USDA puts chill on consumers getting local meat
By Carlos Alcalá, Sacramento Bee
The demand for locally grown food is ballooning, but it turns out that local meat is almost a misnomer.
Small ranchers in El Dorado County gathered at a Local Meat Summit in Placerville last week to beef, if you will, about how hard it is to sell to local consumers.
Ranchers who want to sell an individual tri-tip or tenderloin at a farmers market or store have to have it harvested – the current word for slaughtered – at a facility approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
There aren’t many of those.
Consequently, that can mean a 500-mile journey, round trip, for locally raised meats, said Fred Hunt, who organized last week’s summit on behalf of the Resource Conservation Districts of El Dorado County and the Georgetown Divide.
All one has to do is read books like journalist Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma to realize the USDA isn’t protecting anyone with their insistence on industrial model slaughter houses that keep an inspector on site. If a small rancher even builds a slaughter house, because his/her output doesn’t keep an inspector busy all day, they won’t license them. It is made cost prohibitive on purpose.
…which is true, and compelling, and telling about industrial agriculture’s relationship with the USDA…but not in itself a reason to become vegetarian. Afterall, it is the Omnivore’s dilemma – not the herbivore’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23food-t-000.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/us/08bcslaughterhouse.html?pagewanted=all
Outragious and excessive soviet style centralized control!
Every where you turn nowadays government is betraying the Free markets and the citezens suffer.
It’s unAmerican.
It’s going to get worse if free people don’t start to stand up for the American Way.