Fighting for Food Safety and a Strong Local Food System

Changing the One-Size-Fits-All Food Safety Approach to One that Helps Us Live Better

Editor’s Note: This is the full text of the keynote speech by Roland McReynolds, CFSA Executive Director, at the Feast Down East Conference on March 1, 2013.

When the conference organizers at Feast Down East approached me about this keynote last fall, they asked me to give an inspirational speech that addresses why having a strong local food system is important to our future as a region and a people.  And I thought, ‘gee, that’s pretty wide open, where do I even begin.’  For a couple of months I batted around ideas, hoping for some inspiration myself.  But that all changed on Jan. 4 of this year.

Jan. 4 is when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published its proposed rules to govern the production of raw produce, and the processing of most value-added foods.  And since that date, just about every single day, I have read or written something related to these proposed rules.  FDA has issued these rules under authority of a law passed by Congress in 2010, the Food Safety Modernization Act, or FSMA in government-speak.  This act was billed at the time as the biggest update of our food safety laws since the novel, “The Jungle,” exposed the horrors of the meatpacking industry over one hundred years ago.  FSMA explicitly gives FDA wide new authority to set the rules for how farmers work many crops, and for how food businesses run their operations day-to-day.  With its Jan. 4 proposed rules, FDA shows just what it intends to do with that newfound authority.  Anyone who believes in the power of strong local food systems, who believes in their importance to us as a region and a people, needs to be extremely concerned about these FDA actions.

Now many of you know that Congress put certain protections in FSMA, protections intended to ensure that small farms and local foods are not strangled by industrial-scale food safety regulation.  I am proud to say that Carolina Farm Stewardship Association and the local food movement in the Carolinas played a critical role in winning those protections.  It was truly an against-the-odds victory.  For the first time, the federal government acknowledged that scale matters when it comes to food and farming, and that one-size-does-not-fit-all when it comes to regulating agriculture.  By limiting FDA’s power to govern small farms and food makers predominantly serving local markets, Congress intended that the local food sector should continue to thrive, continue to offer consumers a healthy alternative to faceless processed food, and continue to create jobs.

But I am here to tell you that, despite that astonishing legislative achievement, we are not out of the woods yet.  Indeed, we now have a target on our backs.  The giant corporations that sell most of the food in this country used to just ignore and dismiss local food. They focused on their business of gaming our food policies and squeezing more and more American farms of every size out of business.  Now those corporations are on the attack, charging that local food and small farms are risky and dangerous because they won’t be subject to FSMA.  And so far, many so-called consumer advocates have joined this corporate campaign, insisting that local, organic food should be subject to the equivalent of a full body cavity search from FDA.  They demonize anyone who disagrees with the one-size-must-fit-all orthodoxy.

That’s where I want to start with my main points here this morning. How our nation talks about regulating food safety has got to change, and we in this room need to lead that change.  Here’s what I mean.

Supporters of the one-size-fits-all approach punctuate virtually every argument about safety regulations with the tragic images of children in hospitals and families torn apart forever due to foodborne illness.  They say that if you can’t accept the necessity for every farm and food maker to comply with uniform rules, then you are an enemy to children and families.  I have witnessed corporate lobbyists, consumer advocates, and even FDA officials wave this bloody shirt when faced with well-reasoned suggestions for scale-appropriate safety rules.  And we as a community need to call this tactic out for what it is—intimidation—and we need to demand that it stop.

Every single one of us can relate to the pain and tragedy of needlessly losing a loved one.  Every farmer and food maker is either a parent or a child, or both.  Any parent’s heart rends at the thought of a child suffering.  I am a parent, and I dread the chance that food that I prepare for my children with my own hands might cause them serious harm.  No farmer or food maker wants to cause pain with the foods they create.  Local food producers agree that we should take effective steps to prevent doing harm to our customers, and they accept that the costs of foodborne illness can be terrible.  It’s not a subject of dispute.  And so the sheer tragedy of the worst incidents cannot be offered as the end of the debate about what our society does to prevent foodborne illness.

