| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Regulating Neighborly Food Commerce
00:07:26
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| There's been an incremental move by government regulatory agents to criminalize and prohibit direct neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce. | |
| All right? | |
| So let me give you an example. | |
| So we have a lady in our church. | |
| We all call her Aunt Grace. | |
| We love this lady. | |
| She's got a big garden, some chickens, and she loves cooking. | |
| And so at every church potluck, she brings a chicken pot pie. | |
| It's the first thing gone at every buffet. | |
| And we all love her to death. | |
| So we want to go to Aunt Grace to say, would you cook a couple of these pot pies that we love so dearly? | |
| We'll pay you 20 bucks or whatever you say. | |
| A piece? | |
| No. That's illegal. | |
| It's illegal for her. | |
| To make a pot pie for us. | |
| To feed our guests. | |
| Now, that's wrong. | |
| We should be able to engage in a freedom of choice as consenting adults transaction with Aunt Grace without a government agent in between that. | |
| I'm not suggesting that she should be free to, you know, whatever. | |
| You know, sell them to Sri Lanka or put them in Walmart or Costco, okay? | |
| But I am suggesting that neighbor to neighbor, friend to friend, we should be able to engage in a consensual, and I'm using powerful words because it's important to understand in our country right now, | |
| we love freedom of choice. | |
| We have choice in the bathroom, choice in the bedroom, choice in the womb, but no choice in the kitchen. | |
| And people say, well, I go to Walmart, look at all the choice I have. | |
| Yeah, but that's a very narrow funnel. | |
| All that food comes through an industrial funnel with a bureaucrat oversight that doesn't allow for the kind of localized, customized, non-MSG ingredients. | |
| Right now, for example, we shoot several deer every year, deer season. | |
| We can take these deer up. | |
| There's an Amish Mennonite outfit near us, and we can take that deer up, add a little bit of pork to it, and they can make, it is the best summer sausage. | |
| I mean, I could live on this. | |
| I could just live on this the rest of my life. | |
| Best summer sausage in the world, but they can't do one pound of beef because it's illegal. | |
| They can do a million pounds of venison because that's not in commerce. | |
| But because beef is a commercial product, they can't do beef. | |
| So what we have right now, we have many people that are wanting clean food, safe food, stable, secure food from their neighbors and can't get it. | |
| Because of prohibitive regulatory infrastructure and paperwork requirements, we have farmers desperate to be able to get a retail dollar to stay in business. | |
| They can't sell it. | |
| And we have a rural-urban divide that desperately needs the connectivity. | |
| of direct food commerce to occur. | |
| And so the idea of a food emancipation proclamation to be able to unfetter, unshackle, and de-enslave our food system to this federal, bureaucratic, | |
| regulatory intervention so that you and I can engage in a transaction voluntarily. | |
| To choose our fuel for our microbiome so we can choose our fuel to go shoot, pray, and preach. | |
| I mean, those are guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights, but what good is it to have the freedom to go shoot, pray, preach, and assemble if I can't choose my body's fuel to give me the energy to go do these things? | |
| And so food, the ability to transact a food interaction, Without a bureaucrat involved is, I think, | |
| it's foundational to solving multiple threads. | |
| The rural economy, entrepreneurial agriculture, food choice, food stability, all those things happen when we de-enslave. | |
| See, in 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, Seven companies controlled 50% of America's meat supply. | |
| Today, four companies control 85%. | |
| That's how much centralization and concentration there is in the food industry, which we saw manifested in 2020 when store shelves went empty. | |
| I mean, just think about it. | |
| If we had had 300,000 Neighborhood, community, processing facilities, you know, abattoirs functioning instead of 3,000 mega facilities. | |
| Would we have had as big a hiccup in 2020? | |
| Of course not. | |
| Another element of this in our country, hazardous substances are controlled on all levels. | |
| The buyer, the seller, and the user. | |
| In other words, I can't... | |
| I can't use fentanyl. | |
| I can't use methamphetamine. | |
| Prescription drugs, I can't buy them. | |
| I can't sell them. | |
| I can't use them without a prescription. | |
| So you have this pretty broad umbrella over these hazardous things. | |
| But in food, it's only on the seller. | |
| I can give you raw milk. | |
| I can give you homemade charcuterie, bologna, and my chicken pot pie. | |
| She could give these to me. | |
| And I can feed them to my children. | |
| In fact, I can even buy them if she's willing to be a criminal and sell them. | |
| So there's no prohibition on buying it. | |
| There's no prohibition on using it. | |
| And no prohibition on feeding it to my children. | |
| The only prohibition is on selling it. | |
| So if it's really that hazardous, if raw milk is really that hazardous, if Aunt Grace's pot pie is really that hazardous, she shouldn't be able to give it away, I shouldn't be able to eat it, and I certainly shouldn't be able to feed it to my children. | |
| This shows the great hypocrisy, the inconsistency of these food police that they're only taking The prohibitory side against the seller and not any other user. | |
|
Regulating Market Access
00:00:21
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| So is it really? | |
| Is it really dangerous? | |
| No, it's not dangerous. | |
| This is about regulating market access. | |
| It's not about protecting people. | |