Leadership Quote by Mike Johanns

“Fortunately” is doing heavy lifting here: it frames food safety and quality not as a right the public should demand, but as a lucky break in the marketplace. Johanns, speaking as a politician and former agriculture secretary, isn’t merely complimenting an industry. He’s performing reassurance. The line is engineered to calm consumer anxiety (and preempt calls for stricter oversight) by translating a regulatory problem into a character reference: trust the people who make it.

The syntax matters. “I have the really wonderful situation” centers the speaker, not the eater. It’s an oddly personal boast in a domain that’s supposed to be institutional and verifiable. That shift hints at the real audience: producers, processors, and the political coalition around them. By praising “producers and processors” as the guarantors of “high-quality product,” Johanns treats the regulated as the source of legitimacy, not the subject of scrutiny. It’s the revolving logic of modern ag politics: industry assurance stands in for public accountability.

The most telling choice is the redundancy: “produce and process a very high-quality product.” The echo of “produce and process” sounds like a boardroom mantra, not a consumer promise. It’s value language without measurable claims - no mention of inspection regimes, contamination rates, enforcement, or transparency. In context, that vagueness is the point. It keeps the message upbeat and conflict-free while smoothing over the uncomfortable truth that “quality” in meat isn’t just taste and tenderness; it’s also the invisible infrastructure of regulation that politicians routinely underfund, weaken, or outsource to the very actors being praised.