New Ag Labeling is So Un-COOL

This San Francisco Chronicle story, “What raw milk and the economic meltdown have in common,” might be the best argument I’ve seen to buy local.

Here’s the lesson from the piece, which compares the global financial crisis to the melamine contaminated raw milk from China:

The hopeful news in all this is that in the process of creating so much toxicity both the distressed loans and the distressed food are teaching us important lessons about the limits of scale and regulation that support the massive globalization of the last decade. We are learning that regulators have lost the ability, if they ever had it, to truly monitor the extent of the danger.

At least if you know the farmer, and something goes wrong, you can more easily trace the problem.

I’ve been eating processed food with a blindfold on, trying not to imagine where the meats and coatings originate. The blindfold is off and now I want better labels to be more sure.

Unfortunately, as the article notes, the Department of Agriculture’s Country of Origin Labeling that went into effect on Oct. 1 doesn’t apply to processed mystery meats.

Flickr photo showing COOL label from amgrz469’s photostream.