There has to be a middle ground. Certainly national food safety and health standards are a good thing, but an individual's liberty to purchase and eat what they want should be accommodated. (I'm all for freedom of choice, but if you get sick from listeria on your hype-organic spinach from Vermont, don't go complaining to the FDA or VT Ag. Dept.) It's the uncompromising positions at either end of the argument that create nonsensical outcomes -- destroying perfectly good food rather than feed it to livestock, or allowing totally unfettered commercial sale, interstate or otherwise, of food products without some sort of safety standards. Ironically, both the food-safety Nazis and the eat-anything-sell-anything agricultural Hezbollah hold similar, if not identical, political identities.

While I agree that neither side of this argument practices much moderation, you have to admit Obama's appointing former Monsanto Vice President Michael Taylor as senior advisor to the FDA's commissioner is flat-out egregious. That doesn't really strike me as a "two-sided" issue. It's like letting the president of Coke run the National School Lunches program.