Switcharoo
It was seven years ago in March 2012. ABC news set the beef world ablaze with reports of a widely used product sneaking its way into consumers’ hamburgers and hot dogs. After eleven segments aired, outrage in the meats aisle was palpable and accusations were making more trips around the Web than airplanes make to Vegas. Everyone knew the name: Pink Slime.
Of course, once the news spread and people started freaking out, nobody wanted to eat anything that contained Pink Slime, more formally known as Lean, Finely Textured Beef (LFTB), the not-so-mouthwatering nomenclature quickly assigned to the product by National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and their Beef Council counterparts. Lots of people wanted to ban LFTB, lots of people used the story as leverage to promote vegetarianism, lots of people talked and shouted and reacted and lobbied and apologized and then another news story erupted and we all completely forgot about pulverized beef (Think: when was the last time you heard the term ‘Pink Slime’? It’s been a while, huh?)
With nobody looking, the window of opportunity opened and some beef industry negotiating took place behind the scenes. I was breezing through an industry magazine when I caught the headline: ‘Lean Finely Textured Beef Reclassified as Ground Beef’.
Instead of changing the offending product, food regulators simply renamed it with a far less abrasive title. Today, if you’re prone to purchasing the bargain-basement burger when it goes on sale, you can rest assured that LFTB will be absent on the label. Not because it isn’t in the grind.
It’s no surprise such trickery takes place. Food comes from just a few very large suppliers; nobody eating industrial ground beef gets to meet the people handling their food. Deceit is easy, especially when the rules adjust to match the method.
The American regulation game is lopsided in favor of scale. Small butchers harvesting twenty animals a week are held to the same standards as packing plants harvesting 3,000 cattle per day, placing unnecessary burden on the small business. As family operated butcher shops drip sweat trying to stay afloat in a sea of excessive expense, paperwork, and oversight, industrial meats players carry a big enough stick to change the rules whenever they see fit.
Legislative torment practically ensures that an aspiring farmer / butcher cannot start small and grow to scale. Paradoxically, the smaller the food business, the harder it is to obtain.
Why such scrutiny for a modest business? The regulators are afraid the food won’t be safe. Insurance companies react to the regulator’s advice. And people react to their insurance company.
Frequently a call for more regulation on large food companies is rolled out as the solution to empower small farmers. I disagree, for encouraging federal regulation to mitigate federal regulation only sustains the lopsided legislative climate.
A far better solution is to bifurcate regulations for industrial and community processing facilities: allow the Feds oversight of major packing companies, and return regulation of family operated facilities to a community level. The best way to avoid industrial partisanship is to stop participating in the system that enables it.
Decreased regulation places more responsibility back on the individual patronizing the business: YOU have to determine whether the butcher is maintaining adequate cleanliness instead of assuming someone else did the checking while you watched Netflix. Everyone squirms in their seat at the thought of accepting the liability of personal judgment because we’ve been trained by hand-wringing bureaucrats to believe 1) That we are completely incapable of making an accurate decision about the quality of what we eat, and 2) Food itself is incredibly unsafe, so authority should be granted to only extremely large companies.
Of course, neither statement is true.
We can accurately determine food safety by simple observation: Is the guy grinding hamburger wearing a sleeveless shirt and shedding back hair into the mix? Don’t buy from him. Find another. We don’t need the government to tell us that. Close relationships with local purveyors tells us everything we need to know.
Furthermore, I’m not suggesting we allow small meat packing facilities to become unsanitary. Much more oversight occurs on a per animal basis in a family operated butcher shop than does in industrial facilities. Increased oversight per animal allows for decreased oversight on the cutting, grinding, and packing processes. In other words, on a local level we can forgo a significant portion of the precautions necessary for industrial production simply because a low volume of animals reduces risks and increases oversight.
Even with this insight, I’m betting most people are still more comfortable with industrial fare from huge food preparation companies than they are with raw ingredients from the neighbor’s garage. Un-bureaucrated food continues to carry a biohazard stigma.
In the face of industrial food orthodoxy, freedom of community food commerce seems crazy. We’re too accustomed to not having options, so nobody is looking for more. We accept what is as what always will be. I think we would all be shocked by the abundance and wholesomeness of sustenance that poured forth from our neighborhoods if the burden of red tape and permits and inspections and expense and bureaucracy was lifted, replaced instead by a network of community discernment. Nobody would allow wily name changes to disguise offensive products, would they?
Would you accept unregulated food?