Did you know that E. coli was unknown as a disease before 1983? That's right—E-coli didn't exist before factory farming. It's the result of natural gut bacteria that's mutated—and it does't take much to figure out what caused it to happen: routine administration of antibiotics, in an attempt to create health in animals sick from being treated as commodities—from overcrowding and unnatural diets.

Modern agriculture is no longer husbandry, with its focus on health and care of animals and crops used for food. It's been twisted into a process that treats animals as sacs of protein and soil as nothing more than a place to anchor roots. That's the heart of today's problems with food-borne illness. Given healthy food from healthy farms, there's no need for legislation to make us safe. Modern agribusiness, with its production-line farming, is the reason we're not safe.

The FDA and USDA have not made us safer. Indeed, these two agencies have become nothing more than arms of corporate business. Pharmaceuticals are approved based on the thinnest of research that hides adverse effects and bases benefits on highly questionable concepts. The USDA produces and foists the food pyramid on unwitting school children based primarily on its emphasis of grains, the heart and soul of agribusiness.

Current legislation being put forth would put even more control into the hands of the FDA, which has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted with the power it already has. To give it more is pure insanity. Yet, that's exactly what's currently proposed in Congress.

A recent study by the Make Our Food Safe Coalition (MOFSC) estimates that food-borne illness costs the US $182 billion a year. That study, though, does not take into account the illness resulting from factory farms' pollution or the harm done by antibiotic and other drug use in animals or the lack of nutrition inherent in modern petroleum-based vegetable and fruit farming. The truth is that the real health cost of modern farming must be several times greater than the MOFSC notes.

If food were grown according to nature's dictates, rather than for agribusiness profits, we'd pay more in terms of money. But the costs in terms of health aren't being factored into the picture. Labor-intensive farming would create jobs that have been lost to mechanization. Many people might even discover real pleasure and satisfaction in their employment, instead of the empty fill-a-slot jobs created by most modern business.

Recent news seems to indicate that public pressure against McCain's bill, Senate Bill 3002, the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010, has resulted in him pulling his support fot it. Don't, though, be complacent. That isn't the same bill as the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, Senate Bill 510. It would give unprecedented power to the FDA and the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), an unelected position. As written now, the HHS Secretary is specifically granted rulemaking authority over standards and rules related to virtually all aspects of the food growing and distribution process. Here's a quote from Section 419 Standards for Produce Safety:

...the Secretary shall adopt a final regulation to provide for minimum standards for those types of fruits and vegetables that are raw agricultural commodities for which the Secretary has determined that such standards minimize the risk of serious adverse health consequences or death.

In other words, whatever the HHS Secretary decides becomes law. In all practicality, such measures will most likely be delegated to the FDA, which answers to the HHS Secretary.

Section 420 of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act is called "Protection Against Intentional Adulteration". If your food is locally grown, there's no need for this sort of thing. Will it result in the requirement that all foods be wrapped in airtight packages? That seems to the the sort of thinking found in governmental agencies—an attempt to sterilize every aspect of life.

Section 422 is called "Recognition of Laboratory Accreditation for Analyses of Food". This is yet another indication of the removal of food from a natural product to be treated as nothing more than a mishmosh of chemicals. The "Enhancing Trackback and Recordkeeping" section focuses on identifying outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, something that's needed only because of modern agribusiness.

The money budgeted for the first year of the Food Safety Modernization Act's operation is $825 million. This is money that would be spent only because agribusiness is out of control. Yet, it will not do what's necessary to actually resolve the food-borne illness problem.

Virtually no limits to the power of the HHS Secretary would exist. If she decided that the home gardener needed to register as a food supplier, submit samples for analysis, and pay the costs incurred, this act would allow it.

Instead of addressing the real cause of food-borne illness in the United States, this bill would end up worsening the situation by pushing small producers out of business. It's the small producers who should be our salvation.

We desperately need to address the genuine issue of food safety—by dismantling the corporate nature of food production, not by adding layers of regulations and costs that small growers could not handle, or by granting virtually dictatorial power over our food to a governmental agency. We desperately need to get back to reality and return to following nature's rule in the production of food. Continuing down the path of presuming that we can sanitize and regulate our way out of food-borne illness is pure insanity.