Traceability Trumps Regulation

Today when we have a health scare or quality issue, it is always a big firm like like a while back with ten million pound recall of Farm Rich and Market Day frozen chicken quesadillas, etc.  (Farm Rich.  Market Day. Frozen. Don’t you love branding?)    It is hard to figure out what is making people who eat such food sick when people who eat such food eat so many other suspect foods.  Widely distributed foods means that it takes time for the responsible parties to link someone sick in Columbus from eating Market Day e Coli Rich foods with someone in Chicago eating Market Day e Coli Rich foods. 

And yet, the FDA which NEVER catches these in advance, spends its time on small producers, making pre-emptive strikes on small farmers whose cheese never made anyone sick.  Nonetheless, mainstream media goes even farther than the FDA in spreading false reports on small farms (read the comments.)  If two people got sick over a small chesemakers product, the narrow distribution and uniqueness of the product would jump out at investigators.  Small farm products are so much easier to trace.  And easier to destroy, which makes for feathers in the caps of regulators who are bought by the huge companies among the regulated who can afford to pay.

Traceability trumps trademark, but it also trumps regulation.  With the consumers immediately able to feedback first to the business in question and then to together fans of a given producer, we simple no longer need an FDA.  The future is here.  Let's cut the budget back by the FDA expenditure, and release those people into this brave new economy, and see how they like it.


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