Winners

As a mere weekly, we often get called out for not having a true newspaper pedigree. Despite numerous degrees, a handful of awards and years of experience in the field, readers often point out that our editorial staff simply isn't up to snuff when it comes to tackling the real in-depth stories. And daily staff writer Mike Kilen added insult to injury last week, with his strong news story regarding a family that was asked not to return to a local buffet because the family had been wasting food. Wendy Dersham, her boyfriend and her two kids were given the boot at Dragon House after not cleaning their plates, leaving Kilen to ask this question of buffet diners: "When have you gone too far, plate piling, tasting and dumping, or is anything fair game for a flat fee?" It's, ahem, food for thought; and Kilen went the extra mile - beyond Crab Rangoon - interviewing the manager at not only Old Country Buffet, but Buffet City in Clive, Bob Brammer, spokesman for the Iowa attorney general's office, and Bob Oberbillig, an adjunct professor at the Drake Legal Clinic, while proving yet again just exactly why The Register is the newspaper Iowa depends upon.

Losers

Nearly 80 percent of food-safety decisions are made at the state and local levels, ensuring that Iowans decide how to conduct inspections for Iowa milk, while Floridians determine standards for Florida O.J. But the National Uniformity for Food Act, which is pending in Congress, could shred hundreds of such protections, at a major detriment to consumers and diners. The bill, which has found cheerleaders in the corporate food industry and large grocery chains, would strip individual states of many of their food-labeling and regulation powers and turn those decisions over to the federal government - and we all know how diligent the feds are at holding corporations' feet to the fire. It's a concern shared by the Iowa Public Research Interest Group, which recently published a report on the subject and concluded, "As federal agencies become increasingly under-funded and influenced by powerful corporate interests, the state's role in maintaining the food safety net grows ever-more important."

Five months ago in this space we chided Jeff Vonk, director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, for cow-towing to pork producers and wussing out on a bold move to arm his agency with broader authority to reject animal confinement construction permits if they threatened environmental integrity. In December, family farm advocates and environmentalists lauded the DNR director for adding an agenda item to the monthly Environmental Protection Commission meeting that asked the EPC to approve emergency measures that would allow the state to deny or modify construction permits if the manure from the operation were to be applied in an area that fed impaired watersheds, the confinement placed "an unacceptable burden on natural resources due to the current concentration of confinement operations" or the construction risked "the likelihood of adverse impacts on the environment." But, before the EPC could so much as debate the measure, Vonk pulled the item due to "a number of concerns" from industrial ag interests. Now, to add fatal insult to injury, policymakers joined the demure director at the trough last week, passing a controversial bill that blocks Vonk's proposed plan to rein in confinement construction, virtually eliminating the DNR's authority to deny construction permits on environmental grounds and forcing the agency to take factory farms at their word when they submit permit applications. With skyrocketing confinement construction a prime culprit in Iowa's fouled waters, environmental groups and critical lawmakers couldn't help but point out that, as legislators patted each other on the back for ponying up a bold $18 million for water quality improvement in an already tight budget, they shot themselves in the foot by kissing the asses of some of the state's most notorious polluters. CV

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