There are four premises that our society must accept in the discussion about food safety.  The first is that no farmer wants to cause harm to their customers, and the second is that we cannot achieve zero risk.  And FDA has repeatedly acknowledged that second point.  Even if we irradiated, baked and boiled 100% of the food we eat, pathogens will get through the system somewhere on the journey from field to processing facility to retailer to kitchen to plate, and people will get sick.  Microbes evolve at a startlingly fast rate, and we simply cannot hope to somehow get ahead of Mother Nature.  Indeed, many of the interventions we can pursue to limit pathogens will have other negative health consequences for consumers.  Raw leafy greens are really good for you, and people should eat them.

The third principle is that we live in a world of finite resources.  Governments, large corporations, small business, and consumers all must make choices about how to allocate limited time and dollars to address problems.  There is only so much money the government can raise to fund food safety enforcement, and small businesses that want to stay in business cannot spend more to limit pathogens than what the market will pay for food products.  What’s more, given the second principle that we cannot reach zero risk, we have to recognize there are diminishing, marginal returns to additional public and private food safety investments such that beyond a certain point they become ineffective and counterproductive.

The fourth principle is that healthy, local, organic food, fresh food grown in our communities, artisanal food made by our neighbors, has disproportionate positive impacts on people’s lives, and on public health.  We know that money recirculated within our own communities makes our economies stronger and more resilient, and that healthy economies support healthy people.  We know that better diets lead to less heart disease, less obesity, less chronic illness, and happier, healthier lives.  We know that reducing diet-related illness reduces public health care costs.  We know that our diet in this country is killing us.  Fifty-thousand people die every year in this country from colon cancer, almost a quarter million die from complications of diabetes, and 800,000 die from heart disease.  Our diet may be the gravest threat to human health in the US today, one that we will be coping with for another generation or more.  Local food systems will be huge in overcoming that threat.

When we proceed from these four principles, we can actually start to have the conversation about how we allocate limited resources to reducing the risk of foodborne illnesses.  There must be a cost-benefit analysis if we want food safety law to improve public health. And I say that deliberately – improve public health.  I am not interested in building a food system that merely avoids killing us unexpectedly. I am interested in a food system that helps us live better.

Federal agencies estimate that 9.4 million people get a foodborne stomach bug every year, and that 56,000 people are hospitalized from pathogen contaminated food.  Those are significant numbers, and yet, with 310 million Americans eating on average 2 to 3 meals a day, 365 days a year, we are consuming about 300 billion meals per year.  If those 300 billion meals result in 56,000 hospital trips, then 99.99 percent of the food we eat is not causing severe foodborne illness.

From this perspective, we can see that local food is contributing to food safety success.  And from this perspective, we must evaluate the cost of further regulatory impositions on local food producers.

And I say ‘further’ impositions, because one of the facts that is lost in the discussion of so-called food safety ‘exemptions’ for small farms and businesses is that these folks are already heavily regulated.  From local health department’s oversight of farmers markets, to the NC State pickle school that provides licenses for low risk processed food producers, to home kitchen inspections, to federal good manufacturing practices, and more, local food producers are already laboring under a patchwork of rules and regulations.  FSMA’s protections for local food are really about recognizing that this existing legal framework is already working quite well, at a sometimes significant cost of compliance to producers, and at a relatively low cost of enforcement for government.

Make no mistake, government benefits from the current system.  FDA cannot afford to police every one of the millions of American farms and food entrepreneurs that are contributing to our food supply, and it makes no sense to do so because so much of the food produced from American farms, family businesses and food hubs is a low risk for causing foodborne illness.

