By Jack Moffitt

Editor’s note: This is Mr. Moffitt’s essay from last week’s Farmers Market Report (June 20th), which didn’t get up as I was in a place without Internet service. My apologies to both my reader’s and Mr. Moffitt for the omission.

In a backhanded way, someone makes your food choices for you. They do it in a backhanded way because other than imprisoning you they couldn’t pull it off. Who is it? The government. The government, from top to bottom.

At the top, the government skews your diet towards the products of Big Grain, Big Beef and Big Poultry. They do it with USDA subsidies that pay farmers to grow grain in massive quantities. Since they have flooded the markets with these cheap grains, Big Beef and Big Chicken come in to convert the excess to meat. Hey, if a benefactor gave me nearly free grain for life, I’d buy a cow too! You are faced with a choice at the store – 99 cent chicken or 8.99 wild salmon. The cards are clearly stacked into the chicken camp. In effect, the 99 cent chicken is welfare food. The chicken’s low price is just the welfare recipient passing on the welfare bennies.

In the middle, the government skews your diet toward eating at a distant public trough. The food processors use the government to carve out monopolies. By requiring unnecessary capital expenditures for slaughterhouses, dairies and food processors, the government insures that only well capitalized (i.e. rich) corporations provide food from those facilities. Now, you have no choice. You eat the product of the mega corporation and you pay their price. When Big Food makes a mistake it ain’t pretty. Remember the Big Food peanut butter this past winter? How many thousands were sickened?

At the lowest level, the government skews your diet to whatever the food middleman sells. Since they control what the middlemen sell, by virtue of their skewing from the top down, they now have total control, because they can control at the local level where the food is sold with zoning, and the capital requirements, with additional building and health codes.

How does all of this play out in the real world? The top level skew has pushed the country into obesity, if in fact that is the only ramification of the farmer welfare system. The middle skew makes sure we eat commodity foods from monopolistic corporations. Local goat farmers can’t sell you goat milk, even if your intent is to cook with it and heat it beyond levels pasteurization requires. One farmer friend can’t open a small on-farm store because of zoning restrictions. Another farmer friend has been harassed by police for selling farm products in an empty parking lot. – no building, no food sales ordinance. Last night, at a unnamed city council’s meeting I listened to elected officials discuss soil samples and décor, as they rejected an orchardists’s request for a building permit for his tractor shed.

I have been to six or seven other countries. I can’t remember any of them not having a public market area. I have been to probably twice that many U.S. States and can’t remember even one of them having a public market place. We are lucky here in Brownsville to have the government let up for 4 hours a week. Protect that, don’t let it go.

You can help the situation by patronizing the market, and passing the message on to all of your elected representatives – “Get out of the way of our local food!” Send your federal representatives one question – “Why are we giving farmers money to grow foods that are causing obesity?” Send a message to your state level representatives – “Don’t regulate small local producers like you do Nabisco!”

Till then, eat what is good, not what is pushed your way by happenstance and politics!