There
are clear reasons that food is safer in Europe than the United States.
My neighbor just left to spend
the entire summer in Europe.
He’s the guy with a highly
restrictive diet I recently wrote about, with countless food
intolerances that his “nutritionist” detected using dubious testing methods. I
haven’t had the heart to tell him she’s a total quack. I think on some level,
he wanted to hear that he couldn’t eat half the foods on the planet.
But I also feel for him. He’s
going on the trip of a lifetime to a place with incredible food. What if he
won’t eat it?
The day before he left, I asked
him what he’ll do on the trip. He told me he plans to eat everything. He and
his “nutritionist” agreed that food is better over there. Safer. More pure.
Europeans don’t find many — if
any — artificial dyes in
their food. They can also rest assured that their cows aren’t shot up with artificial
growth hormones. The EU also banned the use of an arsenic-laden
drug in chickens long before the United States finally followed
suit. More recently, the EU enacted a moratorium on the pesticides responsible
for massive bee die-offs.
Europe’s not perfect, but it’s
several steps ahead of us when it comes to food standards.
The next day I drove my friend to
the airport. I generally avoid talking politics with him because he’s got the
views of your average tea partier and I, to say the least, don’t. We get along
so long as we keep our conversations to sharing the bounty of our fruit trees
or the hilarious antics of my three cats.
As we drove, I started thinking
about my experiences in Europe, and suddenly I felt concern for him.
“Have you been to Europe before?”
I asked.
“No, this is my first time!” he
replied, with the excitement of a new traveler.
“You might not want to mention
your political views over there. They are pretty liberal,” I suggested. With
that, he launched into a long diatribe that included statements like “The EU is
a nightmare.”
By the time we reached the
airport, I was glad to see him go. Get him going on politics and it won’t be
five minutes before he says something I find highly offensive.
As I drove home, I could not help
thinking: You hate regulation, but how do you think it happened that the EU
wound up with safer food than ours?
That wasn’t a coincidence of the
free market, with each individual farmer and corporation opting to eschew
hormones, pesticides, and additives on their own. Regulation did that. Now
you’re off to benefit from it all summer, and appreciate it too.
To be sure, not all regulations
are constructive. The world is chock full of clumsily written rules, outdated
laws, and pointless red tape.
Regulations only help if they’re
well-written and enforced. It’s one thing for the government to keep arsenic
out of our food. It would be something else entirely if they banned all cookies
because somebody might get diabetes from them someday.
Europe seems to walk that line in
a more sensible way than we do, at least where food and safety are concerned.
Maybe it’s time for us to learn a thing or two from our friends across the
pond.
OtherWords columnist
Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food
System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org
