heywood on 27/6/2011 at 13:23

---

But are they getting what they paid for? In the US at least, "free range" and "cage free" don't necessarily equate to better living conditions for the animals. I don't think it's really possible to farm poultry on a large scale if you're going to allocate enough forage-able land per bird to make it like a natural habitat and avoid population stress. And due to Finnish weather, you can't really provide freedom to roam for much of the year anyway.

demagogue on 27/6/2011 at 15:42

---

Natural foods like unpasteurized milk or certain eggs are riskier to health, and you can guarantee a certain amount of illnesses associated with it (including miscarriages & infant deaths...). And the regulators feel a certain responsibility to respond to health first.

It's interesting France has almost exactly the opposite attitude. The regulators in some cases privilege the "natural" culture over health, so they'll officially ban or tariff the importation of pasteurized cheese (something like that) as "unnatural" knowing it will cause more illness... Like it's their first responsibility, their reason for regulating food at all, to protect a certain food culture in France, and the health of its population is a secondary concern.

It's funny the different attitudes to what the fundamental job of food regulation is even for.

demagogue on 27/6/2011 at 16:06

---

The brainfart was mine. I corrected it to pasteurized before I even read your post, otherwise yeah it doesn't make any sense.

demagogue on 27/6/2011 at 17:01

---

Well the real controversy was the restrictions / tariffs on French unpasteurized cheese being imported in the US because of the FDA regulations. On the French side, it's more of a cultural thing; American cheese isn't going to be very successful, regulated or not, beside traditional French cheese that has been made the same way for 100s of years and because of the general distaste with processed cheese, but reading a few articles now it seems pasteurized cheese is becoming more common.

I did read an article talking about official resistance or bias against pasteurization in France. But what it might have been talking about was resistance to compulsory pasteurization, since I believe you that there aren't border controls ... (Everyone probably remembers that because it makes the US tariffs look more unfair.)

Edit: Actually I remember where I read it now, and yeah, it was talking about regulatory resistance to compulsory pasteurization & I made the mistake of remembering it talking about imports (which it wasn't; I was probably mixing it up with the US tariffs in my mind. So your bullshit call stands).

The point I was making and the point of the article still stands though: that the regulatory agency saw it as part of its task to take into account the traditional cheese culture in France on the issue of pasteurization as a requirement. It was not merely a matter of what the epid. studies on pasteurization said alone, and that would definitively answer the question of what the regulators should do (as in the US, where for context people also think of Kraft slices as really "cheese"). It's not even that surprising of a conclusion, if anyone knows anything about food regulation & food culture in France. So many case studies I read were about regulators protecting traditional food practices and food "natural"-ness -- anti-additives, anti-GMO, pro-unpasturization; these are cultural stands about protecting a food culture, not really about what scientific studies are saying about food risk if we take them at face value (=there would be the same regulation however the science came out). But it's true one has to get the facts right about it to make the point.

demagogue on 27/6/2011 at 17:41

---

By the way, just as a general response to some of the trend on this last page, I've always felt the core moral case on eating meat shouldn't turn on what is and isn't healthy for humans. It's about what is or isn't proper treatment of animals, and consumer utility (what's more healthy than another thing) is a completely separate issue you deal with after you've addressed that.