Devil's advocate!
I love raw milk, and I like selling extra eggs or produce. I'd love to be able to get away with dressing out animals in our backyard and selling them. I've read a bunch of books on the small grower's movements out there and all of that jazz. It wasn't until I snarked with someone equally snarky before I came to understand why regulations were put in place.
My old stance has always been, if someone knows the risks of buying raw milk or eating meat Old Joe dressed out in his backyard, then who cares? The risks were known up front and they wanted to do it, anyway.
But what do you do when Old Joe sells bad meat that kills someone? Or Gramaw Ethyl down the road sells canned food that has botulism? Who is at fault here? Should the government get involved and tell Old Joe and Gramaw Ethyl they can no longer sell their produce, or fine them? How much do you fine someone for selling produce that killed or seriously injured a person? And without government intervention, how do you keep it from happening again? It's easy to say word of mouth would shut them down, but how long before _everyone_ knows that these people are not careful with the food they are selling?
Yeah, the regulations suck. Yeah, I wish I could sell what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted, without some government busy-body sniffing around my business. But on the flip side, if I bought bad food that put someone I cared about in the hospital - or put me in the hospital - I would not be satisfied with "oh well, I knew it was a risk." How many of you would be ok if that one in a million carrot you bought did serious damage to your kid?
And before anyone condemns the FDA, believe me, I already know about how awful our food practices are. I've complained about how we ship food all over the US without needing to. And how horrible animals are treated before and during the process (urgh - bleach baths to clean off the poo? Seriously?). But I want someone to look up how many cases of botulism we had back when everyone was swapping canned food regularly compared to how many cases of it we have today. When we have a "serious outbreak" for food that is sold NATION WIDE everyone is mortified that FIVE people died. Let me repeat: NATION WIDE. Then everyone gets in a huff about how dangerous food is and how the FDA is failing at their jobs.
Relatively speaking, the FDA has done exactly what it was meant to do: make our food safer. The population as a whole has decided that safer isn't enough; we need safer, more choices (in and out of season), and at the lowest price possible. Our horrible food standards are not the fault of the FDA. It is the fault of a nation that thinks that $2/lb for chicken is outrageous and happily buys up those 10lb bags of chicken quarters at
Wal-Mart for $0.59/lb.
A nation. Not everyone. Obviously some of us are willing to shell out the extra money.