Sunday, July 7, 2013

Mississippi Enacts Anti-Competitive Catfish Marketing Law

One of main subplots of the new-ish movie Mud, starring Matthew McCaughey, involves a poor Mississippi River Delta teen, Ellis, who helps his father catch catfish and sell clear plastic bags of the cleaned fish out of the back of the family’s beaten pickup truck.
That entrepreneurial food startup was all the income Ellis’s family appeared to have.
While I suspect Ellis’s family business probably skirted the laws of Arkansas, where the family’s riverbank home was located (and where I’ve done most of my best catfish eating), I know with great certainty that their simple local enterprise would run afoul downriver in Mississippi, thanks to the latter’s newly amended Catfish Marketing Law.
The Mississippi law, which updates a 2008 law, requires every grocer and restaurant in the state to "provide the consumer with the country of origin and method of production of catfish" and, now, of other catfish-like fish.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/07/06/mississippi-enacts-anti-competitive-catf

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