FoodBanter.com - View Single Post

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 09:50:32 -0000,
(Alex Rast) wrote:

>at Wed, 27 Oct 2004 03:05:41 GMT in
>,
>(Michael Odom) wrote :
>>
>>'Round these parts (NE Texas) the health and food safety laws pretty
>>much put the kibosh on finding never-frozen organic meats unless you
>>slaughter your own. It's not a matter of what I would like to have,
>>it's a matter of the scale of production which proves prohibitive for
>>small producers to meet the fresh meat regulations. At least that's
>>what I think is going on.
>
>Yeah, people say that the regulatory environment is tough, but what I don't
>understand is, how can the legislators draft legislation that would make it
>tough for organic producers to sell fresh? I don't mean what motivation or
>excuse they can use to justify this - it's always possible if not probable
>that legislators are in the back pocket of large, industrial meat producers
>who would naturally wish to see the regulations favour *them* - that, I
>have no problem understanding. What I don't get is, what specific provisos
>do they have in the law that makes it so hard? It seems to me that you'd
>have to do something like explicitly set an absolute minimum on quantity of
>meat shipped in order for it to be able to be fresh. If so, where are the
>activists, for surely a law like this is so manifestly preferential to
>industrial businesses that the activists could create a media circus over
>it? If not, it would seem to me that the worst they could do is make the
>resulting meat more expensive. And if that's the case, is the number of
>people who recognise that there is no free lunch and would be prepared to
>pay more for fresh, organic meat really that small? If so, why is that?

I'm not griping about food safety regulations, myself. I think
working to make our food supply safer is a legitimate use of
government resources. (Conversely, I think that government
sponsorship of unsustainable agricultural practices is stupid.)

What I wanted to say was that, under such a regime of food safety
regulations, offering an affordable product to their customers
requires smaller producers like the organic meat producers in my neck
of the woods to freeze their chicken, lamb, pork and beef at the
slaughter house. Doing otherwise will require them to observe more
costly food safety rules regarding storage and handling and shelf life
which would make their meat more expensive for the consumer and likely
cut into sales.

Several months back we bought 1/4 of a grass-fed steer from the family
who raised the animal. They had it slaughtered and butchered locally,
but all the meat arrived frozen rock solid. The meat is delicious, by
the way. The reason for the freezing was represented to me as a way
to avoid some of the more costly parts of standard food safety
regulations.

This has been also offered as the reason organic meat suppliers at the
Dallas Farmers' Market only sell frozen meats, too. I talked to the
sellers at the market about it.

I don't think the current laws favor non-organic meat producers per
se. Rather, the current laws appear to offer smaller producers a
frozen meat loophole in handling, storage and shelf-life limitations
and regulations which would raise producers' costs to a level that
producers of scale can afford to absorb and smaller producers can't.

I'm sure others will correct me if I'm wrong.

modom

"Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes."
-- Jimmie Dale Gilmore