Legislation and The Foodiest Small Town in America

Shefali and I live in Durham, North Carolina, a small town with an surprisingly great food scene. The scene garnered national attention two years ago, when Bon Appetit named it "The Foodiest Small Town in America."

One of the reasons why food flourishes here is the extensive network of local farms that drive the year-round farmer's markets and farm-to-fork restaurants. Much like the national media has kept an eye on Durham foodies of late, Durham foodies have recently paid special attention to the national media.

Earlier this month, President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act into law. The legislation should provide much needed, albeit controversial, renovations to how the Food and Drug Administration controls and inspects food safety.

Food and Drugs commissioner Margaret Hamburg, in a piece cross-posted on foodsafety.gov and whitehouse.gov, writes that the legislation is a major step in the right direction because recognizes that supervising food safety requires an inspection of the entire food system:

The idea of prevention is not new. FDA has established prevention-oriented standards and rules for seafood, juice, and eggs, as has the U.S. Department of Agriculture for meat and poultry, and many in the food industry have pioneered “best practices” for prevention. What’s new is the recognition that, for all the strengths of the American food system, a breakdown at any point on the farm-to-table spectrum can cause catastrophic harm to the health of consumers and great disruption and economic loss to the food industry.

So, we need to look at the food system as a whole, be clear about the food safety responsibility of all of its participants, and strengthen accountability for prevention throughout the entire food system – domestically and internationally. The new law meets these needs in numerous ways.

Lisa Sorg, editor of Durham's Independent Weekly, covered the story from a local angle. Her story opens with a conversation with Richard Holcomb on his farm (15 miles from our house). The new legislation would cripple small family farmers were it not for the Tester-Hagan Amendment, a "hard-fought addition to the bill," Sorg writes, "that exempts small farms from some of the law's most expensive regulations."

She goes on to explain the law's significant improvements to antiquated policies that date back as early as the 1930s (for example, the new law requires large farms to be inspected every 5 years and eventually every three; previously the farms needed an inspection once every ten). She also, with the help of Roland McReynolds, brings attention to the legislation's limited scope.

"It's important to remember that the bill does not address everything you and I might consider food safety issues: pesticides, allergens, hormones, genetically modified organisms," says Roland McReynolds, executive director of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, which advocates on behalf of farmers and consumers to promote local and organic agriculture.

"We have to go back to the beginning," Holcomb told Sorg, "to the way we grew food for thousands of years."

Because family farmers grow, transport and sell their foods themselves, they control quality of their product. For example, Holcomb harvested close to 5,000 heads of cabbage this weekend. He sold them at local farmer's markets and distributed them to area restaurants. The people who eat them shook his hand after purchasing, listened to his invitation to visit the farm, and will likely visit his stand next weekend.

To a consumer like me, it's all a matter of trust, and I feel Holcomb's model builds consumer trust more effectively than any federal regulation, and costs taxpayers nothing. Ultimately, small farms earned exemption from the new laws because they hold themselves to higher standards than the government's. They are part of the solution, not the problem. In a perfect world, such a model would be the norm.