Too much regulation

We stopped at the St. Benoit yogurt stand on Sunday to get our weekly plain yogurt fix.

This is not just any yogurt. It is made from the milk of grass-fed jersey cows in Sonoma County. There really is nothing like it.

We are not the only fans. The demand has grown so much that the company is expanding, beyond the state even.

Which, of course, means extra attention from federal and state food inspectors. These are the people who don't want you eating poisoned food. Good, I say, I don't want to eat poisoned food either.

Unfortunately, they focus on the small food producers, not big agribusiness.

St. Benoit has had to switch from hand-filling their ceramic yogurt containers to mechanically filling glass containers and then applying a glue-sealed metal lid. The old lids were foil, scrunched on like you would applying aluminum foil to the top of a jar, and then shrink wrapped in a plastic band. Not any more. Now it's all high tech.

The idea is that mechanization is cleaner and healthier than when people are involved.

My main aggravation with this is that the old yogurt containers were re-usable. We returned them each week. The new ones are recyclable - we have to dispose of them in our recycling bins. Environmentalism 101 knows that re-use is better for the environment than re-cycle.

This decree is part of an ongoing program to regulate small producers so they don't put dangerous germs into our food.

There was an article in the LA Times last week about inspectors visiting small organic farmers and telling them they couldn't make their own fertilizers (fear of animal manure contaminating vegetables) or use water from their own creeks (fear of toxins?).

Instead they need to buy fertilizer and water from accredited (big business?) sources.

This is so aggravating. Almost all food poisoning outbreaks are from big food companies or big food distribution companies. Not small farms where the owners eat the food they produce, and are therefore very conscious of the products and procedures they use.

I think the health hazards to worry about are the chemicals that land on our food from the air (what is in that smog?), the ground water (fortunately we don't have fracking near us, do our farmers?), and the tap water used when there is not enough natural water to go around.

But do you see inspectors going after the companies that pollute the air, ground and water? No, of course not. There's no political will for that.

So the small farmers get harassed, and the big companies pollute our planet unimpeded.

What can we do, except continue to support the little guy with our food dollars. And keep all our food dollars away from big agribusiness which doesn't need our support because it gets more than enough from the government.