5. There Are Good Food Rules

Are there good food rules, as the title of this chapter suggests? Indeed, such rules do exist. For example, early on in this book I endorsed food-safety rules that punish those whose food sickens or kills people. I also endorsed some inspections and testing—to make sure food doesn’t do that in the first place. In addition to inspection and testing by agencies such as the FDA and USDA—of the sort, for example, that salumi crafted by Mark DeNittis and Il Mondo Vecchio were subjected to (and passed)—smart rules require employee hand washing. They mandate that food sellers keep potentially hazardous foods—such as raw meat—at temperatures below 40 °F. They require warning labels on foods that are more likely to sicken consumers—from raw meat to sprouts to raw milk. Concerns over sustainability play little or no role in such rules. And they shouldn’t. Food-safety rules shouldn’t care one bit whether or not the guilty party was a sustainable food producer. Leading food-safety lawyer Bill Marler, whom you met in chapter 1, is an equal-opportunity litigator, suing violators of all types and sizes. “To me it is very straightforward,” he told me, of every food company’s responsibility, regardless of size, to “do everything you can do to produce food that will not kill your customer.” I—and readers of this book, I suspect—agree with that statement.