The PRIME Act Is THE Food Safety Law We Definitely Need Right Now!
Who wants safe food? There is an answer and it needs your participation.
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Driving home that day was an adventure.
The farm was about a 6 hour round trip, just south of Charlottesville. I had my two babies in their carseats. And now, we had two full coolers–you know, those huge 120 quart coolers–in the back of the van. The coolers were full of beef cuts wrapped in butcher paper.
I was excited.
I had just bought half a cow of meat all at once. We had saved for months to do this. I chose the farmer carefully from several I knew and trusted. She had a large family, and I looked up to her. Like me, she was a food rights advocate and promoted food access in communities.
This was my first time buying meat this way. I was a little unsure of myself, like many of us are at the outset of a new experience.
When presented with the “cut sheet” a couple weeks prior, I didn’t even know what that was. I was nervous. I didn’t want to embarrass myself by getting it wrong and I hesitated to show my naïveté by asking for help. But I did.
So she kindly and patiently walked me through it.
The cut sheet, she explained, is how I wanted my half cow cut up.
The butcher needed to know if I wanted 1” steaks or 2” steaks.
They needed to know how big I wanted my roasts–did I want 3# roasts? 4# roasts? Or even bigger?
Which primal cuts did I want as steaks and which cuts did I want as roasts? (The primal cuts are the initial breakdown of a whole side (half) of a steer.)
As I filled out the cut sheet, I realized how much flexibility there was in this process and how robust my choices were.
I could choose which style of steaks I wanted, which roasts and how much of those primal cuts I wanted ground up for ground beef.
I felt like I was both entering a new era and honoring the past.
When I picked up the frozen meat that day, I saw that each item was stamped in large lettering on the white butcher paper:
“NOT FOR SALE”
I thought that was odd. Hadn’t I just bought this meat?
As it turned out, no. I hadn’t. I invested in half of a steer while the animal was still alive. Another family invested in the other half. That made us the owners of the live animal and thus able to then pay a custom butcher shop (one where a USDA inspector is not omni-present), to kill and cut the animal we relied on for meat.
I guess it made sense, in a way.
Local butcher shops have always been a vital link in our food security. This is how most small farms and homesteaders ensure their food stores. It is how communities in rural areas know they will have access to safe, trusted meats.
Yes, we need local butchers who have the equipment and expertise to kill and cut the carcass into manageable portions. We don’t all need that specialized equipment and skill. Most farmers need to focus on producing food, yet there needs to be enough butchers in a geographic area to provide services to our farmers.
Butchers are vital to our regional food security.
I finally arrived home, unloaded the now sleeping babies from the car, and began putting the meat in the freezer.
It was fun seeing the different shapes of the packages of meat and the handwriting on the paper saying what cut it was. I hoped that I would get better at cooking some of the beef roasts. I looked forward to improvement.
But what happened next surprised me.
As the months unfolded, a transformation occurred…
Sadly, no, I didn’t get much better at cooking roasts. These are still the one cut of beef that I struggle with the most and am rarely happy with the outcome.
But something else did happen. Something I wasn’t even expecting.
I no longer worried about whether my food was “safe.”
It was subtle at first. I didn’t realize how much I had been worried until the worry wasn’t there anymore.
I was a young mother and wife. Barely 25 at the time, with a husband and two young children to cook for and another on the way. I’d learned a lot about food and nutrition in the past few years, but there was this constant worry–flamed by alarming headlines and targeted media propaganda–that I would inadvertently poison my family.
Foodborne illness
Just the mere mention of the phrase is enough to cause mothers everywhere to freeze. Foodborne illness. The ever lingering threat that we might accidentally poison our own families keeps us incarcerated by our own fear.
A few weeks after the meat pickup, as I was cooking dinner, I realized again that I didn’t have that “foodborne illness” fear anymore. It just wasn’t there.
Something else had taken its place.
Was it joy in the cooking process?
Maybe it was newfound pride in my own abilities?
Nah, it couldn’t be that. I was definitely still learning and had a ways to go.
I realized it was the conviction of KNOWING that my food was safe. It was an underlying confidence in the PROCESS.
I had gone through the steps of choosing a farmer, choosing an animal that would be our food, and correspondence with the butcher shop in how I wanted the cuts prepared.
