WAIT, WAIT... DON'T TELL ME

A provision inserted in the latest farm bill, at the insistence of farm groups, bars the USDA from setting up a tracking system to identify the farms where the food was produced, reports the Des Moines Register. The article immediately follows this up with a priceless quote from Gary Weber of National Cattlemen's Beef Association: "If you're running a small farm with 30 cows or 100 cows, would you want this liability on you, when every time something went wrong they came back to you?"

Every time something went wrong - like what? Children dying from E.Coli and listeria? Well, yeah, if I was responsible for that I'd hate to find out about it, much less be held accountable in a court of law. But I'd have to consider it an occupational hazard of a profession - raising livestock - that resolutely floods America's grocery shelves and dinner plates with dangerous crap. Instead of the poor sloppy farmer having to suffer, we now have widespread deadly outbreaks of food poisoning that can't be traced to their source, and people continue to fall ill and die. Yay, priorities.