The Annual Bowen Island Harvest Celebration Market - BowFeast - was disrupted by a Food regulator who insisted that many selling jams etc have their food tested for safety. A 19 page set of regulations were also applied to the many backyard growers. (HT Chris Corrigan)
Does this sound odd to you?
This type of regulation on the surface looks as if it is there to protect us - but in reality it is there to ensure that small growers and processors are kept out - as happened on Bowen Island.
The PEI Egg industry tried to use food safety as their weapon to get rid of small flocks on PEI too. The irony is that the industrial process used by the large producers is in fact at the heart of the many risks that we face in food.
Scale and concentration are the drivers of risk. The concentration of animals is the greatest health risk and the concentration of production is our greatest food security risk. For instance, Hamburger is ground in a handful of sites. Look at what happend there routinely. Look at what happened to dog food that was produced mainly in ONE plant. Look at McCains challenges in Canada. That is why 2 egg producers in the US can have a problem leading to the recall of 500 million eggs.
Food safety will be better served when we have a much more distributed system. So too will food security. A thoughtful jurisdiction would be working to this end.
In that context, our real safety depends on supporting the local small producer.
This is not too hard to pull off. For this can be a provincial issue. So long as food is not exported out of a province, it remains in the provincial jurisdiction. So the complexity of a good start here - where each province can set up a local system is not too great.
Surely it would not be too hard to set up a new category of food production where the scale threshold was set low and where the principle would be to have a system that was safe because of the design of small units networked into a large system?
