David Frum’s Read on The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Fum kicks off his NewMajority piece with a look at the Right/Left food divide:
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney often joked during the primaries: “Being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.” Try that joke the other way around, and it doesn’t work, does it?
Meat-eating is right-wing, everybody knows that! We even describe a rip-roaring conservative speech as “red-meat.” Crunchy granola is correspondingly left-wing. Whole Foods is liberal fascist, according to Jonah Goldberg, while Wal-Mart is bad for America, according to PBS’s Frontline.
These stereotypes have a basis in reality, for sure. There are more Whole Foods stores in Massachusetts’ 617 area code than in both Carolinas; more in Chicago and Evanston than in all of Georgia. Meanwhile, the state of Alabama supports only one Whole Foods store, but three Ruth’s Chris steakhouses. Mississippi: 0 Whole Foods, 3 Ruth’s Chris.
But, says Frum, it could just as easily have been the other way around. Frum read The Omnivore’s Dilemma (“More exactly: as I listened to it on long bike rides with my wife through the farm country of Prince Edward County, Ontario.”) and he comes away from it with fain praise for Michael Pollan:
Pollan lives in Berkeley, teaches journalism, and used to edit Harper’s. That’s a biography demarked with with red flags for the conservative reader. Pollan cannot resist the occasional grand pronouncement about “capitalism” and its machinations. That’s an irritatingly unconsidered remark… Unconsidered remarks aside, however, Pollan’s work ought to appeal to the market-minded reader. Pollan does some of his best work identifying the wasteful externalities concealed by agricultural subsidies. The corn that feeds Walmart’s cows may be genuinely cheaper than the grass that nourishes the cows yielding my expensive milk. But it’s not quite so much cheaper as the Walmart shopper thinks. The price of a bushel of corn averaged $2.74 between 2002 and 2007. But the federal government guarantees a price closer to $4. The difference comes in the form of a check from the federal Treasury.
There are other externalities too in American agriculture. The one that worries me most is the as yet unexacted cost of the overuse of antibiotics in animal feed. As antibiotics are used more, bacteria mutate to defeat them. By some estimates, 18,000 Americans died last year from drug-resistant infections. The routine use of antibiotics to defeat the infections that arise in overcrowded and under-sanitary feedlots is an important accelerant to the evolution of drug-resistant superbugs. If milk at $3.79 saves you from untreatable illness, you might think it a more economical purchase than it looks at first.
Preventable suffering of animals could also be regarded as an externality. Americans care about the animals they know: It’s estimated that Americans spend some $40 billion a year on the care of their pets. Yet the cow or pig you eat is as intimate a part of your life as the dog or cat with which you live. If Americans understood what the lives of those cows or pigs looked like, I wonder whether they would begrudge the extra cents per pound it would cost to ameliorate these animals’ living conditions. As wealth increases and living standards improve, that price becomes easier to pay – and harder to justify not paying.
Frum says the Right should support policies that promote better public health and fight obesity:
The policy response to this crisis is not obvious. And yet there are some immediate steps that make sense. State governments should ban soda machines from schools. Local governments should adopt zoning ordinances that prevent the siting of fast-food restaurants within 1000 yards of schools. (Research suggests that the near presence of a fast-food restaurant causes a 5% increase in student obesity.) Impose a steep excise tax on high-fructose corn syrup.
Over the medium term, Congress should work to shift federal aid to agriculture away from supports for specific crops – corn, soy etc. - to subsidies for the use of land for farming of any kind.
In the end, however, the impact of public policy will likely prove modest. Conversely, the more responsible approach to food and nature recommended by Michael Pollan and his admirers is the very epitome of conservative individualism and personal responsibility.
Via Andrew Sullivan, who calls Frum’s piece Crunchy Con bait. And, indeed, Crunchy Con takes the bait:
Good for David Frum! I especially like his Pollan-inspired discussion, from the Right, of how government subsidies are screwing up our agriculture, with far-reaching results. But if you’ve followed the reaction to my crunchy-con stuff from my NR days, this excerpt from Frum won’t surprise you, either
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Frum is not surprising, once more. He's among those who wants the GOP to be Democratic (capital D), and it's no surprise that others who are that way like Andrew Sullivan are delighted with this latest jaunt into leftist faddism.
Americans don't need or want the federal government or other government behaving paternalistically when it comes to lifestyle choices, much less beginning to dangerously flirt with totalitarian social engineering that underlies the worst of “food policy,” “lifestyle policy,” “thought and behavioral policy,” all PC, naturally.
