SEEKING ADVICE

Am I too difficult?

                  Today I received the following letter and request to add my signature.  

April 29, 2025

Commissioner Martin Makary

U.S. Food and Drug Administration

10903 New Hampshire Ave

Silver Spring, MD 20993

cc:          Secretary Robert Kennedy, U.S. Health & Human Services

                  Director Tracey Forfa, Center for Veterinary Medicine

Dear Commissioner Makary,

On behalf of the undersigned organizations, we write to urge you to respond to the recently filed petition for reconsideration and ban or restrict ractopamine in meat production. Ractopamine is a dangerous drug used to rapidly grow muscle in cows, pigs, and turkeys that also causes animals’ bodies to suffer tremors, lesions, and deterioration, elevates meat consumers’ heart rates, and harms the environment.       

Ractopamine is banned or restricted in meat production in at least 160 countries, including China and all countries in the European Union. Nonetheless, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved ractopamine for use in cows, pigs, and turkeys raised for meat in the U.S. and continues to allow ractopamine residue levels in meat that exceed those adopted by the United Nations’ food standards body, the Codex Alimentarius Commission. The FDA’s approval for ractopamine relied primarily on safety studies conducted by the drugmaker itself.

Animals given beta-agonists such as ractopamine face increased likelihood of experiencing painful injury, inhumane treatment, and extreme stress. Evidence, including that contained within the FDA’s own files, also links ractopamine to human heart and respiratory issues in meat consumers and farm workers, increased risk of pathogen contagion, and intensified environmental pollution through seepage and runoff to ground and surface waters. Still, ractopamine usage has been estimated in 60–80 percent of all pigs raised for food in the U.S. 

To better protect human health, animals and the environment, we urge FDA to respond to the petition and immediately reduce or eliminate allowable levels of ractopamine in farmed animals.

                  Okay, here's my problem.  Would these people sign my petition asking for a FOOD EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATAION to allow unregulated food commerce between neighbors?   Neighbors, acting as consenting adults to engage in freedom of choice, should be able to engage in food commerce without a bureaucrat between them.  This freedom would launch thousands of entrepreneurial farmers and culinary practitioners on their neighborhoods, decimating the industrial food oligarchy and bringing better nutrition, pricing, safety, security, and stability to the marketplace.                 

                  The problem with signing this letter is that it spends our tribe's political and emotional equity on additional regulation rather than making it easier for farmers who grow hogs free of ractopamine to sell to their neighbors.  So the whole discussion centers around a new regulation rather than a new level of liberty.  If farmers were free to sell to their neighbors without bureaucratic prohibitions, perhaps nobody would buy pigs with ractopamine.

                  If I don't sign, friends will call me a traitor.  If I do sign, I'm adding my support to a regulatory solution for every societal malady.  We have to get beyond asking government regulatory relief for everything we view as wrong.  Releasing people to exercise personal agency in their freedom of choice is another remedy.  Let freedom ring. 

                  Am I being unnecessarily antagonistic by not signing?