Food Production: What's REALLY Protecting You
Posted by BradHarrington 9 years, 9 months ago to Politics
While digging through some old stuff earlier today, I stumbled across this piece from about five years ago.
BUT, some stuff is relatively "timeless" if you know what I mean, and I think this piece qualifies. I can't provide a link because I crashed my blog years ago and the Wyoming Tribune Eagle didn't post commentaries online back in 2010, but here it is in text format.
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May 16th, 2010
Food Production: What’s Really Protecting You
By Bradley Harrington
“To paraphrase Gresham’s Law: bad ‘protection’ drives out good. The attempt to protect the consumer by force undercuts the protection he gets from incentive.” - Alan Greenspan, “The Assault On Integrity,” 1963 -
In his commentary “Food rule protects you” (Wyoming Tribune Eagle, May 14, 2010), Dean Finkenbinder, Consumer Health Services Manager for the Wyoming Dept. of Agriculture, would have you believe that government protects the consumer from food-borne illnesses and other health threats:
“The current Wyoming Food Rule, much like the statutes before it, strives to protect citizens and producers through regulations and inspections.” The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.
Having spent 20 years working in restaurants in various states of the nation, I have become pretty familiar with how food establishments are licensed and inspected.
Here in Cheyenne, for instance, according to the Laramie County Dept. of Health’s website, “Food establishments that sell or serve food to the public must have a State of Wyoming Food License and be inspected by Cheyenne/Laramie County Health Department,” and “the majority of these establishments have two unannounced inspections per year.”
My experience with such inspections is that they average around two hours to complete.
So, in a typical food establishment open 12 hours a day, 360 days a year, yielding a total open-time of 4,320 hours annually, the government-mandated, on-the-spot “protection” consists of a measly 4 hours, or .09% of that period. Would you feel your property was safe from attack if your security guard spent less than one-tenth of 1% of the time actually overseeing the premises?
These inspections, quite clearly, are not all that stands between a restaurant’s customers and an E. Coli, salmonella or botulism outbreak. So, what protects people from such food-borne illnesses the other 99.91% of the time? The “invisible hand” of the free marketplace.
Food producers do not make money off making people sick, nor do they have a vested interest in keeping poorly-maintained facilities that breed disease. Economic forces, to the contrary, work in exactly the opposite direction - when they are permitted to do so. And the most powerful market force at work to guarantee the quality of an establishment’s output? The integrity of its reputation, which can take years to earn and acquire.
Yet state and county regulations regarding the production and sale of food do not permit the value of reputation to operate in an unhampered fashion: for they declare, in effect, that all food--producing facilities measure up once they’ve met health-inspection requirements.
Common sense would dictate that some producers are going to be more effective than others at meeting customers’ needs for high-quality food production - but government regulations and inspections, by placing all establishments on an “equal footing” of clearance, act to destroy this reputation, substituting bureaucratic decree, i.e., force and fear, for that value instead.
In this manner, such health certifications disarm the public into thinking that an establishment meets quality standards when, in fact, as we have seen, there is no guarantee that this is the case at all: and people still occasionally suffer from food poisoning in every state of the union all the time.
Mr. Finkenbinder, however, has a different view of human action: “Rules and regulations are a necessity in many areas of life. Building and fire codes help ensure safety by making sure buildings are structurally sound and won’t go up in flames around you. The Food Safety Rule in Wyoming is no different.”
So, according to Mr. Finkenbinder, those evil producers, left to their own shady devices, would, in addition to stuffing poisons down your throat, also have your house collapsing around your ears - while it’s on fire, no less. Isn’t the contempt for the value of reputation, and the insinuation that all producers are nothing more than “fly-by-night” artists out for quick bucks at the expense of the public, obvious?
Yet, as he views all producers as hustlers who can only be restrained from their rapacious practices through state edict, Mr. Finkenbinder seems quite convinced that the integrity of government bureaucrats is cut from a different cloth; THEIR actions, of course, will always be above reproach. Anyone care to defend that hypothesis?
No, the results of such regulatory burdens are (1) a reduction in true, market-driven protection; (2) an increase in both unemployment and competition as the marginal producers are driven out of the marketplace by added fees; and (3) the infliction upon all of us, guilty or not, of the tax yoke that pays for it all.
What is Mr. Finkenbinder forgetting in the midst of all this (alleged) legislative “protection”? That, in a free society, it is not the purpose of government to engage in preventive law. Liberty demands that people are left free to act as they choose - up to, and not until, they actually commit force or fraud. What would be next? That I have to license my hands because they might reach for someone’s throat?
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Brad Harrington
brad@bradandbarbie.com
BUT, some stuff is relatively "timeless" if you know what I mean, and I think this piece qualifies. I can't provide a link because I crashed my blog years ago and the Wyoming Tribune Eagle didn't post commentaries online back in 2010, but here it is in text format.
