That damn FDA, founded a hundred years ago, just to make sure the milk bottles you got were full of milk and not white paint and rat shit.
– Jon Stewart
Corporate shills and Senatorial obstructionists have taken a last whack at the Food Safety bill. Filthy conditions in food plants will continue unabated if the bill isn’t separated from the moribund omnibus spending bill. That bill became a grab bag for end of year business, and then, faced with obstructionist challenges, it was quietly killed. The Food Safety bill may have died with it.
Not everybody in these parts thought that the legislation was a good idea. Small organic operations reacted warily, as did the guys who recently shipped a billion eggs contaminated with salmonella. An amendment that addressed the organic local producers’ concerns was added to the bill and it passed. People were generally satisfied that locavore and small farm concerns had been addressed. Then came the oopsie. The Senate bill required a return trip to the House because of some spending provision. Back it went. The House worked their magic and sent it back to the Senate. The Senate, now requiring one more kick at it because the House had touched it, bundled it into the omnibus spending bill and there it remains.
What I liked about the bill was its nod to the role of government in our society. When you sell Gordon Gekko a meat packing plant, you know that there will be some overhead issues. This bill was designed to reduce the number of people poisoned by the greedy, rapacious whackos in charge of corporate food. Tom Harkin currently has the bill on life support in the Senate cloak room. It’s anybody’s guess whether his resuscitative efforts will succeed before the lame duck session of congress expires.
