Food Fight
In This Series
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The real nitty-gritty on small farms and the food-safety bill
The Food Safety Modernization Act is back in play due to a procedural error, and facing renewed opposition from an unlikely quarter: small farms and food processors and the people who support them. Here, we drag our experts back for a detailed debate on who's exempt, under what circumstances, and what the FDA's agenda might be.
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Does the food safety bill give the FDA too much power — or not enough?
Debate begins later today in the Senate on the Food Safety Modernization Act. We conclude our Food Fight over the bill with a discussion about whether the government can be trusted to inspect, regulate, and penalize big and small facilities adequately -- and fairly.
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Will the Tester amendment to S. 510 help small farms and processors, but put more kids at risk?
"Deadly pathogens do not discriminate based on the size of a business," argues Food Fight panelist Kathleen Chrismer, the mother of a young victim of E. coli poisoning. Others counter that food can never be 100 percent safe.
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Will the Food Safety Modernization Act harm small farms or producers?
Voting on S. 510 could happen Wednesday. If this food-safety bill passes, it will greatly expand the FDA's authority and lessen food-borne illnesses. But in doing so, will it knee-cap America's nascent local-food system? Grist's panel of experts take their gloves off for an epic debate.
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Will the Food Safety Modernization Act better protect us from contaminated food?
Our invited panel of experts -- and two scrappy Grist readers -- debate whether the bill now before the Senate will decrease large-scale food-borne illness outbreaks of the type we've recently seen in eggs and peanut butter.
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Do we really have a food-safety crisis?
In this first installment in our debate over the Food Safety Modernization Act, our experts lock horns over food-borne-illness data and whether the problems we have with the food system are about dirty, bumpy vegetables -- or dirty, buggy cattle.
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The Food Safety Modernization Act
We've invited an array of food-policy experts along with a few Grist readers to debate whether there is indeed a food-safety crisis and if so, whether the current legislation before the Senate will protect eaters and punish the right producers.
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Do locavores really need math lessons?
Are locavores wrong in thinking they're helping to save the planet, as a recent NYT op-ed challenged? Experts James McWilliams, Anna Lappe, and others weigh in.
