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  • From: Road's End Farm <organic87 AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Food Safety and National Supplier Issues
  • Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:31:39 -0400

After USDA in large part stole the meaning of the word "organic" by insisting that it manage to fit into something that very large scale producers could do without changing their overall business setups, I thought that shifting the emphasis to "local" might help the smaller growers. I wondered how the large centralized producers would manage to steal the word "local". I think this might be the answer: they couldn't figure out how to steal it, so they're trying to discredit it.

They might have less luck with this than they think, at least for the direct marketers. Whenever there's a panic about contaminated food in the news, we seem to get customers asking to buy the item from us instead. If the chef in question will talk to you, talk about your own traceability and food safety practices, and compare to the risk inherent in mixing together ingredients from many fields on many large farms, as most large packers are doing.

No system is going to guarantee absolute safety. I still think your chances are best by knowing your grower(s).



-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 6A now I think
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale




On Apr 28, 2012, at 2:55 PM, Richard Stewart wrote:

I mention this because we have been told by a chef we supply that US Foods, through their produce sales representative, has falsely claimed that local food producers are operating uninsured, without traceability, and without a GAP system in place and then implied that be dealing with us the chef was playing Russian Roulette in terms of exposure to food-borne pathogens.




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