Posted on 02/21/2006 7:55:22 AM PST by laney
DALLAS, Texas- Some people love organic food, are environmentalists, and do not think much of unbridled capitalism, yet they still insist they are hard-core conservatives.
Can this be true?
Now there is a new subset of conservatives known as “crunchy cons.”
Crunchy cons is a term coined by journalist Rod Dreher, who realized after he and his wife got hooked on the superior taste of organic foods, that he himself might be a crunchy con -- or crunchy conservative.
Dreher said, "My wife had cooked these amazing vegetables. They were delicious. I said, 'Where did you get these?' She goes, 'those are organic.'"
By the way, the "crunchy" refers to granola, the crunchiest of organic foods. One day, Dreher was leaving the offices of a conservative magazine where he worked in New York City.
"I said to my boss, ' I've gotta leave early,’” Dreher recalled, “’I've gotta go pick up my organic vegetable shipment from the co-op.' And she laughed and said, "’That's so leftie!' And I thought, 'Gee, is it? When did vegetables become left-wing?'"
But when he wrote a column about conservatives living this more green, more organic lifestyle, he was inundated by a flood of e-mails from fellow crunchy cons.
"All over the country...urban people, rural people, they said, "Me, too, this fits me," Dreher said.
So big was the response, Dreher decided to write about the movement in a book called Crunchy Cons.
Crunchy cons are basically conservatives, usually Christians, who believe in living a counter-cultural lifestyle -- but, as you'll see – they are far from being hippies.
The Catholic Dreher found a couple of perfect Protestant examples when he moved to Dallas, Texas and started buying organic meat at the Dallas Farmers Market from the Hutchins and Hale families.
Robert Hutchins explained that, for years, "My job was everything, and my family was essentially nothing."
But in the 1980s, Hutchins gave up his six-figure paycheck as a defense contractor in Washington, D.C., because he felt God starting to call him to dedicate his life to faith, family, and a farm.
"It only took 10 more years to pry my fingers off that paycheck," Hutchins said, laughing.
Now the entire family works at their Rehoboth Ranch near Greenville, Texas, breeding chemical-free animals on chemical-free land.
Hutchins said they "...raise the animals on healthy soil with nutritious plants, and they eat their natural diet their entire life."
Michael Hale is another example of a crunchy con. Hale was a schoolteacher in the Dallas area who met the Hutchins family, and was deeply convicted that God would have his family live in a similar way.
Hale said, "As conservatives, we're still interested in our health and we're still interested in the environment."
Now the Hales raise chickens at the Windy Meadows Family Farm in a way Michael says would shame the big industrial chicken-growers.
"They put 20,000 birds or so in a confinement house; they never see the light of day,” Hale said. “The chickens that are in there are fed a diet that includes...because the atmosphere is unhealthy...antibiotics. They also feed them arsenic as a growth-stimulator."
“They're (the Hales) conservative Christians who dropped out of the rat race and raise organic lifestock because they believe that's how God would have us raise animals -- not with antibiotics and chemicals, but naturally," Dreher said.
The crunchy con lifestyle is not just about eating granola and escaping off to the countryside to raise organic animals out on a farm. At its heart, it's a profoundly pro-life way of living.
And that does not mean just opposing abortion -- which most crunchy cons do -- but being deeply devoted to the idea that children are a blessing -- and in the case of families like the Hutchins and the Hales, leaving family size up to God.
The Hutchins have 12 children.
"The Lord just convicted us that He wanted to be in control of the number of children that we had and the spacing of the children," Hutchins said.
Hale, who has eight children, said, "I don't deserve the blessing of the children I have. But even now as we're running the farm, there are so many of the jobs that come up and needs that come up, and one of the children will step in and say 'I can do that.' And the surprising part is they can, and they do."
Many crunchy cons end up homeschooling because of their intense devotion to their children. This is true of the Hutchins, the Hales, and the Drehers.
"As homeschoolers,” Dreher said, "we can control what our kids learn and the rate at which they learn. And it integrates our children much more closely to [us] and to our values."
Hutchins remarked, "The assault on godly values, Christian values, is just getting more and more intense each year, and there's no reason to assault your children with that before they're adults and ready to deal with it."
Dreher added, "We don't trust the government schools to do that...we just don't."
Hutchins stated, "We keep them unapologetically out of the mainstream culture as much as possible."
So many of the crunchy cons have re-located to Red State America to escape this culture, that it has become a trend.
And the return to rural America is not just about getting away from the corrupt influences of urban America. It is also to get free from the rat race that is all about chasing the almighty dollar and possessing more and more stuff, while frantically running to and fro.
"So many things that keep us so busy, so harried, so running here and there doing unimportant things, are absolutely destructive to the family," Hutchins said.
Leaving the big expensive cities gives many crunchy cons a chance to afford beautiful old homes -- and that's important because the crunchy con lifestyle is not about escaping bad things, but enjoying the good ones: like beautiful architecture, good art, and the natural world.
Dreher argues in his book that living in the soul-less suburbs filled with giant McMansions leads to a more soul-deadening, isolated existence. He loves his beautiful, old 1930s house in a working-class Dallas neighborhood.
"We're not just isolated pod people living in total isolation from our neighbors,” Dreher explained. “But it feels like a real neighborhood. And there are trees. And there's a real sense of community there."
So being a crunchy con is about re-orienting your resources -- to food that's more healthy, to neighborhoods that are more neighborly, to appreciating the natural world as a real treasure, to a family life that counts children as a blessing and worthy of sacrifice.
Dreher said, "We think that, to provide for our kids means to give them a family life, a real family life, and real spiritual guidance. And if that means making material sacrifices, then we think that's what God calls us to do."
Hutchins says people need to wrench their families free of materialist, mediocre living.
He explains the current materialistic, go-getter mindset: "I have to work because I have to have a paycheck. I have to drive a certain car. I have to run my children to ballet lessons, and I have to be in soccer. And I have to do all these things because that's what everybody's doing."
Dreher says crunchy cons realize that life is so much more important than making a lot of money and becoming a more satisfied shopper.
"It ain't conservative just to buy more stuff,” he maintains. “What we need to conserve is the family and our faith, and the values that made this country great
As I recall a couple of years ago several people died or were badly sickened by hepatitis caught in a Mexican restaurant that was traced to raw green onions grown in Mexico that were apparently fertilized with raw human sewage. I suppose that is technically an organic growing technique but it is nasty.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Nasty. We have gray water available for lawns in our neighborhood, but you shouldn't drink it or use it on your food plants. Wash those veggies!
They do, and that's the reason for the huge bacterial problems being imported along with the produce. Yuk.
I could not agree with you more!
When we look at our past, it is not what we had that we think and reflect upon it's what person made an impact on us and our life, like my grandmother who was the Bone in the Soup for my family...
Some simple but memorable moments I had with her was holding a bucket with her, while she picked peaches off the tree in our yard to make Home Made Peach Pie!
Small volume products tend to cost more, especially when they cost more to produce.
Farmers use all the chemicals because it decreases their cost per unit produced. When you don't use them, your cost per unit goes up. In particular, you run a huge risk of losing your entire crop to insects or disease.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.