Foodie Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in his grave...

If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny -- Thomas Jefferson

Good old Thomas Jefferson, when he wasn't arguing the finer points of the Constitution and other matters of federalism, loved growing his own food and bringing home gourmet discoveries from his travels abroad. He conducted numerous experiments growing strains of peas (one of his favorites) and other vegetables. He brought home America's first known pasta machine from Italy and proceeded to become the Father of Macaroni and Cheese, creating a recipe of boiled macaroni to which butter, shredded yellow or white cheese and a little salt was added, then baked in an oven. Jefferson also boasted a higher-than-average consumption of vegetables, always accompanying meals with a fresh salad and homemade dressing.

I wonder what he would think of five law enforcement agencies (including two federal) raiding a raw and organic food club's distribution center WITH GUNS DRAWN. Here's the shocking (gasp!) video:



The L.A. Times tells the complete story in this article from July 25, 2010:

Raw Food Raid Highlights a Hunger

You can feel the sense of danger and suspense in this snippet:

With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.

Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

"I still can't believe they took our yogurt," said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. "There's a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they're raiding us because we're selling raw dairy products?"

Re-read that last sentence. Now think about the poor folks on the Arizona border with Mexico, dealing with criminal incursions from Mexican drug cartels (NO, I'm not talking about peaceful farm workers and charwomen - don't even start!), and the U.S. Justice Department just shrugs it's shoulders and tells local authorities that they can't ask those criminals for documentation. Head-scratcher, huh?

It's easy to misattribute this outrage to a mere bureaucratic overstep - perhaps a need for some local official to prove his value to the public good by protecting us from evil cheese or something, and of course it's much safer for a SWAT team to go after a grocer than an actual violent criminal. But there's much more going on here than meets the eye.

In 2009, my favorite Democrat (yeah, right), my very own Senator Dick (no comment, really!) Durbin, seeing a need to crack down on farmers making real food and on rogue grocers like the proprietors of the raw and organic store mentioned above, introduced S 510 - The Food Safety and Modernization Act, which has yet to pass or be killed. This lovely bit of legislative prose places all U.S. food and farms under the control of Homeland Security and the Defense Department in the event of an "emergency," which is not defined. It requires compliance with the dictates of the World Trade Organization (goodbye, sovereignty!), allows the government to mandate the use of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones and genetically-modified seed and animals, and that's just the beginning.

There's a great blog post on it here. Click me.

You read that right - it would allow the government to MANDATE pesticides, hormones, antibiotics and other things you just might think you don't need on your family table. Yeah, and it would also make it illegal to wash and store seed stocks, which would make keeping your own seeds, essentially illegal. Gee... you might have to get them from multinational corporations like Monsanto or something, rather than your local garden supply or seed supplier.

If this thing passes, it will be combined with an equally (well, almost) draconian bill which passed the House last year - HR 2749: The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009. (More on that here.)

But hey, you have a RIGHT to decide what you eat, and even to eat wholesome food for health, don't ya? Heh... NO, says the FDA. This is why I love to watch courts - it's where you can find out what's really going on. When some Iowa farmers challenged an FDA ban on interstate sales of raw milk, the FDA filed a motion to dismiss, and its stated reasons were truly eye-opening. Citing case law rather than the Constitution to back its claims, as has been the unfortunate practice in law for far too long, the FDA asserts the following:

a. There is No Right to Consume or Feed Children Any Particular Food
b. There is No Generalized Right to Bodily and Physical Health
c. There is No Fundamental Right to Freedom of Contract

So there you have it. The Food and Drug Administration, which you THOUGHT was out to protect you from bad drugs, bad food, and look out for your general health, asserts that you have no right to any particular food, no right to freedom of Contract, and no right TO YOUR BODY OR PHYSICAL HEALTH. And yeah, they have cases to prove it.

Here's a great blog post on this, and...

Here's a link to a PDF file of the brief in support of the Federal government's motion to dismiss.

On that note, I'll call it quits for today. Stay tuned tomorrow, when I might get really crazy and sound like I'm espousing conspiracy theories or something. But that would be crazy, wouldn't it?