Food Safety Working Group Accepting Comments

So the White House's Food Safety Working Group is on Twitter, and they said they were open for comments. Here's what I wrote them:

First, it's ridiculous that the FDA, with responsibility for 80% of food inspections, has a much smaller inspection personnel budget than the USDA. And I certainly hope that if Michael Taylor is put in charge of the FSWG, that he's gotten over that nonsense about physical plant inspections being unnecessary after all the recent contamination outbreaks. Otherwise, this FSWG effort will rightly be seen as a pointless chicken sacrifice, a ritual effort to give the appearance of doing something while merely hoping to calm the public.

The 'do something, anything' mentality is why we still have take our shoes off at the airport and walk around barefoot in public, a useless and humiliating exercise that distracts from the utter lack of security surrounding air freight and shipping ports. Please don't waste people's time.

Second, I know a lot of money has been spent studying it, but please do what you can to halt this destructive National Animal ID System plan at the premise ID level. It penalizes small farms and doesn't help with identifying the main source of contamination, which is poor packing plant safety practices and excessive line speed during slaughter.

Also, anything that puts the Amish out of business is a PR disaster that the federal government probably doesn't want to deal with.

Third, please establish real accountability in food labeling and the supply chain. Manufacturers should know what they're putting in food and where it comes from or they shouldn't be allowed to sell it. A good start would be requiring the labeling of food that might contain genetically modified organisms, because people should have the right to know what they're eating and corporations should have to tell us, even if they can afford to buy entire congressional committees.

'We don't know' should no longer be an acceptable answer from food manufacturers as to where their products come from or what they're made of.

Thank you for reading.