What is HR 875 and what will it do?

Since you went through the effort to report this, why not conclusively informative instead of deliberately lacking decision making details? This story raises your hackles with nothing to do about it. Frustrating don't you think?

Only eat dirt, rocks and boiled water.

We need to call the ding bats that are supposed to represent "we the people" but represent the corporrations, and ask that they not penalize local food makets with this bill.
I am so sick of big corporations running our country and ruining the quality of life for the majority of people.

They could just hang up a disclaimer at the farmers market:

"EAT AT YOUR OWN RISK, which is nill compared to what your eating from factory farms."

from article:

While on the surface this sounds like it can only be a good thing—surely who would not want greater safety precautions taken with their food?—a little deeper look into the fine print shows it may not be so simple. While it will enforce a crackdown on standards for all mass food producers, smaller farmers will be subjected to the same guidelines—ones they may be ill-equipped to adhere to.

Specifically, the bill calls for tougher restrictions on “food production facilities” and “any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation”. So, while this may not affect our backyard avocado plants, the broad language certainly could affect small farms that sell locally (hence the concern about Farmers Markets). Traceability and record-keeping (new, difficult paperwork) would increase greatly for these small farmers, as opposed to larger corporations who need not worry as much since they already work within the barcode system. So are such restrictions and crackdowns necessary?

Rep. DeLauro’s bill was written immediately after the recent peanut-related salmonella outbreak that killed at least 6 people and hospitalized hundreds more in the US and Canada. One major source of the outbreak was the massive Peanut Corporation of America (which has since filed for bankruptcy protection). After the fallout from this event, certainly not the first of its kind, it became clear that greater health restrictions needed to be put in place in order to prevent future outbreaks. The vast majority of these outbreaks can often be traced back to these large-scale, mass food producers; not the little guys.

And yet, if HR 875 is passed as is, these little guys are the ones who stand to be at the greatest risk. Section 103 of the bill calls for the hiring of experts and consultants and the formation of advisory committees at the Administrator’s choosing. Who is to say these experts and consultants won’t work for or on behalf of massive corporations like Peanut Corp or Monsanto?

Anyone who shops at a farmers market or from a local distributor is aware of the risks they are taking in their choice to support local business and obtain what is often the freshest and delicious product available. How unsafe should we feel about these local products when most of the health scares we hear about are traced back to mass food producers anyway?