America's battle over food rights (book)

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Food Rights: the escalating battle over who decides what we eat

Do Americans have the right to obtain their food privately from their friends and neighbours in the way their grandparents did? 'Yes' say a growing number of Americans who want locally grown food processed outside of the food industry. 'No' say public health regulators, who argue that all food must be regulated to ensure public health is maintained. These different answers are leading to a legal conflict which has seen farmers prosecuted for selling milk directly to the public. This book tells the story of the battle to determine who controls America's food.

o Americans have the right to privately obtain the foods of our choice from farmers, neighbors, and local producers, in the same way our grandparents and great grandparents used to do? - See more at: http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/life_liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_food_rights#sthash.Zw0ukHJk.dpuf

Do Americans have the right to privately obtain the foods of our choice from farmers, neighbors, and local producers, in the same way our grandparents and great grandparents used to do?
Yes, say a growing number of people increasingly afraid that the mass-produced food sold at supermarkets is excessively processed, tainted with antibiotic residues and hormones, and lacking in important nutrients. These people, a million or more, are seeking foods outside the regulatory system, like raw milk, custom-slaughtered beef, and pastured eggs from chickens raised without soy, purchased directly from private membership-only food clubs that contract with Amish and other farmers.
Public-health and agriculture regulators, however, say no: Americans have no inherent right to eat what they want. In today's ever-more-dangerous food-safety environment, they argue, all food, no matter the source, must be closely regulated, and even barred, if it fails to meet certain standards. These regulators, headed up by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, with help from state agriculture departments, police, and district-attorney detectives, are mounting intense and sophisticated investigative campaigns against farms and food clubs supplying privately exchanged food—even handcuffing and hauling off to jail, under threat of lengthy prison terms, those deemed in violation of food laws.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights takes readers on a disturbing cross-country journey from Maine to California through a netherworld of Amish farmers paying big fees to questionable advisers to avoid the quagmire of America’s legal system, secret food police lurking in vans at farmers markets, cultish activists preaching the benefits of pathogens, U.S. Justice Department lawyers clashing with local sheriffs, small Maine towns passing ordinances to ban regulation, and suburban moms worried enough about the dangers of supermarket food that they’ll risk fines and jail to feed their children unprocessed, and unregulated, foods of their choosing.
- See more at: http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/life_liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_food_rights#sthash.Zw0ukHJk.dpuf