Go First Lady!!
Michelle Obama is going to dig up the White House lawn and plant a vegetable garden. Now that’s my kinda presidential initiative. 
I knew I liked her for a good reason.
Michelle Obama is going to dig up the White House lawn and plant a vegetable garden. Now that’s my kinda presidential initiative.
I knew I liked her for a good reason.
March 31st, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Don’t mean to get all political on a lighthearted gardening entry, Zan, but I saw this on a friend’s blog, checked it out, and immediately thought of you:
A bill creating the Food Safety Administration.
The cliff notes version is this:
The (formerly) ubiquitous summer roadside vegetable stand appears to be both Category 3 and 5 “food establishments” since they sells “fresh produce in ready-to-eat raw form” and “stores, holds, or transports food products prior to delivery for retail sale”.
The explicit exclusions in Section 3 (13)(B) do not exclude roadside vegetable stands.
Section 3 (14) explicitly declares “any farm” (no matter what the size) to be a “FOOD PRODUCTION FACILITY”.
SEC. 406. PRESUMPTION. 1 In any action to enforce the requirements of the food safety law, the connection with interstate commerce required for jurisdiction shall be presumed to exist
Section 406 is a real doozy which places the burden of proof on the small farmer or roadside stand operator to demonstrate that none of their goods were participants in interstate commerce (the basis for this whole thing appears to be the Commerce Clause) IE: If some government jerk says the tomatoes your selling in a roadside stand came from out of state and violate interstate commerce law, they did: unless somehow you have PROOF they didn’t. How in the hell can you prove where an eggplant was GROWN??
Long story short, AS IT’S WRITTEN this bill could require you to have your backyard garden inspected by a government agency and farmer’s markets are effectively going to cease to exist. As will a ton of family farms.
I know you and I are pretty much on opposite sites of the political spectrum, but I’ve always enjoyed your blog. In all honesty, I doubt having big brother eyeballing your zucchini is what they intend with this bill, but in my experience I’ve found that any loophole in a government agency that allows some petty bureaucrat an excuse to wield power is going to be used somewhere down the line. Please don’t dismiss this as right-wing BS just because I’m not real happy with the current administration, read the fine print on this bill and if I’m wrong I’ll actually be pretty happy to be wrong
Anyone who believes in small batch food production, private or commercial, needs to be making a pretty big stink about getting that bill killed, or at least heavily modified.
April 1st, 2009 at 6:47 pm
It’s actually the perfect post for this comment, I’d say.
Yeah, I’ve caught wind of this bill and it stinks! Thanks for bringing it to my attention again.