Commentary
Yes, people have died from food poisoning—and they still do. But in our obsession with safety, we’ve built a bureaucracy that is suffocating the very people who feed us. Under the banner of “protection,” we’ve created endless layers of regulation, inspection, and paperwork that have not made us healthier. In fact, we’re sicker than ever.
Every year, a few thousand Americans die from foodborne illness. But more than 100,000 die from diabetes, 700,000 from heart disease, and hundreds of thousands more from cancers and inflammatory diseases linked to diet and lifestyle. We have “safe” food, yet our hospitals are overflowing. What exactly are we being kept safe from?
The food safety regulations that were supposed to protect us have made food less nutritious, less fresh, and less real. Farmers can no longer wash or package their produce on-site. Everything must travel to separate facilities, sometimes hundreds of miles away, before it can be legally sold. Every mile of travel, every layer of handling, every day in a truck or a warehouse strips food of life and nutrient density—all in the name of safety.
We waste staggering amounts of food this way. We destroy produce because it doesn’t meet an arbitrary standard. We pour milk down the drain because it was bottled in the wrong facility. We leave crops to rot in the ground because small farms can’t afford the certification stamps required to sell them. It’s all justified by “safety,” but the result is the opposite: sterile, lifeless food and communities that are dying right alongside their farms.
This endless bureaucracy doesn’t just make food worse; it crushes small businesses, farmers, and entrepreneurs. The only ones who can survive this regulatory maze are massive corporations with teams of lawyers and compliance officers. The system has been designed to protect us from danger—but really, it protects monopolies from competition.
And yet, we keep demanding more. We keep handing more power to “Daddy Government,” as if it’s the government’s job to stand between us and every human interaction. When did we decide that personal responsibility no longer mattered? When did we decide that freedom was too risky?
I can’t tell you how many times people come to my farm and I hand them a tomato off the vine, a blackberry, or an edible flower, and they hold it in their hand for the entire tour—afraid to eat it until they can wash it in a restaurant bathroom. That breaks my heart. I can’t imagine a world where people are afraid to eat a blackberry off a bush. One of life’s greatest joys is eating fruit right off the tree, tasting the earth, the sun, and the sweetness that only comes from nature.
We’ve also forgotten that we are biology.
The more we sterilize our food, the more we sterilize ourselves. Every time we scrub away a little dirt, sanitize a little harder, or process a little longer, we erase the living microbes that have always supported human health. Our ancestors understood this intuitively. A little soil on your carrots, a little raw milk from your cow, a little wild yeast on your sourdough—these weren’t contaminants. They were connection. They were nature’s way of keeping our microbiology in harmony with the world around us.
Today, we’ve replaced that living exchange with bleach and plastic wrap. We eat food so sanitized it can sit on a shelf for years, and then we wonder why our immune systems are confused and inflamed. The science on the human microbiome confirms what our grandparents already knew: our health depends on our relationship to the natural world. When that relationship is severed, so is our vitality.
There’s no such thing as perfect safety. Children die. Adults die. Accidents happen. Of course, we should do what we can to mitigate risk, but maybe the cost has become too high. Maybe we’ve traded away resilience for control, community for compliance, health for the illusion of safety. Everything in life is a trade-off.
The question we should be asking is: do we feel good about these current trade-offs? Are we truly safer, or just more sterile? Are we more alive, or simply more controlled?
The government was never meant to keep us safe from every possible risk. It was meant to protect our freedom, not manage our fear. The people are supposed to control the government, yet today the government controls nearly every aspect of how we live, work, eat, and farm. And for what? It’s been shut down for weeks at a time, and most of us don’t even notice. That alone tells you everything about how unnecessary so much of it really is.
Community wisdom has been replaced by bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is strangling us all. We no longer trust our senses or our neighbors. We wait for permission, for inspection, for approval. But no federal agency can teach you what your grandmother knew by heart—how to tell if milk is fresh, how to store food properly, how to wash your hands, how to use your eyes, nose, and common sense.
We must take our power back as individuals. We must stop giving away our freedom in exchange for a false promise of safety. The truth is, life has never been safe. But it has always been sacred.
It’s time to roll back the regulations that are suffocating us, rebuild the local wisdom that sustained us, and remember that we are capable of caring for ourselves, our food, and one another without a federal agency standing between us.
