When I came across this New York Times article about large vegetable growers and other segments of the industrial food industry who are paying out of pocket to hire inspectors and implement production guidelines and safety standards that go beyond the FDA minimums, I figured it would be a great opportunity to crack some jokes about how this really goes to show that market pressures aren’t enough, and our food safety laws really need to be stricter. Turns out, I didn’t need to joke:

These do-it-yourself programs may provide an enhanced safety level in segments of the industry that have embraced them. But with industry itself footing the bill, some safety advocates worry that the approach could introduce new problems and new conflicts of interest. And they contend that the programs lack the rigor of a well-run federal inspection system.

“It’s an understandable response when the federal government has left a vacuum,” said Michael R. Taylor, a former officer in two federal food-safety agencies and now a professor at George Washington University. But, he added, “it’s not a substitute” for serious federal regulation.

[…]

“Industry self-regulation didn’t protect our money, and industry self-regulation won’t protect our food,” said Carol L. Tucker-Foreman, a safety advocate with the Consumer Federation of America, in an e-mail message. “We want every inspector to be paid by and owe their loyalty to the people who eat, not to the owner of an unsanitary produce packing operation. You can’t work for both.”

Yes, because there are never problems or conflicts of interest when things are run by the government, are there? This is a case in which markets are working, in which the threat of safety hazards or bad publicity has led producers to develop a self-imposed regulatory regime and so bear on their own, rather than passing on to the taxpayers, the costs of responding to their customers’ perceived demands. If, in the face of all of this, you think that the desire to pass this burden on to the gummint is motivated more than a whit by a selfless desire to protect the public health, then you must be … well, you must be a Times reporter who ends up carrying water for the food industry, that’s who you must be.

As my friend Tim Carney has helpfully explained in connection with the Food Safety Modernization Act being pushed by the congressional Democrats (on which see more here), what’s going on in this case is every bit the rule rather than the exception:

Big business is not only more able to bear the costs of regulation, but also better positioned to craft the regulation in beneficial ways. Kraft Foods, for instance, spent $3.68 million last year on its lobbying effort, which includes William Lesher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Agriculture.

When the fine print is ironed and when the agencies implement the regulations, Kraft and Big Agriculture will have a say, but your local organic farmer won’t. As Stockton puts it, “There is no distinction now between industrial agriculture and federal regulatory agencies.”

For the record, my CSA sends out their spinach literally caked in mud, ensuring us that this actually makes things safer, by allowing nature’s defenses to do their work and keeping contamination from spreading. If such practices aren’t good enough for the Consumer Federation of America, that’s their problem, not mine; a quick rinse and then a dunk in cold salt water cleans those leaves off just fine. That this isn’t the result of state-enforced policy doesn’t show that these decisions are made in a “vacuum”, or that a “well-run [sic!] federal inspection system” could keep things any safer than the collective power of a highly-motivated consumer base. It’s regulation, not individual choice and corporate responsibility, that fails to be a “substitute” for the natural state that it aims to displace.

Earlier: I interviewed Tim, and a host of other luminaries, on regulatory capture and the politics of food safety in my Doublethink article on the war against unboiled milk.

     Filed under: agriculture, food, government/law, libertarianism