FDA released analyses along with the FSMA proposed rules that document hundreds of processed foods and produce items that are inherently unlikely to harbor pathogens.  FDA also confirms that food processing businesses with less than $1million in revenue account for only 2 percent of the US food supply. It makes no sense to waste limited government dollars to impose further regulations on these low risk foods.  And it makes no sense to apply new rules designed for complex, national and international food supply chains to the inherently short supply chains that characterize local food distribution.  These local, diffused supply chains by their nature impose strict limits on the possible extent of foodborne illness outbreaks, and safety rules must take that into account if they are to be efficient and effective.

It’s instructive to compare the approach in FSMA to foreign food suppliers.  Twenty percent of our food supply comes from foreign countries.  Thirty-five percent of our produce is imported, which is three times the share of the produce market that small domestic fruit and vegetable farms supply.  And the market share for imports increases every year.

Of course, the US Congress cannot grant FDA authority to conduct inspections in foreign countries, so FSMA creates a system that amounts to self-certification by foreign suppliers that they have adequate safety measures in place.  Which leads to an obvious question: If it’s good enough for foreign food, why isn’t it good enough for local food?  Why would we give foreign producers this competitive advantage if we are concerned in this nation about the loss of farmers and farmland and about our food security?

We need solutions that work to keep the public not only safe, but healthy and enriched, and that promote opportunities for new people to enter agriculture, start businesses, and create jobs, shared value and community-based economic growth.  And despite the perils that the proposed FSMA rules present, they also offer the local food movement an opportunity to shape our own destiny when it comes to food safety.  And that brings me to my second major point.

It is not enough for local food producers to take our chances on being exempt from FSMA, and to rely on assumptions that ‘my farm has never made anyone sick before’.  We must recognize that just telling consumers to wash produce will not prevent illness, because the science clearly demonstrates that washing alone does not significantly reduce pathogen loads.  Instead, we must create a comprehensive alternative structure for local food safety, one that takes advantage of our inherent strengths, that increases producers’ access to the best scientific information on protecting customers, and that enhances the ability of farms and businesses to compete in the marketplace.  In short, we must always strive to improve our safety performance, and win recognition from regulators and buyers that we are doing the best we possibly can.

FDA’s proposed FSMA rules expose just how fragile the so-called ‘exemptions’ for local food can be in the face of government arrogance and corporate pressure.  FDA is proposing loopholes in the law’s local food protections that threaten to swallow those protections completely.

Moreover, FSMA’s protections generally only apply to businesses with less than $500,000 in food sales.  If we want local, healthy food systems to grow, if we want market opportunities that will encourage a new generation of sustainable farmers, we will need businesses that grow beyond $500,000, especially food hubs and other collaborative processing and distribution models.

And regardless of whether FSMA applies to an individual local food producer, the market will respond to the federal rules by adopting them as private standards.  Insurance companies and retail outlets will require farms and food makers to comply with FSMA as a condition of market access—unless we take the initiative to create a safety system for local food that is tailored to the actual risks we create and tailored to the economic conditions on our farms.

And that is our opportunity at this moment.  We can offer a solution to FDA’s impossible challenge of uniformly enforcing safety rules.  The answer is establishing equivalency between what works in local food and what is necessary in complex corporate supply chains.  The answer is to demand that government, markets and insurance companies treat local producers the same as foreign suppliers.

We need to band together, farmers and foodmakers alike, to establish our own standards and approaches to address our greatest risks while preserving the accessibility of local, organic markets for new food and farming entrepreneurs.  In best tradition of agricultural community cooperation, we can establish effective, regional safety certification and training systems, run by us, by our community.  These regional, scale- and market-based entities would set research priorities, distribute information to farmers and food makers on the latest applicable science, set our own certification requirements, and conduct safety certifications that government and insurance companies alike will accept.  This is a vision for a food safety government of our community, by our community, and for our community, and for a better food supply for all.

So how do we get this done?  First, we document the egregious problems with the FSMA rules.  FDA’s proposals weigh in at over 1,500 pages, and are riddled with flawed assumptions, false conclusions, logical inconsistencies, circular definitions, and incomplete data.

