Government Food-Safety Regulations Don't Always Make For Safer Food
Smart piece over at reason by Baylen Linnekin. Three ways food-safety regulation makes food less safe:

First, a flawed food-safety regulation can prevent people from gaining access to a healthy food. In 18th century France, the country's parliament banned consumption of the potato. Among the host of diseases the govenment mistakenly attributed to consumption of the tuber was leprosy. This was particularly problematic because at the time France's government issued the potato edict, the country was in the midst of a famine.

...Another way that a food-safety regaultion can make people less safe is when the rule actively promotes the spread of disease. A perfect illustration of this can be found in the USDA's 90-year meat-inspection scheme--labeled "poke and sniff" by critics and supporters alike--that the agency replaced only in the 1990s.

Poke-and sniff often entailed having an inspector "poke" a piece of meat with a rod and "sniff" the rod to determine, in the inspector's opinion, whether the meat contained pathogens. This method meant that the hands, eyes, and noses of inspectors were to be literally the front line of the USDA's food-safety regime.

The problem? "[I]f a piece of meat was in fact tainted but the inspector's eyes or nose could not detect the contamination after he poked the meat, the inspector would again use his hands or the same rod to poke the next piece of meat, and the next, and so on."

This approach likely resulted in USDA inspectors transmitting filth from diseased meat to fresh meat on a daily basis. Food may actually have been safer when the USDA failed to regularly inspect some plants for a mere three decades.

Related to this latter point, the third way in which a food-safety regulation can make people less safe is when the regulation attaches a false veneer of safety to a particular food based on the public's misplaced faith in the ability of regulators to ensure food is safe.

The summer 2010 recall of hundreds of millions of eggs due to negligent USDA oversight at the laying facility--even as the agency's egg graders provided the public with the false veneer of food safety--is a perfect illustration.

While the FDA used the recall to argue for more authority to inspect egg-laying facilities, the truth is that USDA egg graders already on site simply dropped the ball when it came to ensuring the eggs they graded were safe.

Linnekin's full article, The Food Safety Fallacy: More Regulation Doesn't Necessarily Make Food Safer, can be read at the Northeastern University Law Journal website.

His mini-bio below his reason piece:

Baylen J. Linnekin, a lawyer, is executive director of Keep Food Legal, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that advocates in favor of food freedom--the right to grow, raise, produce, buy, sell, cook, eat, and drink the foods of our own choosing.

Hear, hear.

And people should also have the freedom to grow, sell, and use pot. (And I say that as somebody who hates pot and whose drug of choice is dry white wine.)