alt Hacker NewsWith poor enforcement, it would be nice if at least I could buy my meat directly from the farmer I know where at least I can see the facilities for myself, but they have made that illegal -- no you must buy it through one of the poorly enforced USDA approved slaughterhouses that I have no personal connection to.
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I buy beef in bulk from a rancher, who sends me to get it from a USDA approved slaughterhouse. Which is a small family operation, so I've gotten to know them well too. They raise the most delicious lamb I've ever tasted.
Your comment reminded me of this book called, "everything I want to do is illegal" [1] written by a farmer that talks about his annoyances with the US food system and how regulations favor corporate farming.
> they have made that illegal
We have the Food Freedom Act in Wyoming [1]. It technically requires meat be sold "for future delivery provided that the processing of the animals is done by the purchaser or by a Wyoming or federally licensed processing facility."
But in my experience, ranchers are liberal with how they define me "processing" my meat. (In one case, he pointed out the bits of silver skin he hadn't trimmed. So I "processed" those off at home.)
There is currently a bill in Congress trying to address (some of) that: https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/family_grocer...
And also milk: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8374
Interesting, where are you running into trouble buying meat from local farmers? I've often visit rural farms that have a store houses. Nearly all of them haver refrigerators and freezers with meat to buy.
Do you think “have a personal relationship with the farmer, slaughterhouse, and butcher” is a scalable solution? And if you happen to live near a cattle ranch and know your supply chain for beef, how are you going to establish a relationship with the guy selling you fish as well? Will you be making road trips to the coast to talk to some fishermen and ride along on their boats?
The instinct to see a bureaucratic system working poorly and resolving to opt out instead of fixing it is precisely why everything sucks right now. You can’t just work and vibe and spend your way out of living in an advanced industrial society.
Never had any problem buying from local farms. Not sure where that is illegal.
Yeah one of my friends is bashing her head against the wall about this. She’s a small farmer up on the Olympic peninsula where there are no approved slaughterhouses for small farmers to use to process meat, so them selling the meat locally to people around them is illegal. So she is trying to build one for the surrounding area, except all the regulations that exist are for insanely scaled operations and make no sense for a small scale… so she has to keep petitioning the county about different things.