Poop in the Food: A Rallying Cry For Regulation

Listen, people. I know the government has done a lot of bad things. There was the war in Iraq, and all the bombings of civilians in Afghanistan, and I'm not too happy about the way the Obama administration is handling the Gulf oil spill...Let the scientists do it, Mr. President...

But this Rand Paul guy scares me, and it scares me that people agree with him enough that he was able to win the primary in Kentucky. For one thing, he has a man working as his campaign manager who's a truther, which means he thinks the government had something to do with 9/11, and now he's saying private companies have the right to deny service to people because of the color of their skin. What jackass. Sounds of racism to me. But what really gets my goat is his anti-governmentism. All of the steps forward we have taken in this country are under threat, if this guy gets elected. The government, which some people deem wasteful and bloated and filled with too many regulations, will become a shell of itself, with little power to do the things it needs to do, which is to help keep people safe and to serve as a force to balance out the corporate greed that permeates. And this is why it bothers me...

There has been poop in our food.

Let's think about that for a second...

Our food supply has been plagued with numerous E. coli outbreaks. E. coli, more or less, is fecal matter. Fecal matter is poop. People in America have eaten poop. When that happens, it's not the producers of the food who come forward with this information. No, it's the FDA. The FDA discovers the problem and issues a recall... How would this have played out if there was no FDA?

In a court battle, that would have lasted years and bankrupted the plaintiff. The food companies would say the E. coli wasn't from them, they'd say something else caused the defendant's illness, and motions would have been filed out the wazoo. Meanwhile, more people would be getting sick. Who even knows what the long-term effects of E. Coli would be?

Luckily, we do have the FDA, and we do have other federal government agencies looking out for our best interest. They're not perfect, but they do what they can. We need more regulation, not less. That should be apparent to anyone paying attention. More regulation of the food supply, of our water supply, of Wall Street, and of campaign finance. Why don't people see it? I don't know. All I do know is that one thought comes to mind when Rand Paul and others talk about less government, and how we should trust the free market and the private sector: There has been poop in our food, and that is unacceptable.