The Food Police (4 page)

Don’t take my word for it. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2003, concluded, “There is no doubt that [the food system] delivers—more nutritious food with wider variety; improved safety, with less environmental impacts; and greater convenience than at any time in the Nation’s history.”
³³

I’m not saying all food trends are heading in the right direction. Rather, my claim is that the actions of the food police have produced a misleading picture of food and agriculture. The food police rely on a distorted view of reality to gain support for a sweeping agenda that, if successful, will cause more harm than good.

In the following pages, I endeavor to convey the enormity of what is at stake. I trace the history of the food police and uncover their origins in the thoughts and attitudes of last century’s Progressives. Today’s food police, sympathetic to the anticapitalist leanings of the socialists of yesteryear, have a new weapon in their arsenal: behavioral economics. I show that behavioral economics is the intellectual engine behind the food elite’s justifications for overriding our preferences and decisions with their own. Given this general backdrop, I then take specific aim at the fetishes of the food police (organic and local food) and their fear of biotechnology, all of
which is underpinned by an untenable ideology of food. Along the way, we’ll see that the food police’s favored policies—from fat taxes to veggie subsidies to calorie labels at restaurants to strategic grain reserves—will hurt the poor, damage the environment, limit choice and innovation, and ultimately do little to alleviate their foodie angst.

The food police don’t have a monopoly on passion for food. I love to eat, to cook, and to visit the farms and factories that make it all possible. I’ve spent a lifetime learning where food comes from and how to make it better. I believe our freedoms are worth fighting for—from what farmers choose to do on their own land to what we decide to stick on our own forks. My desire is that farmers and agribusinesses have the freedom to compete for a place on your dinner plate, and that you have the knowledge to eat, with a clear conscience, what you wish.

THE PRICE OF PIETY

Tune in to the
Martha Stewart Show
or the Food Network, watch
Food, Inc
. or
Supersize Me
, or pick up a book such as
Fast Food Nation
or
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, and you’ll find that there is an emerging consensus about food. What we hear isn’t good news. In fact, it’s downright frightening. Yale professor Kelly Brownell tells us that we live in a “toxic food environment.”
¹
Bestselling author Michael Pollan says that “Americans have a national eating disorder.”
²
After showing a picture of an atomic explosion,
New York Times
columnist and food writer Mark Bittman proclaimed that our modern food production system is leading to “a holocaust of a different kind.”
³

The prescription for our ailments is local, organic, slow, natural, and unprocessed food along with a healthy dose of new food taxes, subsidies, and regulation. If we would only
repent our wicked ways and shackle our oppressors, we’d reap better-tasting, healthier, sustainable, and equitable food. To save the planet and our very lives, we must return to nature and abandon modern agriculture. These are the sacred cows of a growing food movement. Yet sacred cows make the tastiest burgers.

Is it possible that what you’ve read about modern food is all wrong? We humans are notoriously bad at judging small risks. It’s also human nature to focus on the negative and the emotional. The result is that stories claiming that we are drowning in a river of cheap, pesticide-riddled corn are more salable in the media than reports showing the benefits of lower prices at the supermarket. We fret over the dangers of food pesticides when we’re 1,600 times more likely to die in a car accident and even 15 times more likely to die from drowning in the bathtub.
⁴
When activist organizations and government agencies require crises to secure donations and public funding, there is a natural incentive to slant the facts. In fact, our vision of reality can become badly distorted.
⁵

Did you know, for example, that science is now beginning to suggest that despite all we’ve been told, cutting salt intake has little effect on the chances of having a heart attack or stroke and may even increase the chance of death?
⁶
Yet with every new study questioning the effectiveness of salt-reducing diets, the food police ramp up their efforts to force food processors and restaurants to cut back on sodium. It is time to rethink the rethinking of the modern American food system.

