I don't care where my food comes from -- and neither should you.

"People should know where their food comes from," an organic farmer from Montana declared at a conference on agriculture and the environment I attended this past weekend, sponsored by the Political Economy Research Center. This notion is increasingly popular among political environmentalists. It is usually a shorthand way to express opposition to genetically enhanced crops and to convey approval for their organic equivalents.

First, a bit of background. It is not at all surprising that most Americans think that chickens come plastic-wrapped without bones, that milk pours from gallon jugs, or that fresh fruit can be picked year around. After all, less than two percent of the country lives on farms today.

But when I was growing up in the 1960s I knew exactly where at least 90 percent of the food I ate came from: my family's crops. Every tomato, bean, squash, cucumber, pea, potato, ear of corn, turnip, mustard green, carrot, and cabbage I ate came from our huge garden. We picked wild blackberries and grew gallons of strawberries. We had cherry, apple, peach, walnut, and European chestnut trees. We canned nearly everything and had a root cellar. Our honey came from more than 20 beehives.

As for meat, we raised and slaughtered all the beef, pork, chicken, goat, lamb, and turkey we ate. Our milk came from our dairy herd, and we spent many hours churning butter. The domesticated meat was occasionally supplemented with squirrel, groundhog, opossum, and mud turtle. Although I didn't much care for them, our fish consisted of crappies and catfish taken from the farm ponds.

My father's standing orders for butchering the beef was to make as many steaks as possible and turn everything else into hamburger. The meat was wrapped in waxed butcher paper and stored in giant freezer chests. We had a smokehouse in which we salted our own hams. I even knew the names of the cows and pigs we ate. You can't know much more about where your food comes from than that.

It is precisely this personal food history that makes me cherish modern grocery stores and restaurants. American grocers can choose what they offer their customers from among more than 320,000 different packaged foods. As a kid, it was an enormous treat to go to the local Piggly Wiggly to buy tasty exotic prepackaged items like hot dogs, spaghetti, and Velveeta. (Incidentally, it was Piggly Wiggly that invented the novel concept that customers should be allowed to roam a store's aisles and pick out their own groceries.) And the proliferation of fine restaurants in the last two decades has been amazing.

Which brings me back to the absurd assertion that everybody should know where his or her food comes from. I knew where my food came from because it took my family a huge percentage of our time just to do the mind-numbing and back-breaking labor of raising it. Of course, we sold our surplus cows, milk, and wool for money so that we could buy incidentals like clothing, medicines, books, refrigerators, televisions, tractors, trucks, and cars. And no one hectored us about knowing where those items came from.

One of the great glories of modern life is the enormous elaboration of the division of labor and how the efficiencies gained from that division makes people much wealthier than they could otherwise be. Since we all don't have to stitch our own clothes, bake our own bread, compound our own medicines, or even cook our own meals, we are all much better off. This is why as a society we can afford to have economic niches like pet dentists and manufacturers of elastomolds for pastry chefs who specialize in baking madeleines.

And why should they care? Food today is cheap, nutritious, and safe. The last century has seen a vast improvement in food quality and safety. In millennia past, food and water were the chief sources of many deadly diseases. Consider that as recently as 1933-35, a U.S Public Health Service survey found that 5,458 children between the ages of 1 and 15 died from diarrhea and enteritis, most caused by food-borne pathogens.

By contrast, a recent survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that just 29 Americans died of food-borne illnesses between 1993 and 1997. Meanwhile, stomach cancer rates are down by 75 percent since 1950 because old-fashioned food preservation techniques like salting, pickling, and smoking have been replaced by refrigeration.

That doesn't mean people are or should be prevented from learning about where their food comes from, if that's the way they want to spend their time. Among life's greatest pleasures are fine dining and food connoisseurship. The expanding division of labor and our growing technological prowess is nurturing more and more differentiation among foods, permitting the creation and appreciation of thousands of wines, cheeses, chocolates, coffees, teas, and so forth.

I might prefer parmigiano-reggiano versus your inexplicable fondness for boursin. Or I might think that Rombauer Napa Valley Zinfandel is nectar and sniff at that swill from Australia that you quaff. Today, you can choose "slow food" (though it has some unsavory ideological baggage) over fast food, or choose both when that suits you.

Nor is there anything wrong with waking up on Saturday mornings to rush out to the local farmers market. I, too, cannot resist organic heirloom tomatoes. I buy organic not because such foods are ecologically or nutritionally superior -- they aren't -- but simply because the local lady who grows the Brandywines, Mortgage Lifters, and Yellow Pears I crave chooses that method of production. I'm glad she grows them, not least because that means that I don't have to anymore.

