Legislating Away Food Safety

In the 1973 science fiction movie Soylent Green starring Charlton Heston as New York Police Detective Robert Thorn, we find ourselves in a dystopian version of our current society. In the movie efforts at sustainable development have failed, resulting in an environmental collapse stemming from global warming and overpopulation. Food, as we currently know it, is in short supply. The majority depends on processed food products manufactured by the Soylent Corporation - Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and the new, recently introduced Soylent Green. This latter Soylent is touted as being ultra-nutritious made, as it is, from pulverized plankton and because it is also far tastier than its red and yellow cousins it is extremely popular. There is however, a nasty realization when Thorn discovers that (spoiler alert) Soylent Green is not made from plankton but rather from ground human bodies. Soylent Green, in the now oft quoted line, is people.

From Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation what's repeatedly been shown is that as long as people don't know how their food is produced, they can easily be coaxed into eating substances that border on hazardous. Similarly, as long as food producers - from farmers to corporations to restaurants - know that they can hide behind a veil of secrecy, the pressure to do increasingly harmful things to our food supply in a global market that clamors for cheaper and cheaper food is omnipresent (hence melamine in baby formula). When it comes to food safety, transparency is the ultimate antiseptic.

Yet, a spate of recent legislation seeks to move towards less - not more - transparency in food production. A trend that is horrible for sustainable development.

In Florida Senate Bill 1246 would make it a a first-degree felony for anyone to "photograph, video record, or otherwise produce images or pictorial records, digital or otherwise" without express written permission of the farmer or the farmer's representative. A first-degree felony by the way is subject to up to thirty years of jail time and is, in the eyes of the Florida Senator who proposed the bill equivalent to someone who committed vehicular homicide and left the scene of a car. Yes, murder is equivalent to snapping a picture of a Florida farm.

A similar bill has been introduced in Iowa, Iowa House File (HF) 431. The Iowa bill differs in that in most cases it's a misdemeanor, not a felony and it goes on to say that anyone who copies or facilitates the distribution of said material (sorry YouTube) would also be guilty under Iowa law.

Meanwhile in Michigan, - HB 4306, would mandate that all Michigan public schools have to privatize their food service programs. This not only kills the burgeoning Farm-to-school program, but it would also put school children at the mercy of companies that have been known to play fast and loose with student health.

While there's a lot of prognostication as to the reasoning behind these bills - from making it difficult, for example, for citizens to photograph confined feed lots, capture farmers engaging in visible but illegal behavior such as enslaving their workers, or snap a picture of a GMO test farm, to simple cronyism - what these laws have in common is rendering opaque a process that should be crystal clear.

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