Some will argue that 2010 was the year that homemade sausage finally came of age, or the year the school garden movement exploded. Others will remember 2010 as the year KFC’s Double Down sandwich made its glorious debut. With so many food preferences and priorities, you can hardly make an end-of-year food list to please everyone, so lets start with what the people think. Some of them, anyway.  

A market research firm called Wakefield surveyed 1,000 Americans on what they felt was “the most significant food story of 2010.” Interestingly, the top three stories were threats to food safety: The impact of the BP oil spill on the seafood industry, the nationwide egg recall, and the recall of 35,000 pounds of beef when E. coli was detected at a Southern California distributor. (Story #4 was “Calorie count on menus goes national.”)  

This public perception makes the current food safety bill especially timely. The bill finally (sort of) got though Congress a few weeks ago before being sent back on a technicality as part of a Republican endgame on tax cuts. If it doesn’t make it through in 2010, the food safety bill would most certainly pass in some form next year (the Senate vote was a comfortable 73-25), but perhaps not in a form as considerate to small farms. Following closely on the food safety bill’s heels, the landmark Child Nutrition Act suffered no such snags and is was just signed by Obama.  

Another important policy move went down in February, when USDA modified its organic standards for beef and dairy. The new “Access to Pasture” rule, named after an infamous longstanding loophole in the organic standards, finally specified a minimum number of days per year that organic cattle must spend on pasture to qualify as organic. The requirement raises the bar especially for the large producers trying to qualify as organic, forcing them to more truly live up to organic principles. For small milk and meat producers, and the consumers who are willing to pay a little extra for their product, this clarity in the law is welcome.  

In other bovine product related developments, USDA has apparently gotten serious about investigating the many ways that unregulated pharmaceuticals are getting into our meat and dairy. An April report by the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General called out its own agency for its near total lack of oversight in recent, decades, and made recommendations for reform.