Fascinating. “Sedgwick,…

Fascinating. "Sedgwick, Maine...unanimously passed an ordinance giving its citizens the right 'to produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing.' This includes raw milk, locally slaughtered meats, and just about anything else you can imagine. It�s also a decided bucking of state and federal laws." -- Maine Town Declares Food Sovereignty

On the one hand, locally-grown is good, and assuming the labelling is clear, people should get to choose what they want to eat.

But on the other hand -- if I'm remembering right, infant health in America has improved dramatically since the FDA started mandating that companies fortify their sliced bread, cereal, etc. -- that way, lower-income pregnant women who might not have had access to prenatal vitamins were still getting the nutrition their fetuses needed, without needing to seek it out. What will happen in Sedgwick to those babies, for example? And that's just one tiny example of the good stuff the FDA does to protect the public health -- I suspect there's lots and lots more.

Ah yes -- a bit of Wikipedia produced this: "Since 1941, however, fortification of white flour-based foods with some of the nutrients lost in milling, like thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, and iron was mandated by the US government in response to the vast nutrient deficiencies seen in US military recruits at the start of World War II. This fortification led to nearly universal eradication of deficiency diseases in the US, such as pellagra and beriberi (deficiencies of niacin and thiamine, respectively) and white bread continues to contain these added vitamins to this day.

Folic acid is another nutrient that some governments[citation needed] have mandated is added to enriched grains like white bread. In the US and Canada, these grains have been fortified with mandatory levels of folic acid since 1998 because of its important role in preventing birth defects. Since fortification began, the rate of neural tube defects has decreased by approximately one-third in the US."

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