Or cookies, or candy bars, or frosted breakfast cereal, or peanut butter cups, or even Tater Tots—just a short list of the high-calorie human food that's fattening hogs and cattle now that ethanol demand has driven the price of corn into what's left of the stratosphere. The Wall Street Journal reports that it's now cheaper for farmers to feed their animals "seconds" from candy and snack food factories. North Carolina pork producer Alfred Smith told the Journal that he shaved $40,000 off his feed bill by filling his troughs with trail mix that was too salty for human consumption and also contained bits of cardboard. But the pigs enjoyed it nonetheless. "I've heard no complaints," Smith said, though his charges turned their snouts up at the Brazil nuts. Kind of makes me pine for simpler days when all I had to worry about in livestock feed was a little melamine.
Speaking of Things in Our Food Supply…
It seems that our lawmakers will jump on any opportunity to weaken the already feeble regulatory system that's supposed to keep our food safe. The most recent hole torn in the already tattered safety net was a sentence slipped into the Farm Bill. It reads: "No state or locality shall make any law prohibiting the use in commerce of an article that the Secretary of Agriculture has inspected and passed." Hmmmmm? Could that legalese be aimed at recently enacted laws in California, Arkansas, and Washington prohibiting the planting of genetically engineered crops approved by the USDA? The Center for Food Saftey seems to think so. Here's what they have to say. This marks the second major attack of the year on the safety of our food. Read what I had to say about the National Food Uniformity Act passed by the House in March.