I was cooking the meat I had chosen.
These key factors added up to create that assurance:
The people in this process all cared. They cared about their quality of work and they cared about my family and me. It was a closed loop, with real, intimate connection.
The animal I chose was the animal I got back. It wasn’t mixed with the meat from thousands of other animals.
I chose a farm based on the food safety principles that are important to me: grassfed, no antibiotics and humane standards of care and harvest. I knew I was not starting with meat cuts filled with antibiotic resistant bacteria.
I understood the timeline and how the meat was handled from start to finish–harvested, cut, frozen, transported, thawed then cooked. There were no questions about how long it was sitting out, or whether it had been mishandled.
Participating in that process allowed me to cook without fear.
Since that time, I learned that it wasn’t just me thinking this. Multiple government reports showed that it was as I suspected–that our food coming from massive industrial operations was the cause of the rise–and subsequent rise in fear–of foodborne illnesses.
Foodborne illness and massive meat recalls are literally caused by the centralization of the production and processing facilities. There is inherently more risk in those systems as noted by a Government Accountability Office report. “Public health and food safety officials believe that the risk of foodborne illnesses is increasing for several reasons. For example, as a result of large-scale food production and broad distribution of products, those products that may be contaminated can reach a great number of people in many locations.”1
Processing millions of pounds of meat together means higher contamination numbers if there is an incident. “Challenges to food safety will continue to arise, in part because of: Changes in food production and our food supply, which mean a single contaminated food can make people sick in different parts of the country.”2
“Food safety and public health officials believe that the risk of foodborne illnesses is increasing. Several factors contribute to this increased risk. First, the food supply is changing in ways that can promote foodborne illnesses. For example, as a result of modern animal husbandry techniques, such as crowding a large number of animals together, the pathogens that can cause foodborne illnesses in humans can spread throughout the herd. Because of broad distribution, contaminated products can reach individuals in more locations.”3
With the added risks as noted above, come factors needed to mitigate those risks that are often not conducive to humane practices–such as thousands of animals slaughtered under questionable circumstances with an emphasis on tracking and data management (rather than actual safety and humane practices) so that if an “incident” occurs, it can be tracked and reported.
As reported by the Animal Welfare Institute:4
“In early 2008, a slaughterhouse investigation revealed multiple incidents of egregious cruelty to cattle at the Westland-Hallmark Meat Packing Co. in Chino, California, resulting in widespread public outrage and the largest beef recall in US history. Congress held multiple oversight hearings in the aftermath, and the USDA took several actions to step up its enforcement of the humane slaughter law.”
Our industrial meat production and processing is a truly barbaric system. It is no wonder that many of our fellow citizens choose to not eat meat at all.
We’ve allowed this system to insidiously terrorize us in our own kitchens, making us afraid of our own cooking when it is not our kitchens, not the local butchers who are the origin of the problem.
It doesn’t have to be this way
The solution is simple–and can be easy:
Creating exemptions for local, custom slaughterhouses to process our meat–without having to buy half a cow at a time–is exactly what we need to decentralize our food production for our food safety and peace of mind.
This is the antidote to the massive industrial system that has created the circumstances for 195 MILLION pounds of meat to be recalled (over 390,000 cows worth of meat) in the last 10 years alone.5
Custom slaughter exemptions mean local meat transparency in production and processing. It means a return to knowing where our meat comes from, choosing the processors we know and trust, and not being forced to rely on foreign countries for meat to put on our family tables.
Representatives Thomas Massie and Chellie Pringree have brought this solution to our legislature with the PRIME Act.
The exemptions outlined in the bill mean that we can cultivate a local system that gives us the resilience we need within our communities and in our own kitchens to keep feeding our families clean, safe meat.
And should there be an issue, using the exact same mandatory processing standards as of today, it means that identification and containment of the source is exponentially easier. It means drastically lower exposures in a given instance. It means—full-stop—a much higher level of food safety…
It’s time to put American meat back on American tables.
Let’s make the PRIME Act the law of this great nation.
About Raw Milk Mama: I believe in the freedom to feed our families how we see fit. I also see the direction that our country is going--no one wants to live in a world where food scarcity is a constant reality. It's time to take back our food systems so they serve us, not monopolistic corporations.
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