For those who are deluded enough to think that organic foods are nutritionally superior, the market makes the opportunity to buy them widely available, generally at a 30-percent price premium. (Ideologically motivated organic aficionados should keep in mind that organic production typically yields a third less food than other means. That means that more land is being plowed down, leaving less for forests and other wildlands.)

But there is something wrong with the puritanical notion that it's a sin to live in blithe ignorance of the ultimate sources of your nourishment. Life is too short for most people to learn how to fix their computers and cars, and too short for most to learn about food production. And that's just fine. Eating shouldn't be a moral duty; it should be a pleasure.

(Ronald Bailey, Reason's science correspondent, is the editor of "Global Warming and Other Eco Myths" and "Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet.")

However, enjoy the bliss of your capitalist ignorance.

You're one of the most precise writers I've come across--anywhere--so I gather you intend exactly what you say here. Your choice of "capitalist" is probably not accidental.

Still, it rankles. I am a capitalist. My great, great grandfather started a drugstore in our family's ancestral hometown in Western Kentucky. It became the local hospital, talking post, foodstamp distribution platform, veterinary office, and speakeasy. He raised his family up out of poverty. It was a grand achievement.

Today, of course, the old building is occupied by a corporation. The employees earn minimum wage, and I can almost guarantee you that there are no beverages on the premises to offend the local Baptist sensibilities. I am not a Corporatist.

I'm struggling with the distinction these days, BelleDame. Is the Corporatist/Monopolist period we are in today part of the inevitable evolution of capitalism? Or did we take a wrong turn at Albuquerque?

{sigh} Something like 80% of businesses and over 70% of us employed work for businesses of less than 50 people. Some of these are sole propriterships, some partnerships some (shudder!) Corporations--this is just their legal organization. One can not be truely pro-capitalist and anti-corporate.

It's a liberal/marxist lie that we are being over-run by big bad evil corporations....its exactly what the stupid kids were yelling in the protests last weekend in DC.

I'm sorry your grandfather's interesting Drug Store location is now occupied by a boring corporation. I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of (more) people benifitting from that dull company--in both employees and customers, than your grandfather, as good as he was, ever dreamed of helping.

One can not be truely pro-capitalist and anti-corporate.

What did Rummy call those guys who were holed-up in Tora Bora? "Dead-enders," I think. They were so fundamentalist that even the other fundamentalists were afraid of them.

We have our own breed of dead-enders here--market fundamentalists who place all of their Faith in unseen hands.

It wasn't always so dull in the Conservative movement. The original conservatives in this country--men like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver--understood the threat that monopolist corporations posed to Liberty. They understood that the impulse of multinationals, as they achieved greater pricing power and greater remove from the local community, was to ally themselves with government at the expense of the consumer...and the citizen.

I have no truck with the Leninist Dead-Heads who travel from capital to capital these days. Their critique of globalism and corporatism is nothing but a regurgitation of the old Lefty platform of enforced equality along identitarian lines. My primary concern--like that of all true conservatives since Burke--is Liberty. To the extent that corporations endanger Liberty by allying themselves with the State, I will oppose them.

That does not mean that it is necessarily the most nourishing food.

What is your souce for your dire information? Rodale's Organic Gardner magazine? Or maybe the Utne Reader or the Nation magazine? Perhaps the local vitamin store?

I get sick of people passing off notional nonsense as fact (like "we pump cows with hormones to boost milk production") without verifiable science to back it up! I know hormones are used...judiciously--but will a farrmer really hurt his own cows to make a living??? The environmental wackos have FILLED our media with such junk science and most of it, being junk, is just horse (or maybe cow) manure.

Do you really think American farmers are so ignorant and desparate that they would poison their own children? After all they buy and eat the same food from the same food market for which they produce...

It's just all-grown-up-now-counter-cultural-I-can't-get-over-the-60s mentality silliness to think that EEEEVILLL corporate executives are plotting to poison our food chain to fill their own greeeeedy coffers....

The source of such nutty ideas about food are the same people who think W. Bush's motivation in foreign policy is to enrich his rich Texas oil buddies... What a bunch of crap!!!

Sometimes I think conservatives are as suspicious and silly over certain things as liberals are over other certain things...and both extremes seem to have a deep mistrust of American business. It's rather sad.

I for one believe in America, her companies, and her food and farmers.

So tell me, do we have more, or fewer companies than 10 years ago?

I'd be willing to bet money we have more, far more... And the landslide of Americans are employed in SMALL businesses. Large corporations are far from gobbling up our economy!

Family farms are in trouble....but, every government program which pumps more BILLIONS into the market, also pumps more governmental control there, AND ironically goes mostly to rich farms and corporate farming... thus ultimately damaging more family farmers than a normal unfettered market would. I'm as against corporate welfare as I am individual welfare--both build government dependency--seen most acutely in the American agriculture.

