The Daily Caller featured this article. I'm not seeing much said about SB 510 anywhere else, except for a youtube video that talked about some of the possible scenarios we could end up with in the event of a national crisis.
Like most bills that ever go through Congress, this one has a nice name that really doesn't mean anything. We all believe in food safety. Most of us like modernization, although in the context of growing and preparing food, I'm not sure I do like the sound of it that much.
SB 510 advocates say that this bill will help protect us, by ensuring that farms and food manufacturers follow safety procedures that will prevent future scares like the recent egg recall. Opponents say this is just more government overreach that will hurt small farms and local farmers markets.
I've read that Monsanto is a huge lobbyist behind this bill. Just the first paragraph in the link is enough to convince me that I do not want Monsanto behind anything regarding food safety. They're all about pesticides and growth hormones and genetic engineering.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not an environmentalist by any means. I'm a free-market girl, and I believe that we should have the choice to support Monsanto, or to support our local farmers' market. Living in Boise, there are a lot of ways to buy fresh, local, organic food. This bill will make it harder for those local farmers to produce food, and could possibly make it more difficult to buy heirloom seeds for our own gardens. It will likely end the sale of raw milk (there's a place that sells it a half mile from my house), and I think that I should be able to buy raw milk if I want to.
2 comments:
I don't like Monsato either, it is scary how much power and control they have over our food. Our family is soon moving 9 miles south of where we are now to a home on 10 acres. We were about to start building a home (a project I have worked on for the last year) but at the last hour before our plans were submitted to the city, we realized this wasn't the path we should take. This came after much prayer and searching. It feels good - I want to be more self-sufficient. Plus we want to have chickens and a couple cows.
Agh!!! I sure hope they DON'T end raw milk sales... I'm a wanna-be-believer, but I can't have dairy yet. I'll be royally PO'd if I can't even TRY it someday w/o owning my own cow.
And yeah - this bill is just an INSANELY bad idea. The low revenue (not profit, REVENUE) threshold for exemption doesn't seem like it'll help many small farms, and as they go, our food supply will be more and more consolidated - under the companies who are CURRENTLY violating the guidelines, anyway! It's an outrageous abuse...
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