Friday, April 20, 2018
Family Farmers Face Prison for Calling Skim Milk by Its Name
Forget narcotics. Uncle Sam has a new substance to crack down on: all-natural skim milk.
Food and Drug Administration regulations make it a federal crime for dairy farmers to call all-natural skim milk exactly what it is—skim milk. Instead, the FDA demands that farmers label additive-free skim milk as “imitation milk product,” because, in the FDA’s mind, skim milk just isn’t the real thing.
The FDA’s finicky rules are not going unchallenged, however. Attorneys with the Institute for Justice are challenging those rules on behalf of a dairy farmer, Randy Sowers, who wants to sell all-natural products and label them honestly, without the threat of fines or imprisonment.
Randy Sowers wants to sell his milk in Pennsylvania, which is no problem under Pennsylvania law.
But under FDA regulations, in order for him to sell skim milk across state lines with an honest label (“skim milk”), it needs to have some dishonest additives: artificial vitamins A and D, in amounts set by federal regulation.
Without those additives, the FDA requires Sowers to call his product “imitation skim milk” or “imitation milk product.”
Who even knows what that is? And more importantly, who would buy it?
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4 comments:
Bureaucrats need keepers.
Soooo - bureaucrats, by requiring addition vitamins and whatnot to milk make it an artificial substance but call it natural (as in, milk as nature produces it).
Then claim that milk with cream skimmed off, but with no artificial substances added, is an artificial substance and cannot be called 'skim milk' (which everyone knows means milk with the cream removed.)
And then bureaucrats cannot understand why the average person has so little respect for them and their convoluted rules.
The Institute for Justice represented the Ocheesee Creamery in Florida for the same basic rule. The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (DACS) applied the Federal standard to skim milk sold in Florida.
The Creamery said "that's nuts," and even offered to put labels on that were more descriptive of the actual product while letting the consumer know it was not what the state defined as "skim milk." The DACS rejected them all.
The case actually ended up in the Eleventh Circuit where the Court ruled for the Creamery.
In some ways, you don't want items sold across state lines to have labels that mean different things. That's not the problem here. The problem is that a federal agency is trying to force companies to sell something or label something in an inaccurate way.
I read once that the FDA held up the shipment of Defibulators to hospitals because of paperwork delays
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