You can criticize America and her farms and where they are going, but what is your solution? Primitive agriculture? Homesteading? Hand plows?

I'm glad AnalogueReigns got this shot in across the bow before I responded:

One can not be truely pro-capitalist and anti-corporate.

This is as true as the fact that everything a human being is, or ever will be on earth, is contained in its embryo.

After all the parades and and rhetoric and brass bands and hot wars and cold---in the deep dark night of the conservative soul--we must finally face the fact that it is the money system itself that is eating away at our vitals.

Marx was never able to get his hands around the neck of the money system and instead became hypnotized by it. He dedicated his greatest work to it. Das Kapital,in the fianl analysis, is a love poem to the money system. The money system is the utimate acheivement of materialist man--and Marx knew it.

The money system is god-the-father. The industrial revolution is god-the-son. Corporatism is god-the-ghost-maker---it is out to makes ghosts of the tattered remnants of the resistance.....

I don't like the idea of importing much of our food.

My husband is in agriculture and he assures me many countries do not have our standards for food production. He will not eat any food--fresh or canned--from Mexico, Brazil or India. We like to stay away from China as well. The same is true of cut flowers. Never touch them without immediately washing your hands.

Lets get specific. You don't believe that market systems work without government busting up eeeevil monopolistic corporations....

Exactly what is a monopoly? Was IBM one? Is Microsoft one? Will it be in 5 or 10 years...even with government's hands off?

Is not a corporation a free association of individuals for a particular business? And the cause of Liberty opposes this? hmmmmmmmmmmm......

How, does government oppose monopoly? By government manipulating law and markets and people in ways the U.S. Constitution gives it no authority to do?

I believe in the Constitution, not Burke, thank you.

"I get sick of people passing off notional nonsense as fact (like "we pump cows with hormones to boost milk production") without verifiable science to back it up! I know hormones are used...judiciously--but will a farrmer really hurt his own cows to make a living??? The environmental wackos have FILLED our media with such junk science and most of it, being junk, is just horse (or maybe cow) manure."

The answer - absolutely, without a doubt.

How do you use hormones judiciously?

You are evidently talking of dairy cows, but they also pump hormones into beef cattle and we eat them. As to a farmer feeding his kids that - he probably doesn't. Although, to be honest, some farmers are not that smart either.

For 15 years, we raised everything we ate, except flour, salt, pepper, etc. I even cooked in lard when I had it. We ate butter, whole milk, real cream in my coffee (ummmmmm!), We ate as much of anything as we wanted. None of us had an ounce of fat on us.

My point, how can you fill your food with hormones and not expect it to affect the ones who eat it. That just makes no sense at all. Now if you want to say you accept the risk involved - fine, but don't try to say it has no effects. If it effects the cow, it will affect you.

I will also say this, since we have left the farm and buy meat in the stores, I cook very little meat on the top of the stove. The scent turns my stomach. I have to cook it in the oven or slow cooker - so it doesn't waft through the house.

And don't even talk about the stench from chickens. And speaking of chickens, how do you feel about arsenic in your chicken feed?

It's not the "money system" as if its something somehow outside of ourselves....

Greed and materialism are always problems--and they are problems that start inside the human heart, not in some amorphous "system" out there. Political liberty and a just economic system are always relative and tentative... Neither I nor other constitutionalists, from the Founding Fathers on, are utopian. We will not bring Heaven on earth--we're primarily trying to keep hell at bay however.

This is where Ayn Rand and Marx both got it wrong--both pooh poohed the idea of internal corruption, lets just call it what it is--sin, as the fundamental problem in economics (as it is in any human endeavor). A republican democracy, with its natural market economy, has however been the best way so far--BY far-- to make the best society for the greatest number of people.

I look to something or really Someone beyond governement and economy to take care of the fundamental internal problem--but I also get frustrated by people--on various sides--who don't, looking rather to fix the "system" without first looking to deal with themselves.

I will also venture to say that in groups of people who don't look to God to fix their internal problem--no system will ever work well. It takes an internally just (or speaking theologically "justified") people to make a just system. I know that Washington, Patrick Henry, and even Franklin, among others, believed the same thing.

An example: Candidate Algore spews the usual liberal mantra about conservatives not caring for others. While during the last election, he--making a handsome 6 figure income--showed donations to charities of only $200. (just 10% in giving should have made that figure over $20,000.) I cannot take seriously what someone like that says about an evil selfish system--when he himself is demonstrably so selfish.

I'm not saying you are selfish like that, I have no idea what you are like--I'm only saying the talk of changing the "system" is often done by people who have never changed themselves.

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