Food-Safety Regulations Don’t Always Mean Safer Food
30th June 2012
In my article, “The Food-Safety Fallacy: More Regulation Doesn’t Necessarily Make Food Safer,” I use ancient and more recent historical examples of flawed rules to rebut the common misconception that more food-safety regulation means safer food. Rather, history shows us that food-safety regulations have often made food (and, consequently, people) less safe.
June 30th, 2012 at 18:53
A thoughtfully written piece with a cautionary note which we all should heed.
Quantity (of regulation) does not equal or engender quality (of regulation).
June 30th, 2012 at 21:09
The usual drill in food regulation in recent years is this (it sucked much less back before 1960 or so)
Some huge corporation does something appalling. Something must be done.
A regulation is passed that makes compliance much more relatively expensive for smaller operations. Often it is written by lobbyists for the original offender.
Frequently the original offender even gets an exemption.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the ‘economies of scale’ that exist in most industries today are primarily regulatory (easier to absorb the fixed costs of compliance as a megacorp than as a mom & pop or small corporation).
One of the easiest ways to make an economic profit is to have the government dig your ‘economic moat’ (Warren Buffet’s term, not mine) to protect you from real competition.