We can deliberate any food policy, but something larger than costs and benefits is at play. As John Donvan of ABC
News put it when moderating a debate on organic food, “What strikes me about this debate is that the tone here is as bitterly partisan as anything that’s happening in Washington. And I’m curious about why that is. And it’s on both sides. It’s also from all of us here in the hall. There is a nasty feeling to this issue.”
⁷

The debate is nasty because our freedom is at stake. On one side are farmers who want to work, and consumers who want to eat, as they please; on the other side are the self-proclaimed saviors of the food system, who want to make decisions for us. The food elite have appointed themselves our caretakers. They seek the power to steer food production and choice, claiming to know better than farmers and consumers. It is time we regained control of our forks and farms, and rightfully assumed responsibility for our own health, environment, and pocketbooks.

The surprise for the average grocery shopper, not to mention many fashionable foodies, is that the food zeitgeist did not result from careful thought and scientific investigation; it is the result of a concerted agenda to remake our food system. Avid buyers of organic who are just trying to protect their families and the environment are largely unaware of the undercurrent driving the modern food movement, but the food elite understand it all too well.

Even a casual reading of the bestselling books on food and agriculture reveals an explicit disdain for the system of free enterprise. Michael Pollan writes of “another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism—the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings
of society.”
⁸
Pollan sympathetically portrays a farmer who claims, “The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will.”
⁹
Stan Cox, a scientist at the Land Institute, opines about the state of modern agriculture when asserting, “If we find no alternative to capitalism, the Earth cannot be saved.”
¹⁰
Author and nutritionist Marion Nestle is “increasingly convinced that many of the nutritional problems of Americans … can be traced to … a highly competitive marketplace.”
¹¹
The American Public Health Association, a leading proponent of new dietary regulations, even has a Socialist Caucus. Food activist Frances Moore Lappé reveals that the modern food movement “is at heart revolutionary.”
¹²
In fact, the modern slow food movement grew from “intellectuals on the political left who were … supporters of communist ideology.”
¹³

The food elite have found the problem underlying our modern food dilemmas, and it is nothing short of capitalism and individual freedom. They demand a revolution in food—a dictatorship of the foodie proletariat.

Of course I’m not saying that everyone who wants healthier or tastier food is a socialist. Far from it. The question isn’t whether we want healthier and tastier food. Who doesn’t want that? The question is
how
to get it and what it
costs
. What the food police offer is not a realistic plan for food but an ideology. They offer compassion, but it’s easy to be caring and generous with other people’s property and choices. The modern food movement did not arise in a vacuum, and the food elite providing the intellectual underpinnings are far from dispassionate observers. Here’s a recipe for how they work.

STEP 1:
Mix first four ingredients (for best results, none should be local), taking care to remove any inconvenient facts that bubble up.
STEP 2:
Blend in butter and eggs (only local products here, to avoid hint of impropriety) and work until a smooth river of mainstream media and government funding emerges.
STEP 3:
Whip batter into media frenzy and an apparent epidemic is produced.
STEP 4:
Add in the elitism and antibusiness ethos and place in pressure cooker until Congress passes new legislation.
STEP 5:
If desired legislation is not obtained, add last ingredient, bypass the legislative process, and use the president’s executive order and bureaucratic fiat to complete the recipe. Feel free to rig the rules to get corporate photo ops to support the cause.
STEP 6:
Quickly move on to next problem before unintended consequences appear.

T
he police can be an important source of security and support for a neighborhood. A responsible police force works at the behest of the citizens, with their explicit direction and consent. But when the police believe that the citizenry are no longer capable of knowing what is in their own best interest and when they use their power to advance their own ideology, good-bye Andy Griffith and enter the Gestapo. We do not yet have martial food law, but no totalitarian state in history emerged without the stage first being set with ideas and the populace giving up incremental powers in the name of the greater good. It is against this danger we must be on guard. It was the philosopher David Hume who said, “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.”
¹⁴

The truth is that the food police don’t seem to understand the challenges faced by everyday food consumers. Celebrity chefs are accustomed to serving dinners to people with fat wallets. Nutritionists are trained to evaluate every morsel that goes into our mouths. Out in the real world, you and I have real trade-offs to make. We can eat the fifty-dollar roasted squab or we can make our mortgage payments; we can cut out the saturated fats and sugars or we can eat something tasty.