conching

While real threats are clawing steadily at the food pyramid, with the potential spread of awful diseases in livestock and in crops, shortages and skyrocketing prices for grain, spillage of rogue, engineered organisms into the environment and general mismanagement of land and resources (plus treatment that is less than humane), the US Food and Drug Administration is poised to send inspection teams to audit several Swiss dairies and chocolate manufacturers to ensure compliance with American standards for sanitation and, I suppose, for patriotism. This particular episode of Security Theatre clears Swiss chocolates as platforms for launching a biological or radiological attack on US interests, declaring said truffles to be non-weaponized, and is brought to you by the sponsors of the concerned US confectionaries union, I’m sure. Switzerland, I think, is not being specifically targeted by the intent of the resolution, however, it does seem to add insult to injury just after friction between another US agency and another venerable Swiss institution, the Internal Revenue Service and the banks.

I imagine that precision clockworks will be next. Of course, with imported food, consumers need to know what they’re eating is safe, but it is American agribusiness and appetites that’s escalating many of the problems with food supply and actual food security, and submitting to indignities that defy common-sense is not much of an alternative to being blocked, cut-out or compromised. Chocolate-makers would face pyrrhic victory is they were allowed to stay in the export business, providing they toss aside traditional manufacturing methods or possibly feed their milk cows a recombineered diet.