It's bad enough that this stuff so badly infests the recent interest in urban gardening…
“American agriculture”
Leave the silly faddism (and worse) out of this, and just seek rational agricultural policy reform. [sigh]
Well, you missed your chance! The real irony is that Whole Foods is a Texas born and raised company, still headquartered right here in Austin!
Of course, there are a lot of Texans that will tell you Austin isn't really Texas, and I admit in many ways it isn't. It is more like a chunk of San Fransisco dropped dap smack in the middle of Hill Country.
That is why I love it here, though. I have always lived in liberal areas (shocking, I know) like Hawaii, San Francisco, Pennington, NJ, and now Austin. I wanted my children raised around communities known for openness and acceptance, not intolerance.
It does seem quite odd that fresh fruits and veggies have somehow been branded as leftist or elitist. I remember picking produce from my old German Grandpa's farm deep in the Central Valley of California, and every elitist tomato and exotic green tasted like heaven.
As for superbugs, I guess it's really not a concern if you don't believe in evolution, so of course that concern must be a lefty conspiracy.
I do (amazingly) agree with this statement from DLS: “Americans don't need or want the federal government or other government behaving paternalistically when it comes to lifestyle choices”. It's true — both for the lib causes like abortion and sexual preference, as well as conservative causes like whether or not we eat meat or smoke cigarettes or get good gas mileage. My problem with the way the government currently deals with food in particular is not that I think they need to tell us what to eat, just give healthy food the same chance as crap food by taking away the subsidies that lead to having every darn thing we put in our mouths pumped up with hydrogenated soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup. They are *currently* telling us what to eat by tipping the favor toward things that make up far to big a part of the national diet.
Well roro80 it seems that the right is just bothered full time about government and “lefty” influences.
Crooks and Liars has a great piece on how the right side of the room sees the world:
Thom Hartmann: Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican
“My problem with the way the government currently deals with food in particular is not that I think they need to tell us what to eat, just give healthy food the same chance as crap food by taking away the subsidies that lead to having every darn thing we put in our mouths pumped up with hydrogenated soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup.”
I don't believe Washington will reform agricultural policy (much less, for the better) any time soon. That (real reform, at least) would require a dimunition of Washington's power and intervention in agriculture.
* * *
“It does seem quite odd that fresh fruits and veggies have somehow been branded as leftist or elitist”
That's because it requires odd “reasoning” to contrive that claim rather than face the facts that I list.
(Of course, one prerequisite for acquiring the facts is to be informed, perhaps read about things like urban gardening in addition to, say, knowing about or patronizing Whole Foods, Wild Oats before it was taken over, local markets or farmer's markets, reading about urban gardening and related projects, and so on…)
“I have always lived in liberal areas “
It's been a mixed assignment for me all over the USA — when I was in St. Louis metro, I was in a bluey-blue spot (yard signs: “INSTEAD OF WAR — INVEST IN PEOPLE”) where my favorite restaurant had “WANTED FOR WAR CRIMES: GEORGE W. BUSH” and the like posters in its front doorway.
“That's because it requires odd “reasoning” to contrive that claim rather than face the facts that I list.”
I'm sorry, I guess I missed those facts? To which facts are you referring?
“To which facts are you referring?”
Go back and re-read, also learn from what's in the parentheses. No demands for repetition, citations, studies (all of such are subsequently subject to additional stalling or argument just to waste time for waste's sake) accepted.
So, let's recap what you've said in this post, and I'll try to pick out some facts.
1) You don't like Frum or Sullivan. This is an opinion of yours.
2) Americans don't want the government telling them what to eat. I agree with this, and said so.
3) Urban gardening is cool. Opinion, but I can go along with it. Sure. Urban gardening IS cool.
4) Faddism = bad, rational policy = good. Still opinion, but again, sure.
5) Federal policy change for the better probably won't happen. Probably true. No “facts” nor evidence given, but I don't necessarily disagree.
6) Some claim is “odd”. Also: urban gardening is still cool. Which claim? I don't know, but evidently you've already proven it by the above listed “facts”.
7) You lived in St. Louis and there were liberals there. Ah! I found a fact! Off-topic and irrelevant to a discussion of farming policy, but a fact nonetheless.
So, I don't see any real fact that would say anything whatsoever about my statement about fruits and veggies being associated with leftism or elitism, which is what you quoted. I don't even see any opinions on that statement. I can't even tell whether you agree with me or not. I'm guessing not, since you seem to think we're in an argument?
So, fine. I've re-read each of your comments, and have come up with the perfectly logical conclusion that you don't know what the word “fact” means, nor do you understand the grammatical use of parentheses.