People at CFSA and at our sister organizations across the country are combing through those pages now to identify as many of the potential pitfalls as possible, so we can have thorough, well-researched and detailed criticisms, as well as kudos where appropriate, to offer to FDA.  Then it will be essential for you, the farmers and food makers and consumers of local organic food, to take those theoretical problems and bring them to life with examples from your own knowledge and experience.  The national grassroots comment campaign from the local organic ag community will start in earnest at the end of this month, about six weeks before the comment period ends (EDITOR’S NOTE: The comment period of the FSMA has been extended.  For more information, read the excellent NSAC blog post).  I can’t stress enough how important it will be to have you participate in that campaign.  We’re not talking about 100,000 auto-generated email comments, but specific real life illustrations of how these rules will jeopardize farmers’ rights to grow, small businesses’ rights to make, and families’ rights to eat healthy, local food.  And if you are not already a CFSA member I am asking you right now to go to sign up for our action alerts so you can be ready when the grassroots campaign begins in earnest.  Share this issue with your customers and neighbors, and encourage them to comment, too.

That’s the first step.  But simultaneous with that immediate urgent issue, we also need to start work on creating our alternative vision, and we must all participate in creating it.  CFSA has gotten started on this work already.  We have spent the last two years working with a dozen diversified small farms to find out if we can get them through a USDA Good Agricultural Practices, or GAP, audit, and documenting exactly how much time and money it takes pass.  The good news is that so far every farm that’s gotten audited has passed, and no one has had to eliminate manure fertilizers, kick livestock off the farm, or install stainless steel countertops to do it.  The beauty of USDA GAPs is that it provides flexibility, unlike the proposed FSMA rules.  Just because a GAP inspector faults one element of your food safety plan doesn’t mean you fail the audit.  And this is a great foundation to build upon.

And there are similar programs being developed for local food systems across the country.  The National Good Food Network has pioneered a ‘group GAP’ program that holds the promise of helping cooperatives and food hubs to earn certification without every single participating farm having to undergo inspection.  These programs and others like them offer our movement a platform for building a food safety system that is safe for local organic food.  And we need more of you involved to validate them.  CFSA will be doing more trainings on our GAP program this year, and will offer cost shares to farmers applying for GAP certification.  And in the fall, we will begin convening meetings of farmers and food makers and food buyers across the Carolinas to identify the next steps we have to take to create an equivalent alternative to the industrial food safety model.  We need you to be a part of those conversations, but if we don’t know how to find you, we can’t involve you.  So sign up for our action alerts from CFSA, even join us as a CFSA member.  Each and every one of us has a responsibility to get involved in this discussion.

Making a scale-appropriate local food safety system will require talking with our customers about safety issues, frankly and forthrightly, explaining to them the realities of food production and the solutions that the local organic food movement can offer.  Farms and food makers serving local and markets are committed to strengthening their communities and to protecting the soil, air and water upon which we all depend.  An essential part of that commitment is providing customers the healthiest foods they can.

Sustainable farms, regardless of size, want to do the best job possible to protect public health, and are playing a vital role in reducing the epidemics of diet-related diseases ravaging this nation.  Our food laws and regulations must ensure that local farms and food producers can prosper and continue to contribute to a healthier national diet.  But that won’t magically happen by itself.  We have to take responsibility for protecting ourselves and our communities.

From my years of working at CFSA, and travelling across this region visiting with farmers and farm-lovers, I know the caliber of people that you represent.  I know how amazing you are and how committed you are to building a better food future.  And because of that, because of the amazing people that you are, I am confident—indeed, I am certain—that working together, we can turn the threat of FSMA into the greatest opportunity we have yet had to create a vibrant, just, and nurturing agriculture in our communities and across this nation.  I hope you are as excited about the possibilities as I am.