Is Uninspected Food Safe?

If you've been to our website or farm store, you probably know we’ve chosen to circumvent governmental oversight rather than comply. If the state and county food oversight bureaucracies had their druthers, we would have a raw milk permit to sell raw milk, a licensed and inspected kitchen in which to make homemade canned goods, an inspected processing facility to process our pastured meat chickens, a retail food facility license in order to sell to you, and all our red meat would be processed in a USDA facility. 

Fortunately, we’ve been able to circumvent the food police to where they allow us to operate as a private farm who only caters directly to consumers (no restaurants, hotels, or retail stores). 

That said, our stance could be interpreted as careless, lackadaisical, or, depending on your view of governmental food oversight, straight-up foolish. But there are two sides to the coin. Here’s why we take the position we do:

• We, more than anyone, want a safe food system, but in our view, all of the above-named licenses and permits do not necessarily serve that cause. Rather, they incentivize centralization and corporate-scale food establishments. A centralized food system is by nature unsafe. It is unsafe food-safety-wise because far more animals and crops are amalgamated to central processing mega-facilities where, if you have a pathogen outbreak, it quickly spreads out of control. But it’s also unsafe nationally, because—as it now stands—if someone wanted to cripple America, they could, for example, destroy or disable 4-6 industrial meat plants and we would have meat shortages for at least eighteen months and a doubling of meat prices—similar to what we saw in the spring of 2020. 
• At Pasture to Fork, we want a safe food system, but compared to the current food regulatory authorities, have a very different vision of how to get there. They vie for centralization, control, and a big-business conglomerate food supply. We advocate for decentralization, freedom, and small-scale direct-to-consumer food acquisition.
• We care passionately about food safety but just don’t think government inspectors looking at thousands of chickens whizzing down an industrial processing line makes the chicken any cleaner or safer. Or that having a Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture inspector come in once a year to measure freezer temperatures and eyeball our poultry processing room will help us to produce cleaner food.
• We’re more than willing to participate in a clean food system, if only the USDA or FDA were willing to set a threshold for what clean food is. We would love to submit our chicken for swabbing and compare it with chicken from the supermarket, if only they were to set a threshold (bacteria parts per million, or whatever). Please, just give me a threshold! We know we’ll far exceed it because to set a threshold would require a bar set low enough to allow industrialized processors to meet it. But the entrenched notion of food safety is whether or not one of USDA's own has seen the process, which we think is an illogical determination.
• Those of us who are small producers in a branded product take food safety very seriously, in part because we don’t have a bevy of Philadelphia attorneys on retainer to protect us from a bad food situation. We actually take it more seriously than the industry that has both the bureaucracy of inspectors and attorneys on retainer whose skirts they hide behind. 
• For us, the direct relationship with the eater of our food creates a real-time daily audit, if you will. The direct connection with the people who actually use the food we produce invites direct blowback if the product is less than stellar. In the era of social media, we know producing an unacceptable product quickly smears our reputation when an unhappy customer posts it online. By catering to the end user, we make ourselves vulnerable, in a sense, but we welcome and desire that direct interaction.
• If we want people to exercise their discernment muscle to make better food decisions (yes, discernment is muscle that must be exercised just like your biceps or triceps) a direct relationship with the farmer or food producer is paramount in order to have a scenario in which to exercise discernment. In the supermarket setting—because everything has the official stamp already on it and the producer is a nameless faceless entity that may be thousands of miles away—that discernment muscle remains lethargic.
• If the only decision is whether or not it has the USDA blue check mark on it, there’s no decision going on. Because of this, society has become extremely ill-informed and lethargic in its ability to determine whether the food is any good or not, or whether it’s trustworthy or not. Nobody asks because government bureaucracy has essentially taken away the ability to weigh options, and it has not been for the betterment of food or society. As a nation, we no longer know how to actually vet our food and are at the mercy of a few bureaucrats making food decisions for us. I’m not saying direct-to-consumer producers want to pass the buck to the eater when bad food is produced, rather that if we depend on the government to tell us if our food is safe, we’re in a very precarious position due to the empirical nature of top-down regulation that is swayed by lobbying influence from the industry itself.
• If the goal is an educated savvy consumer, how do we get there? I suggest we get there by circumventing the plethora of federal and state regulations and allowing people the freedom to look around, sniff around, and ask around on real farms to see if they’re comfortable with what’s being offered. Food production should be aromatically and aesthetically pleasing, and even relatively uneducated people will quickly know whether or not what they’re seeing and sensing is pleasing or not.

Let's be honest, the current plethora of regulation surrounding food production does nothing to improve the quality of the food aside from a supposed assurance of cleanliness. And even that is largely a myth when you look at where the biggest contaminated food breakouts occur, which is from the largest processors in the industry. 

Food regulation, for the most part, does not address antibiotics in animal agriculture, or GMO's in crop production, or consider the environment in which the animal or crop was raised. It simply comes down to whether or not the process and/or facilities were seen and approved by whatever bureaucratic agency is set to oversee that sector of the food supply.

We beg to differ with this simplistic approach. We think it matters how the animal was raised or what the vegetables were sprayed with. We believe scale matters in processing. Dressing two hundred chickens one day out a week is vastly different than dressing five million chickens every day of the week operating around the clock. We believe food and farming is an inherently biological process regardless of how bent the industries have been on reducing it to science and widgets-in/widgets-out. And in biologics, scale matters.

Interestingly enough, the FSIS (Food Safety Inspection Service) has been known to brag about the efficiency of the largest meat plants they oversee, using pounds of meat processed per inspector hour as a measure. To me, this mentality is damning on its face. I should think the inspection service should be more concerned about whether or not something is overlooked by the inspector, but instead they measure their success in terms of how fast the process goes. By that measure, the speed of the chicken processing line should be increased even more, which is to say the 5 million-chickens-a-day are whizzing past the inspector even faster.

At Pasture to Fork, we believe animals raised in their natural outdoor habitat will produce healthier meat or milk than their confined antibiotic-ridden-hormone-driven-GMO-fed counterparts. The same is true for produce in terms of compost grown versus chemical laden. When one arrives at this conclusion and puts effort into raising only the best of food quality, to subject it to the dumbed-down regulatory standards of the conventional food industry seems foolish. Even more so when you have a patron base who shares your values and harbors a growing distrust for the regulatory establishment, largely because the establishment has proven itself incompetent.

What's more, to attempt compliance with this plethora of regulation robs one of the energies that could otherwise be put to good use in ensuring food quality, animal welfare, and soil building, not to mention customer relations or sales.

To sum it up, we advocate for a food system that is regenerative in nature—in other words, farming and food production that leaves our nest better than we found it. One that is aromatically and aesthetically pleasing for both farmer and visitor. 

We believe food and farming should be decentralized—many family-scale farms and processing facilities across the nation in every town and region, serving savvy eaters wherever they may be. In order to have a readily accessible food supply we need thousands of farms who open themselves to an increasingly aware populace. And finally, we advocate for a food system that is relational in transaction—the eater has a direct connection with the producer and vice-versa, which creates a win-win for both eater and farmer. And that, is The View from the Country.

Do you have a safe food supply? If not, how do you propose to attain one?

Quotes worth Re-Quoting –
“We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse–we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.”― Joel Salatin