After a long respite, I'm back to make some suggestions to our new congress and president. Congratulations to all of them, by the way. Now let's all buckle up and do our best to ride it out.
Anyhow, you have, no doubt, heard about the peanut butter problem. Bunch of people got sick from peanut butter. Some 470 or so people. A few even died. That's bad. The government must put new regulations in place to ensure that this kind of thing doesn't happen again.
My proposal is this - peanut farmers should register their farms as a "peanut premise". Then, they should mark each peanut, with an individual tag, that identifies the point of origin (premise). The farmers can then easily keep records of the date each peanut was planted, picked, and leaves the farm. All other points along the peanut processing route can be listed as a premise as well, and they can provide and transmit the same sorts of records to the government. As long as they relay those records to the government within 24 hours of each "event", the USDA will be able to determine the source of any future outbreaks.
Now, it would be a bother to farmers if they had to mark each peanut inside the shell. As you know, most peanuts have a shell containing two nuts. In order to make the whole thing manageable for the farmer, they can tag the outer shell, unless they open it, in which case each individual nut will require a tag.
Large processors who move the peanuts in batches can mark and track whole batches of peanuts as a single entity.
Granted this is likely to lead to consolidation of the peanut butter industry - dramatically increasing the likelihood that contamination will occur and contaminated food will be in every corner of the country before the government even realizes that there is a problem. Sure, it means that a single contamination could lead to every single jar of peanut butter everywhere in the country being potentially contaminated.
Hmm. Perhaps instead of creating ridiculous regulations that are likely to drive small farmers out of business and lead to a consolidated industry, the government could encourage the small farmer and the local sales, ensuring that contamination would be limited to a small area, easy to track, and contained to a small population. Nah - that would never work.
Oh - maybe the government should just leave us alone to do as we please. People who want to buy local can, people who want to buy from Acme Consolidated Peanutbutter and Jet Fuel Inc. can do so, too.
Na, more government is always better. I'm sure of it.
