Posted on 09/29/2002 6:09:37 PM PDT by gcruse
The Reason Foundation
LOS ANGELES -- I don't care where my food comes from -- and neither should you.
By Ronald Bailey
"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.
From a nutritional and ecological point of view, the idea is bunk.
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.")
Copyright © 2002 United Press International
Good "Lord"...
Nicely put. I really liked your post #119 and some of your other comments as well.
I agree with you in principal, but don't agree with you 100% on some specifics like hormones in milk, etc. I do think it's an issue for the free market/producers & consumers to hash out.
Some people will insist on hormone and pesticide free food, and via a free market, there will always be producers who will accommodate these demands. Other people are willing to purchase food with hormones, etc. for a number of reasons; because it's cheaper, they aren't convinced it's harmful, etc., and producers will accommodate them, too.
I'm not convinced that adding hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, and herbicides to our food supply is healthier, but that doesn't mean there aren't benefits that may outweigh the risks. We can produce a greater abundance of food using modern technology. This gives poorer folks the ability to purchase a wider variety of foods that maybe they couldn't afford otherwise, and it enables us to feed millions of the world's starving as well.
Americans who don't want to eat food with these additives have the option of forking out the extra cash for organic alternatives. IMO, both choices should be available, and I don't think one side of the pro or con organic foods debate should use the might of government legislation to force their views on the other side.
I think that was basically what I said. Canning *is* a lost art, and I doubt that I would feel secure buying food canned in someone's home kitchen.
I don't live in an area where there are local meat producers, but I can assure you that I do buy most of my produce from local farmers during growing season. I also buy strawberries and melons in Jan, and those are not locally grown :-)
It's not surprising, mind you, given how atrophied the internal conservative "debate" has become, summed up in the now ubiquitous phrase "you're either with us, or you're with [fill in the blank]." It's also quite understandable, given the 250+ year seige we Conservatives have endured at the hands of the Left.
I do find a lot of merit in corporations, especially as compared with governments. My problems with them stem from the fact that, as the apotheosis of the money system, they can recognize no value other than the profit motive. As a matter of fact, it's probably worse than that. Values tend to get in their way. Values turn people skeptical consumers. Values allow us to suppress those appetites which, if properly stimulated and gratified, turn us into both perfect consumers and perfect slaves of the State. Values--you might say--are the true aquifer of Liberty.
And so Corporations have a tendency--visible in nearly all advertising, and in most of Media outlets that are, after all, 100% supported by corporate advertising dollars--to re-shape those inconvenient traditional values.
I believe in the Constitution, not Burke, thank you
To borrow your phrase, one cannot be both pro-Constitution and anti-Burke. Cheers.
For one thing, the alternatives are too terrible to contemplate. Feudalism, marxism, primitivism, etc. etc. They all contain worse seeds of malice than today's money system, imo.
Furthermore, I do not believe that the profit motive, which is at the root of the money system and of capitalism, is in itself an evil thing, any more than I believe that the sex drive is in itself an evil thing.
AnalogReigns made a great point lower down in this thread about man's Fallen Nature being an even deeper root cause of the problems you and I both tend to harp on. Men being Men (and I use the term generically), we would find a way to pervert just about any system.
The more that I think about it, the more I tend to focus on the advertising and media element. We are almost unbelievably susceptible to the power of images--Mohammed (the first psychologist, one might say) understood this, as did Moses. And the thrust of all advertising is clearly to Stimulate appetites which may then be Gratified by the corporations. This is as it ever has been, I suppose. But there is something so much more sinister about the scale and ruthlessness of it today. I don't claim to have any of this figured out, which was why I posed my original post to you as a question.
In any case, I'm enjoying the conversation here, which seems to be holding onto a relatively civil tone despite the best efforts of a few misfits.
Go such a lemon, dear. It might improve your disposition.
But some people bring out the worst in others. Go do a search on nopardons' posts to see how many people on FR she has condescendingly maligned. Why in the hell FR management puts up with it is a mystery to me.
It was inevitable that it would come down to this between us as soon as we put the argument in the christian arena. How did the sytem get "out there"? Did it start "out there"? Of course not. It grew out of the conscious determination of individuals acting in concert with other conscious, determined individuals. Protesting that we can't put the genie back in the bottle doesn't alter the fact that persons--acting with "self-control" in their time--massaged the bottle.
We can argue the nature of sin all day long; that it is always an individual choice. But you are being pollyannish to a irresponsible degree not to admit that the money system, as it has evolved, makes the near occassion of sin absolutely necessary. One person's sinful behavior necessitates sinful behavior on the part of others by virtue of the system. In almost every other field of "sinful" endeavor we seek--publicly anyway--to curtail sinful behavior because we are mindful of its inherant attraction. But that was when christianity still possessed it's otherworldlycharacteristics; characteristics that it has shed since it has embraced the protestant ethic and fled from two of it's three foundations--greco/roman paganism and judaic mysticism---leaving only what Santayna in The Life of Reason referred to as its European barbarism:
".......In thus meeting the world the soul without experience shows a fine courage proportionate to its own vigor. We may well imagine that lions and porpoises have a more masculine assurance that God is on their side than ever visits the breast of antelope or jellyfish. This assurance, when put to the test in adventurous living, becomes in a strong and high-bred creature a refusal to be defeated, a gallant determination to hold the last ditch and hope for the best in spite of appearances.