********************
May 16th, 2010
Food Production: What’s Really Protecting You
By Bradley Harrington
“To paraphrase Gresham’s Law: bad ‘protection’ drives out good. The attempt to protect the consumer by force undercuts the protection he gets from incentive.” - Alan Greenspan, “The Assault On Integrity,” 1963 -
In his commentary “Food rule protects you” (Wyoming Tribune Eagle, May 14, 2010), Dean Finkenbinder, Consumer Health Services Manager for the Wyoming Dept. of Agriculture, would have you believe that government protects the consumer from food-borne illnesses and other health threats:
“The current Wyoming Food Rule, much like the statutes before it, strives to protect citizens and producers through regulations and inspections.” The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.
Having spent 20 years working in restaurants in various states of the nation, I have become pretty familiar with how food establishments are licensed and inspected.
Here in Cheyenne, for instance, according to the Laramie County Dept. of Health’s website, “Food establishments that sell or serve food to the public must have a State of Wyoming Food License and be inspected by Cheyenne/Laramie County Health Department,” and “the majority of these establishments have two unannounced inspections per year.”
My experience with such inspections is that they average around two hours to complete.
So, in a typical food establishment open 12 hours a day, 360 days a year, yielding a total open-time of 4,320 hours annually, the government-mandated, on-the-spot “protection” consists of a measly 4 hours, or .09% of that period. Would you feel your property was safe from attack if your security guard spent less than one-tenth of 1% of the time actually overseeing the premises?
These inspections, quite clearly, are not all that stands between a restaurant’s customers and an E. Coli, salmonella or botulism outbreak. So, what protects people from such food-borne illnesses the other 99.91% of the time? The “invisible hand” of the free marketplace.
Food producers do not make money off making people sick, nor do they have a vested interest in keeping poorly-maintained facilities that breed disease. Economic forces, to the contrary, work in exactly the opposite direction - when they are permitted to do so. And the most powerful market force at work to guarantee the quality of an establishment’s output? The integrity of its reputation, which can take years to earn and acquire.
Yet state and county regulations regarding the production and sale of food do not permit the value of reputation to operate in an unhampered fashion: for they declare, in effect, that all food--producing facilities measure up once they’ve met health-inspection requirements.
Common sense would dictate that some producers are going to be more effective than others at meeting customers’ needs for high-quality food production - but government regulations and inspections, by placing all establishments on an “equal footing” of clearance, act to destroy this reputation, substituting bureaucratic decree, i.e., force and fear, for that value instead.
In this manner, such health certifications disarm the public into thinking that an establishment meets quality standards when, in fact, as we have seen, there is no guarantee that this is the case at all: and people still occasionally suffer from food poisoning in every state of the union all the time.
Mr. Finkenbinder, however, has a different view of human action: “Rules and regulations are a necessity in many areas of life. Building and fire codes help ensure safety by making sure buildings are structurally sound and won’t go up in flames around you. The Food Safety Rule in Wyoming is no different.”
So, according to Mr. Finkenbinder, those evil producers, left to their own shady devices, would, in addition to stuffing poisons down your throat, also have your house collapsing around your ears - while it’s on fire, no less. Isn’t the contempt for the value of reputation, and the insinuation that all producers are nothing more than “fly-by-night” artists out for quick bucks at the expense of the public, obvious?
Yet, as he views all producers as hustlers who can only be restrained from their rapacious practices through state edict, Mr. Finkenbinder seems quite convinced that the integrity of government bureaucrats is cut from a different cloth; THEIR actions, of course, will always be above reproach. Anyone care to defend that hypothesis?
No, the results of such regulatory burdens are (1) a reduction in true, market-driven protection; (2) an increase in both unemployment and competition as the marginal producers are driven out of the marketplace by added fees; and (3) the infliction upon all of us, guilty or not, of the tax yoke that pays for it all.
What is Mr. Finkenbinder forgetting in the midst of all this (alleged) legislative “protection”? That, in a free society, it is not the purpose of government to engage in preventive law. Liberty demands that people are left free to act as they choose - up to, and not until, they actually commit force or fraud. What would be next? That I have to license my hands because they might reach for someone’s throat?
********************
Brad Harrington
brad@bradandbarbie.com
When I started my own consulting business, I eventually found time available between engagements to expand my knowledge of other things of interest, and cooking is one of those.
Since I have really learned to cook I find the value to me of eating at restaurants is much lower than before. To finally get back to the original topic, I also find that a substantial minority (more than 30%)of the times that I do eat at restaurants now, not only is the quality of the food disappointing, I have a negative physical reaction to the product. This never occurs when I prepare food myself, so I conclude that it is not a fault of my physical system.
When I frequented restaurants in years past this never occurred. The restaurants I visit today on the surface appear to be a higher quality in general than the ones I visited in years past.
I conclude that the product from the restaurants I hire to prepare food is not at the standard that is produced in my kitchen, nor at the standard of a few years ago, and the standards of quality are getting worse as time goes on while the cost continues to rise much faster than the costs of raw materials. In restaurant food, value for value is increasingly hard to find. Government quality and cleanliness inspections do not appear to work.
I've just begun to start growing/harvesting my own stuff. It kicks the Hell out of the processed pap we're being fed by a county mile. I would strongly urge others to do the same thing whenever possible. You can always sell or can what you can't consume immediately. Around here in Wyoming such harvests get top dollar as the supermarket stuff is hopelessly outclassed by "heirloom" products...
Brad
Brad