How food safety regulations do not necessarily lead to greater food safety

From Baylen Linnekin, on Reason.com:

“Nearly 18 months after passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act, a landmark piece of legislation that granted new powers and authority to the FDA, the legislation is still mired in congressional debates over how to fund it. If this status update sounds familliar, it’s with good reason. The FSMA found itself in a similar place six months ago and a year ago.

As FSMA implementation treads water, my own latest piece of research on the subject has just been published by the Northeastern University Law Journal. It’s based on a talk I gave as a panelist at the journal’s 2011 food-law conference—held just weeks after the FSMA became law.

In my article, “The Food-Safety Fallacy: More Regulation Doesn’t Necessarily Make Food Safer,” I use ancient and more recent historical examples of flawed rules to rebut the common misconception that more food-safety regulation means safer food. Rather, history shows us that food-safety regulations have often made food (and, consequently, people) less safe.

What are they saying ’bout raw milk?

From Jacob Sullum, on Reason.com:

“Do you hate pot-smoking vegans but love raw milk? Have I got a website for you. On its face, Thoughtful Living is meant to be a refutation of two pernicious cultural trends: the belief that cannabis is harmless fun and the belief that a diet free of animal products is healthy. But it is actually an exercise in distinguishing subtle satire from earnest crankiness. Here are a few reasons why I favor the latter interpretation:

1) The anti-pot propaganda is not as over the top as it could be. Yes, there is the obligatory anecdote about the guy who got hooked on the reefer because he mistakenly thought it was not addictive, the criticism of medical marijuana laws as covers for recreational use, and even a call to boycott Progressive Insurance because of its founder’s support for marijuana reform.

Ron Paul and Barney Frank would end U.S. federal prohibition on marijuana

From Mike Riggs at Reason.com:

Image via Reason.com

“Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) will introduce “bi-partisan legislation tomorrow ending the federal war on marijuana and letting states legalize, regulate, tax, and control marijuana without federal interference,” according to a press release from the Marijuana Policy Project that just hit my inbox. More from that email:

Where’s Senator Joe McCarthy when we need him? The TSA, raw milk, Bill S-510 — was the “red menace” ever this real?

What would Senator Joe McCarthy have said about Bill S-510. Would he have seen in it, a creeping communist menace?

Senator Joe McCarthy -- Hey Joe, there's a helluva lot of "unAmerican" activity going on these days. Where are you?

Of course Sen. McCarthy has long been discredited, and communism is dead or so we’re led to believe. But what if Russia was just a beta test for what’s starting to happen in America now, with S-510 and with random TSA checkpoints even on domestic travel?

Raw milk journalist David E. Gumpert is certainly seeing red, over the apparent collusion with the government, of farm and consumer groups who should know better. From his latest post on The Complete Patient blog:

“I keep asking myself, how did we ever get to this point, where political and economic control of America’s food system is on the verge of being turned over to a government agency whose leaders declared early this year we have “no absolute right” to “any particular food” or to “bodily and physical health.”

“If you have two cows…” — Reason.com

Here are a couple of excerpts from a recent post on Reason.com titled “Why Buy the Cow“:

Cartoon from Counter Think.com

“….Since at least the 1930s, some version of this series of jokes has been in circulation, via chain letter, newspaper reprint, and eventually email forwards. Sometimes it travels under the name “a parable of isms.” This version from 1940 is pretty typical: