Kissed by the Nanny State

This is an excerpt from a back issue of the New York Times. Although it is not about milk, it is yet another example of a loss of quality foods and ancient traditions to unfounded fears and overbearing regulations.

"On Monday inspectors destroyed all the cured meats at Il Buco restaurant in NoHo. They did so, according to the owner, Donna Lennard, not because of any evidence of contamination but because the temperature in the curing room was six degrees higher than it should have been.

"These are pigs that were raised for us," Ms. Lennard said. "We knew their names. We were trying to do something sustainable and traditional, and this is what happens."

The process of curing meat has been refined over thousands of years by people who are on intimate terms with their handiwork. Food historians believe that the Romans picked up the craft from the Lucanians, a tribe that for almost 1,000 years ruled part of what is now Basilicata in southern Italy, developing a reputation for sausages while fending off imperial conquerors. The Greek sausage loukanika and its Mediterranean cousins the longaniza (Spain), luganega (Italy), and linguiça (Portugal) are all descendants of the ancient lucanicus."

It seems more and more as people are removed from the actual production of actual food, they want the government to control their fear of the unknown. Factory farms and huge industrial animal processing plants cannot completely control their final product in the best of conditions, and arguably, they do not create the best of conditions. An individual producer, be it of raw milk, fresh spinach, or in this article salami, can and must be aware and control intangibles that science may never define. And that is an art. And art must be free to express and create. Just as we are a nation founded upon individual liberty, all men deserve the freedom to eat as they choose.

Please click here to read the whole article