So much stupidity in one place…

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Because the federal government has helped so much with everything else they’ve gotten involved in (like banking, home ownership, the economy in general), they’re going to get more involved in farming. Particularly, farming by smaller outfits (the few farms that aren’t giant conglomerates). Because — the children.

Now, farmers are discovering that the FDA’s proposed rules would curtail many techniques that are common among organic growers, including spreading house-made fertilizers, tilling cropland with grazing animals, and irrigating from open creeks.

What happened to liberal big government types loving to do things the natural way? How did all of humanity survive when that was how all farming was done?

Food safety advocates have urged regulators to hang tough. “We don’t believe large facilities are the only place where outbreaks are happening,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington.

“We don’t believe…” Because, see. We think. We feel this way. Not, “We have evidence that…” or “Data shows that.” No, she believes these smaller farms are just as likely to poison you. That means we all need the government.

Also, the Center for Science in the Public Interest? That sounds like a small, grass roots organization representing the people. Let’s check out their website. Hm, they’re a non-profit.

They also really don’t like Coke. That’s cool; I’m more of a Dr. Pepper man myself. But why are they going after Coke so hard? Coke’s not bad for you — in moderation. It’s just a drink, one that people in the 1950s and 1960s drank and the obesity problem wasn’t so bad. Maybe it’s not the magic poison drink — maybe it’s the general amount of consumption. Hm?

Farm-to-fork growers, she said, need to accept that emerging strains of E. coli and other bacteria can just as easily seep into the produce sold at a farmers market as into the batches of salad bagged at giant processing plants, and they need to tweak their methods to protect against it.

Wash your goddamn produce. Also, the produce sold at a farmer’s market is less likely to have been picked by an illegal alien who was picking his butt between kale plants. It’s farmed by someone who will go under if they make people sick. If BigAggroFoods Co. makes people sick, their CEO gets a 20 karat gold toilet upgrade instead of a 24 karat. All of those huge conglomerates are diversified — the guy selling kale at the farmer’s market to make ends meet is pretty much just a farmer. I’m not trying to say the small farmers are magic super nice wizards of food and the Mega Corps are giant evil children murdering Nazi farmers.

I’m just saying the one has a whole lot more to lose, personally. It’s like Nintendo and Sony — Sony is a huge, varied company. They don’t rely on Playstation sales to stay afloat. But Nintendo is pretty well married to selling their video game systems of all stripes, because that’s all they do. This is probably a bad example because Sony is on my company shit list, but the same argument could be made of Microsoft. A varied company can survive a hit to part of its body a lot more than a company that isn’t so varied.

And even so — say Dole Spinach poisons some kids because a crazy guy in a plant pours liquid Super Anthrax and Herpes into a vat. Dole isn’t going out of business, or even the spinach business. They’ll make an offer to the families, fire the guy, and keep moving.

“At the end of the day, consumers will be paying a little bit more for this. But a few cents here may help avoid a severe illness,” Smith DeWaal says.

Such a liberal. Pay more for food (because CHILDREN), pay more for gas (because ENVIRONMENT), pay more for healthcare (because that’s RACISS). You can pay more, because we think you should live a certain way.

Fuck you, lady.

It’s not even about paying more or less. It’s about food that is less processed, or less treated with chemicals (which do God knows what, right?). How the fuck am I arguing this? (Personally, I buy my greens at the supermarket and most of them have the Dole logo on them.) I just — if someone wants to make very natural food, then they should be allowed to. They should be allowed to sell it. Same for raw milk. Personally, I won’t drink raw milk and I think most “organic” stuff is a marketing ploy to charge more for food. But the few times I’ve been to a farmer’s market I’ve gotten some pretty tasty, locally grown stuff.

(I do find that free range, vegetarian fed hens produce eggs that taste better. Same for grass fed cattle and butter — mm, it’s good, especially for cooking a steak!)

At a recent congressional hearing, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) seized on one draft set of rules in which the FDA declared kale is “never consumed raw.”

The person at the FDA who said that should be fired. Good for Blackburn; I’ve only ever consumed raw kale. In juice, when I went through that phase, and in salads. Kale is a pretty good green when raw — I’m not sure why you’d need to cook it.

But hey, if you buy it, whatever, right? Just was the motherfucker. Use some BioKleen or something even.

Vegetables tend to grow in the dirt. Dirt is the root for “dirty.” Wash your fucking vegetables. Problem solved. I didn’t wash mine good enough once when I made juice from raw kale, raw celery, raw… etc. It was basically the V8 recipe here. Something was, ah, not clean. And I paid for that.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Smith DeWaal said. “Why not create a cooperative whose sole job it is to truck this stuff to a composting facility and truck it back? It’s an expense, but way better than the unexpected expense of a major recall and implications to your farm if an outbreak is traced to your product. There are costs either way.”

See, here, she makes my earlier point — there’s a cost if you make people sick through something you are liable for (even if the liability is public opinion only). But she makes my other point, too, and is incredibly ignorant of the state of smaller farms that are, to quote a farmer from the article, “hanging by a thread.”

She’s like a crazy liberal white girl in college. “Why don’t we just do THIS?” When she has NO IDEA how the real world works. Just, sheer ignorance.

Why don’t you people offer to make the cooperative since it’s so important? Instead of spending money paying people like this, round up some white guilt college liberals and let them put on their transcripts how they helped some farmers move chicken shit around.

Or you could just fuck right off and stop stepping up to say how other people should have to spend money or their time.