More on Food Safety

I didn't plan on blogging again quite this soon, but an article in today's New York Times set me off - "Food Companies Are Placing the Onus for Safety on Consumers."
It seems that big agribusiness can't be bothered to guarantee that the ingredients in their products are free of contaminants, bacteria, and other things that could make us sick (or dead). So they have said it's up to the consumer to be sure that they are preparing the foods well enough to kill any bugs. Yet testing, according to the article, found that following the directions for preparing a pot pie left some of the pie below the recommended temperature while much of the crust was burned and inedible. Yummy.
I am fortunate to live in an area that offers an abundance of local foods, from meats to dairy to grains to vegetables. It is sometimes difficult to afford the added cost of buying from the farmers market rather than the supermarket, certainly, but it also certainly feels a lot better.
One positive effect of the bad economy, at least in my eyes, has been to slow the rampant development that was paving over hundreds of acres of farmland every year. A local nonprofit has been doing their best to save agricultural lands, but that is a hard fight, especially against realtor organizations from far outside our local area and with much better funding. They defeated a proposed ballot measure to help raise money to buy development rights, so that farmers could retire with a nest egg but leave their land in agricultural rather than sell it for development. They promised an "alternate solution," but of course that has not been forthcoming.
Other than fresh seafood, you have no way of knowing from whence your foodstuffs are coming. And if the source is China, it's big time buyer beware! So I am fully behind the locavore movement, and hope others out there will push to save their own local agriculture. We are still going to have to feed ourselves in the future, and I don't see how we will do that if we pave over the most productive lands.