Rumination - a deep or considered thought about something.
Eggsasperating Inspections
If there's a question I've heard too many times, it's, "Why is local, small-scale organic so expensive?"
There are many reasons why organic food is more expensive but, surprisingly, most of them are completely unrelated to the cost of production.
Government-regulated "food safety" is a big one. Just this week, I had 40 dozen eggs put in detention by a government employee because 6 out of 84 randomly chosen eggs were 1 gram below the government standards for an Extra-Large egg. I had to reweigh all 480 eggs and separate out any that teetered in the balance between large and extra-large.
I told the inspector that I could reweigh them quickly while she swabbed my egg-grading facility for any scary pathogens (I'll get into this one in a minute). I was told that it would have to be a separate visit for re-inspection of those eggs. Keep in mind, the eggs are clean, drug and chemical free, laid by hens living in green pasture. The eggs are in government detention with an official government signature warning label. In fact, I was not even permitted to move them. I needed to get another piece of paper signed just to have permission to move them out of the cooler to a table to reweigh them. OVER 1 GRAM (that's about 1/30 of an ounce)!
Now here's the really frustrating part: out of the back of a dirty pick-up truck in the driveway, I could legally sell eggs with obvious poop, cracks, and deformities, having been laid by sick hens in a filthy barn, and the government wouldn't even look my way. I would be permitted to just put a label on the carton that said, "ungraded eggs" and it would be a "buy at your own risk" scenario. But because the eggs are sold in what is technically a commercial building, they must be sold according to the CFIA protocols, which include a separated government inspected egg grading facility with a non-residential washroom for the inspector with the appropriate hand-soap.
I asked the inspector if she ever sampled the actual contents of the eggs (i.e. the white and the yolk). NOPE! They will test barns, they'll swab countertops, they'll weigh eggs, they'll demand paperwork, they'll even send me a bill in the mail for the headache, and they'll do all of it in the name of protecting the consumer, but they won't sample the eggs themselves for salmonella. They'll take 12 production environment tests in our 50 sq. ft egg room, often swabbing within a foot of their last sample, but not one sample of the actual end-user product, the egg itself.
You see, the industry makes the rules, and the industry would never allow the eggs to be tested because almost all their eggs have some salmonella. So, they pretend that using bleach to wash the shell will make these contaminated eggs safe. As a follow-up, the egg-industry lobbies the government to make raw egg products illegal so that no-one eats an un-cooked egg and traces their sickness back to them. That way I can't sell you good old-fashioned nutrient-dense mayonnaise even though it's impossible for my eggs to have salmonella. I'd be a criminal for selling you mayonnaise, but the industry is well within the law to whitewash their high-risk product.
Their idea of safety is removing our freedom to do good, so they can continue to do evil.
Let me digress a bit to explain how salmonella gets inside an egg. The explanation of the problem is as simple as the solution for the problem. Industrial layer barns have too many birds, too little bedding, and birds overfed but undernourished. These conditions lead to the perfect storm.
Ammonia levels in the barns are off the charts burning lesions into the birds' sensitive lungs creating a portal to the bloodstream for toxic pathogens. At the same time, the malnourished and often dead birds load the bedding with a high pathogen level (particularly salmonella). The constant flapping of wings normal to laying hens creates a fecal haze in the barns that is inhaled into the open wounds in their lungs. The salmonella gets into the eggs because it's in the bloodstream. No amount of washing eggs or scrubbing the grading facilities with toxic disinfectants will make a difference.
What to do? Never allow your barn to smell like ammonia. We pasture our birds all summer long in a portable open shelter. No possibility for ammonia there. In the winter, we house the birds in a deep bedding barn and open the doors to their outdoor yard anytime the weather allows it. The barn never stinks.
Clean farming in conjunction with a maximum nutrition diet for strong immune function categorically rules out the possibility of salmonella being in the egg. The smell of the farm is directly related to the health of the egg. If you want to know if the eggs are safe, make sure you can't smell the barn.
Back to the bizarre inspection system. Appalling is the incredible heap of plastic garbage produced every time inspectors come to our farm. They use new latex gloves for every swab to prevent cross-contamination, even though I used the same cloth and sink water to wash every surface. It's sheer insanity. (I always rescue the gloves from the trash can, so we can use them in the machine shop as grease gloves.)
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is paid for by the taxpayer but owned by the food industry. The CFIA needs to dissolve and return the tax dollars to the people. If farmers or industries make people sick, they should be boycotted. Let the people decide who can produce food. This approach is the only effective one.
Why should people who are too lazy and irresponsible to know anything about their food be able to demand that the government take money from me to pay for expensive, dysfunctional, bureaucratic "solutions" to ensure their safety?
If someone wants to hire an inspector to visit the farms where their food comes from and give a report, let them pay the bill. The system we have at present is theft and criminal negligence at best, murder at worst.
Can you imagine how much better it would be for us all if the government stopped roadblocking small producers with a tangled mess of red tape and stupid "compliance" rules? I could knock a serious chunk of the price off our eggs if I could sell them ungraded, without anyone taking up my time with useless checkups. I could just stick 90% of our eggs in a carton and hand them to the customer without having to wash, candle, weigh, and sort them. The remaining 10% "not perfectly clean eggs" could be sold for a discount to customers who weren't bothered by that. Talk about efficiency and freedom.
You see, it's not hard to pay for an extra non-residential bathroom for your inspector when you move a million dozen eggs every year. But when you apply that same cost to a small operation, it represents several years of profit. Complying with ultra-particular gram weights isn't hard when you can justify buying state of the art automated egg-grading technology because you move so many eggs. We couldn't pay for a machine like that in a lifetime. The CFIA has basically created a "You can't ride on the rollercoaster unless you're this tall" rule. No problem for the big guy, rough for the little guy.
So, again, "Why is organic so expensive?"
The answer is simple – publicly-funded tyranny, ineptitude, and waste, coupled with a built-in discrimination against small scale operations.