It is part of Protestantism to be austere, energetic, unwearied in some laborious task. The end and profit are not so much regarded as the mere habit of self control and practical devotion and steadiness. The only evils recongised seem so many challenges to action, so many conditions for some glorious un-thought-of victory. Such a religion is indeed profoundly ignorant--it is the religion of inexperience--yet it has, at its core, the very spirit of life. Its error is only to consider the will omnipotenet and sacred and not distinguish the field of inevitable failure from that of possible success. Success, however, would never be possible without that fund of energy and that latent resove and determination which bring also faith in success. Animal optimism is a great renovator and disinfectant in the world.
In the end with the complete crumbling away of Christian dogma and tradition, Absolute Egoism appeared openly on the surface in the shape of German speculative philosophy. This form, which Protestanism assued at a moment of high tension and reckless self-sufficiency, it will doubtless shed in turn and take on new expressions; but that declaration of independence on the part of the Teutonic spirit marks emphatically its exit from Christianity and the end of that series of transformation in which it took the Bible and patristic dogma for its materials.
It now bids fair to apply itself instead to social life and natural science and to attempt to feed its Protean hunger directly from these more homely sources......
Santayana wrote this in 1905, with the revised edition in 1951. So let me make my position perfectly clear: We are living in a post-Christian society. And "post-Christianism" was inevitable on the heels of protestantism, not accidental. To appeal to christian ethics as a means of taming some mystic "sinful" characteristics of capital in order to harness it to it's equally mystic "good" characteristics is an exercise in pointlessness.
Instead, what we do have, is empirical evidence of the nature of the money system--that is, the people (the individuals) who consciously act in concert with other conscious individuals as a means towards achieving a goal-- in the "common era" of 2002. It has maintained the eogistic, optimistic, courageous traits that characterize its protestant ancestor. It is not, in any way, secretive about its goals and aspirations.
To observe these activities does not make me a conspiracy theorist nor a marxist. And the ability to recognize the sytem for the barbarism that it is, does not make me a loon---but rather a natural scientist.
(And I say this not because I hate barbarism; I'm a great fan of babarism when its splendor is harnessed by other energies as it was with Christendom in the High Middle Ages.)
And, by the way, the above Santayana quotation is an excellent, if tragic, forshadowing, of the outcome of the war to "elevate" the moslem world that certain sections of America seem determined to prosecute. It is no accident that President Bush is a Protestant in Christianity's dying days and that he is being egged on by post-christian progressives and post-judaic Jews.
"....Its error is only to consider the will omnipotenet and sacred and not distinguish the field of inevitable failure from that of possible success....
Or:
MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN
But that's a whole 'nuther head of the hydra--eh?
Spoken (typed) like a true reactionary cicero's_son! And you went straight to the heart of the reactionary's dilemma, didn't you?
So I, in my demonic, progressive mood demand:
How long can we continue to gaze backwards at the terrible things that have happened and that might happen again if we dislodge the status quo? Have we so disciplined our imaginations that we cannot conceive that what lies ahead is far, far worse?
A few words from the accused "war criminal" and poet, Radovan Karadjic:
Lured by the candle flame
the times immemorial
arrive by night among us
Think, all you jolly, food-loving, capitalism-loving gourmands--as you gobble your wonderfully diverse and inexpensive foodstuffs--of all those grim little jihadists toiling away on the farms and in the food processing plants overseas (cheaper food, you know, is the highest human goal).
Hee hee, hee....
Did you know that I am a Protestant, albeit one with Habsburg Catholic sensibilities?
I ask you this not to personalize the discussion, but because I think your critique of Protestantism, for all its potency and persuasiveness, is flawed.
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Those words still send chills down my spine after nearly a decade of agnosticism-atheism and a recent return to Faith. Belshazzar died the night they were written and was succeeded by Darius the Mede. It was Darius who freed captive Israel and made possible the Restoration to Canaan. In this way, Darius became an unwitting father to Western civilization...and even to the Enlightenment and its present-day malcontents (including yours truly). How mysterious and awesome are the ways of the Lord!
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Nothing happens without God's foreknowledge. All that happens--even the Original Rebellion that is at the heart of so many Earthly Revolutions--is under His Plan. Can the Reformation be different? Of course not!
This does not, of course, make it "right," "good," "holy," or "inevitable." It simply means that it is under the same Plan, the One Plan, as all of the rest of history.
And so your critique of Protestantism--and I emphasize again that, owing to my temperament and reactionary sensibilities, I find it both potent and persuasive--is in this sense an even more profound rejection of Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin than the developements you describe. It is a this-worldly critique. You mourn the loss of beautiful and good things--Christendom, for instance, and Medeival Mystification--but to what end? Does the fact of the Reformation fundamentally alter the Outcome? Like so many other developments in history, it may make the world harsher, drearier, and more hostile to our common Faith, but these are burdens the Lord intends us to bear.
I'm now in serious danger of wading into waters out of my depths, so I'll give it a rest. My point in this post is, in a way, no different from one I made a long time ago in another post to you, when I pointed out that Empires have served God's purposes just as readily as have Republics.
All of which is to say that there are Protestants out there who still possess heaping quantities of Old World fatalism.
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