That doesn’t solve the problem. Even if you’re dealing with a local farmer, are you testing their food for all of the dozens of contaminants which could be there? No.
And more importantly, you can’t deal on a local level for the most part. It’s not possible. You mostly purchase products from national or multinational brands, so good luck getting any consumer protection from them. If poisoning customers lets the CEO buy a longer yacht for his house in Cyprus, he will do that.
You're still imposing industrial agriculture problems on smaller scale local ag.
The contaminants used in industrial farming generally come down to two main areas, poisons and fertilizers for the growing period and preservatives for the shipping/warehousing process.
Local farmers wouldn't be at the same scale and may very well not need to spray their fields with the same chemicals during the growing cycle. At a minimum, they're local and anyone buying their food that cares can come right out and see how the farm operates, meet the farmer, etc.
All of the preservatives and packaging could be skipped entirely if you as buying local. When the food doesn't need to handle weeks or months of storage and shipping you simply don't need all of that.
> You mostly purchase products from national or multinational brands
My while point is they if consumers cared we could just story doing this. Sure, it'd be less convenient and we wouldn't have products like iPhones or modern cars, but in the context of getting rid of the use of plastics and PFAS those kinds of products go away anyway. It boils down to the fact that we care about the idea of PFAS but we aren't actually willing to give up the novelty and convenience of all the products those chemicals allow for.
And we're supposed to regularly drive out to farms to monitor their use of chemicals? You'd have to spell that scenario out to me because it sounds ridiculous and rather naive. For example, all of us who eat food also have our own jobs and lives to worry about, and we can't spy on every producer of every good we consume, though I'm not even sure what the spying accomplishes.
Tell me what this stakeout looks like and what kind of info it's going to gather.
Sounds like something we'd offload to a representative, authoritative body...
You'd have to really stretch the definition of chemicals here to find any used on my own farm. Same goes for the farm we have a CSA membership with while we get our own produce setup built out.
I have visited the farm we get our CSA from a few times, but not often at all. Its much easier than you might think to meet the person growing your food and have a feel for them as people, their farm, etc. They do also often update on their own website and email newsletter, though again I don't really feel the need to watch them like hawks.
I don't think its much of an investment to actually meet the people making one's food if that really matters to them. Granted finding local farms isn't always easy and I'd love to see more people start, but would you really rather blindly trust a massive public corporation driven entirely by profits and almost certainly buying off the regulators meant to keep up safe in such a system?
So the best alternative to government regulations is to go back on hundreds of years of economic development and only purchase products you have personally vetted every part of the supply chain for. No one has time for that. Other than Amish people, I don’t know of anyone who lives like that.
And again, this ignores the other two glaring issues I mentioned previously: that individuals are not equipped to properly assess the supply chain; and regulations also protect you from your neighbors’ use of dangerous products.
> So the best alternative to government regulations is to go back on hundreds of years of economic development and only purchase products you have personally vetted every part of the supply chain for
You don't have to go back hundreds of years or vet every part of the supply chain to recognize when a product is wrapped in plastic. Hell, you can effectively assume that all produce in a chain store was sprayed heavily with chemicals and that all meat approved by the USDA was sprayed with bleach and is full of stress hormones due to the way animals are processed.
All I have been arguing for the whole thread is for individual consumers to make decisions that can have a direct impact on what products are produced and what aren't. Are you arguing that consumers should just buy whatever is there and wait for the government to fix it from the top down?
> regulations also protect you from your neighbors’ use of dangerous products.
There's nothing wrong with that when your neighbor's choice is infringing on your rights. I agree that's a reasonable use of government regulation if the damage caused is clear.
And more importantly, you can’t deal on a local level for the most part. It’s not possible. You mostly purchase products from national or multinational brands, so good luck getting any consumer protection from them. If poisoning customers lets the CEO buy a longer yacht for his house in Cyprus, he will do that.