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—— Original Message ——
Received: Tue, 21 Sep 2010 03:08:53 PM EDT
From: Paul G King
To: Alicia Munday <...@wsj.com>
Subject: Food-Safety Bill

Dear Ms. Alicia Munday,

Having read S. 510 in its latest incarnation and being well-aware of how the safety of food can be improved and what this bill actually does, it is clear that this bill is a “big business” / “agra-business” bill designed to eliminate the competition from small food producers, co-ops and home gardeners that, as the bill is written, would need federal permission to grow food even if it was only for “personal consumption”.

This bill is outrageous and should be opposed by those who wish to preserve the freedom for individuals to grow their own food without federal government intervention and meddling.

Moreover, those consumer groups who are supporting this bill clearly have NO idea about how the local production of food is or, should be, managed.

What we need is to keep the inspection of all food production facilities under the control of local health officials and use local laws to penalize the health inspectors who, in the egg case, were clearly not doing their jobs and the food producers, egg farms in this case, who operate under filthy vermin-infested conditions that are in and of themselves illegal.

As a person who grew up in the meat purveying business, and worked on a family farm that supplied meat to their local grocery store as well as raised 60,000 fryers at a time in chicken houses, I know and understand that the issues of cleanliness and proper operation should be under the control of the local (city, county, and state) health inspectors, who, if properly incentivized and restrained by the threat of criminal prosecution when they turn a blind eye to filthy and vermin-infested situations, have been and are more than capable of stopping this type of food contamination — obviously the local and federal health inspectors had repeatedly turned a blind eye to the problem on the egg farms — yet I see no grand jury being called to indict them for their failure to do their job or to indict the owners of the egg farms for their wanton disregard for the filthy and vermin-infested facilities they KNOWINGLY, as that term is defined federally, operated.

And as a past worker in businesses and farms where cleanliness and infestation-free facilities were an expectation that was reinforced by the various city, county and state health inspectors who inspected the businesses my father ran (meat purveying, restaurant supply, and restaurants) and the farm on which I worked for my step-grandfather who sold his locally raised beef, pork, and chicken in his small-town “country” store that was routinely inspected by the city and county health inspectors making certain that the applicable sanitation and vermin-exclusion standards were met, we knew what to expect.

As I have learned, if you want to stop such corner-cutting practices. fine and prosecute those who are engaged in them and prosecute those health inspectors who were/are induced to turn a blind eye to such deplorable conditions.

All that the Food Safety bill, as written, will do is drive the smaller producers out of business and reward the larger operations who are the very firms that operate without regard to the consumer’s health.

This odious industry-serving bill that does nothing to truly improve food safety should be opposed at every level.

Respectfully,
Paul G. King, PhD Analytical Chemist
http://www.dr-king.com

PS: I have repeatedly contacted the US Senators for
the State of New Jersey and other Senators opposing
this bill and asking that they put a hold on this bill.