Pollan and Schlosser on the Food Safety Modernization Bill

As I discussed last Tuesday, the Food Safety Modernization Bill, a very important piece of legislation, is scheduled to be voted on tonight by the Senate.

Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, two authors at the forefront of the real food movement, wrote an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times summarizing the main aspects of the bill (more power for the Food and Drug Administration) and the opposition to it.

According to the authors, the opposition is based on inaccurate claims and corporate greed.

(Pollan and Schlosser don’t use the word “greed,” but I do. Why? Because I am sick and tired of how corporations—usually fronted by their lobbying arms—control most everything in this country. And don’t even get me started on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case, one of the worst decisions in the court's history.)

Hopefully this bill will pass, making our food supply a bit safer.

Click here to read the entire article; here’s a snippet:

"In the last week, agricultural trade groups, from the Produce Marketing Association to the United Egg Producers, have come out against the bill, ostensibly on the grounds that the small farms now partially exempted would pose a food safety threat. (Note that these small farms will continue to be regulated under state and local laws.) It is hard to escape the conclusion that these industry groups never much liked the new rules in the first place. They just didn’t dare come out against them publicly, not when 80 percent of Americans support strengthening the F.D.A.’s authority to regulate food."