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Health & Fitness

Plow to Plate Movie Series Presents: Farmageddon

Americans' right to access fresh, healthy foods is under attack. The filmmaker's quest to find healthy food turned into a journey to discover why access to these foods was being threatened.

There is more than one scene in Farmageddon of SWAT teams and sheriffs, pistols drawn, searching, seizing, and confiscating goods. But Farmageddon is not an action film, crime drama, or documentary about Mexican drug cartels or American suburbs ravaged by meth labs. The victims of these raids are small scale farmers and processors selling locally produced fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy products in particular, that have run afoul of state and federal food safety regulations. Farmageddon: the Unseen War on American Family Farms is an impassioned and personal indictment of American regulation run amuck and a plea for a saner and more rational food safety system.

The real problem is that the United States has two separate and distinct food systems. The first, a behemoth, is the industrial food system, comprised of factory farms [also known as Concentrated (or Confined) Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)], processors, and multinational corporations. The other system, about 2% of the total, is comprised of small, local, sustainable, farms. However, both systems operate under a single regulatory structure and set of laws that support large-scale industrial food production but threaten the very existence of family farms. 

This one-size-fits-all approach is not working and results in burdensome overregulation for many of the smaller producers that lack the money, manpower, time, and other resources of their larger competitors. For example, to receive a permit to sell lettuce and other goods at the weekend Union Square Farmers’ Market, merchants must fill out 3 inches of paperwork. But inflicting unnecessary, bureaucratic, obstacles on small producers is the least of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) misdeeds chronicled in this film. 

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Far more harrowing is the mistreatment of many farmers by federal regulators. A pioneering couple in Warren, Vermont was on the verge of revolutionizing sheep farming in this country when the government stepped in, fearing the spread of Mad Cow Disease. Despite the fact that scientific research had shown that only cows, and not sheep, could have this disease, the family was spied on and harassed. Eventually their animals were rounded up, carted away and slaughtered, and their equipment was tossed in a local landfill. The couple sued the USDA for damages and the agency was eventually forced to admit that all of the tests for disease came up negative. The USDA finally paid the family $1,500 per animal rather than the standard $5,000 because they were angry that the family had chosen to fight.

The USDA’s overreaction traumatized the couple’s children, who had become deeply attached to the animals, and cost the couple their pioneering entrepreneurial dreams, as well as their livelihood. They now make and sell cows’ cheese. Yet, what they experienced is not unique. Farmageddon profiles numerous individuals who suffered at the hands of the regulators. In the mildest of cases we watch as gallons upon gallons of raw milk are unceremoniously dumped onto the grass because the seller crossed state lines, which is illegal. In a more egregious case, a woman recounts a raid on her home in which she and her family were rounded up by armed enforcers, confined to their living room for hours while they confiscated her inventory, and were even told not to pick up the phone when her son, stationed abroad in the army, called home at his normal time.

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There’s a lot in this film to digest: the pros and possible cons of raw milk, the historical development of the pasteurization process, and the underlying scientific, social, and political forces behind the actions of the state. Not least of these themes, one voiced by libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul who is featured in the film, as well as members of the Tea Party, is when does government overstep its proper role?

We do not want to return to the age of the Robber Barons when cows fed nothing but waste from beer distilleries produced vile and sometimes lethal milk which had to be adulterated with chalk and flour to be made drinkable. We know from all too frequent outbreaks of e-coli from contaminated peanuts, ground beef, and spinach, that we need sensible and effective food safety regulations. But we also have to ponder the words of Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia and a star of the sustainable farm movement (and several documentaries like this one).  When asked if he had a single message for the USDA, he answered, “Why do you hate freedom so much?”  Why indeed?

 

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Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

Park Slope Food Coop – 2nd Floor

782 Union Street Brooklyn, NY 11215

7:00 p.m.  Refreshments will be served.

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