November 18, 2010 The Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510) is being considered in the Senate today. One of the amendments, the Tester amendment (to protect family scale producers), was just ratified to be included in the Managers Amendment. So if the bill goes forward, the Tester amendment will be part of it.

When asked why he thought the small farmer could even be regulated by local entities, Senator Jon Tester (Montana) replied,

“They’re small, there’s a pride of ownership there that’s real, they raise food they don’t raise a commodity as what happens when operations get bigger and bigger, and there’s a direct customer relationship with that processor or that farmer that means a lot. And if a mistake is made – which rarely happens – it doesn’t impact hundreds of thousands of people. We know exactly where the problem was, and we know exactly how to fix it. So the traceability of the outbreaks is immediate, and is taken care of without impacting 20-30 states and hundreds of thousands of people.”

Want to learn more? Check out the discussions going on at Food Fight and Do we really have a food-safety crisis? at Grist.