores meat when they used CO-packaged meat, because it’s harder to tell from appearances if it’s been maintained at low enough temperatures.

But intrusive inspections, mandatory $500 fees and other charges, and a host of other bullshit turned it into another 20-pound bill crafted to ensure government overreach and control, without anything in the way of passing information along to the consumer or protecting the populace in any meaningful way from the worst effects of some notably bad practices. A couple of small tweaks to existing regulations were all that were needed, not a mountain of new regulations.

While we’re on the topic, missing altogether was any provision to fund more Federal meat inspectors. Their numbers have dwindled rapidly in recent years, as meat production has soared, to the point where only huge megacorps can get their beef processed; small farmers are excluded from the gigantic inspection facilities, and there aren’t enough inspectors available to staff smaller operations. This is squeezing smaller, family-run operations right out of business, and doing so at a time when demand for hand-raised meat and poultry is at an all-time high. This problem really needs to be fixed. Or Federal regulations forbidding the sale of butchered meat from facilities that aren’t Federally inspected need to be revisited. It’s been a hundred years since The Jungle, and thing have changed.