But USDA, naively called "The people's department" by Abraham Lincoln, has long been the largest of the "captive regulators." That means it is so interbred with the big business interests it supposedly oversees that it can always be counted on to soft-pedal any health, environmental or economic problem created by modern industrial protein production.
But even the most obsequious toady undermines his own value if he never points out ways in which the servant might better serve the master.
That's what happened Monday in Salt Lake City, as USDA Secretary Mike Johanns told the national convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation that implementing a credible animal identification system would be a benefit not only to consumers, but to cattlemen and hog producers as well.
As Johanns noted, the official probe into a single case of mad cow disease discovered in Washington state in 2003 took four months. That's how long it took state and federal inspectors to figure out where the diseased cow came from and satisfy itself, and the world, that that particular animal was actually the only one infected with the always-fatal brain-wasting disease.
While that was going on, the profitable beef trade with Japan and 24 other food-buying nations was stopped or threatened.
Yet proposals for a national animal ID system, in which livestock would be tagged with cheap microchips that would track their locations and interactions from birth to supermarket, bogged down in complaints about the cost and disputes over whether participation would be mandatory or merely voluntary.
The USDA's trial voluntary ID system has attracted barely a quarter of the nation's producers to take part. Utah's growers, on the other hand, are smarter, and 64 percent of them have signed on.
The desire of consumers, here and around the world, is a food safety system that puts real safety first. A complete mandatory animal ID system would be a huge step in that direction.
And, even if it costs them some money, cattlemen could only benefit from that.
