FREEDOM VS. SAFETY

In the last week I've done three conferences and my FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION is really resonating, moving into some fairly high-swinging circles in the political tornado.  So I'm a bit hopeful.

                  The single most common pushback is ALWAYS about safety.  What if someone gets bad food?  It reminds me of my conversation more than a decade ago in a break during a Virginia General Assembly hearing about food freedom.  Our state Commissioner of Agriculture at the time, J. Carlton Courter, came over to me during the break and nicely admonished:  "Joel, we can't give people freedom to choose their food.  We couldn't build enough hospitals fast enough to handle all the sick people from bad food."

                  I've learned to always take folks in good faith.  In other words, I don't think he hates small farmers, freedom, or food choice per se.  He truly believed he was in the right to fear what he considered a Wild West in food commerce.  It's reminiscent of the education establishment 40 years ago writing a plethora of op ed pieces for major media claiming that if we allowed this aberrant home schooling movement to continue, we couldn't build enough hospital psych wards fast enough to deal with the unsocialized kids.

                  Of course, not only was that wrong-headed, but it has now proved, 40 years later, to be the opposite of reality.  The teen suicide rate, which is through the roof, is largely a product of institutional educational social pressures, screen logistics, and dysfunctional parenting.  The homeschool community is immune, for the most part, from these trends. So the demon they fingered is actually the cure for their own demon.  Funny how that works.

                  Kind of like folks who start drinking raw milk and feel better.  Or shift from veganism to carnivore and suddenly get healthy.  

                  When the naysayers jump on bad food from unwitting eaters buying directly from farmers, they act like the food buying habits in America today are as healthy and pure as the wind driven snow.  If Bobby Kennedy's MAHA team has uncovered anything in the last 100 days, it's how deplorable America's government-sanctioned, certified, and approved food system is.  For anyone, at this juncture of information, to say with a straight face that buying food directly from a producer is more dangerous than buying  from Tyson, Nestle, and Kellogg's is unmitigated stupidity.

                  The fact is our hospitals are already filled.  We're already short of beds for people eating government food.  I think it's time to start differentiating freedom food from government food.  When the federal government approves food, the matrix is a labyrinth of creative tobacco-company lab manipulation to make it addictive and nutrient deficient.

                  Our food system right now is enslaved in the shackles of the corporate-government-industrial oligarchy (Bernie Sanders' favorite word).  But unlike his solution, which is always a big beautiful federal agency to ride herd on the bad guys (how has that worked for the last century?) the real answer is emancipated food producers accessing the marketplace and competing with the oligarchy.  It's such a simple solution, and yet the push back any time you mention food freedom is long, shrill, and powerful.

                  Two final thoughts:  do you really think we should trust a bureaucrat more than a farmer?  Second, how can you have freedom without risk?  You can't.

                  Why do most folks think farmers are dirty and want to hurt their patrons?