The Food Police (6 page)

Let me be clear: if we are to discuss the morality of food, foremost in our minds must be the ability of people (especially the poor) to eat. Whatever else the modern food elite may
say
—their push for soda and Twinkie taxes, their promotion of local foods, their attempts to regulate processed and fast food, their aversion to biotechnology—their actions make it harder for the poor to meet the most basic necessity of fending off starvation. The irony of many contestants on reality cooking shows such as
Top Chef Masters
is on display for all to see: they pledge to give their winnings to help the poor, all the while promoting a food system that’s sucking money out of the back pockets of the least advantaged. Abraham Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs” had a foundation, and this is it. And yet those of us who oppose the actions of the food police—the same food police who have turned Maslow’s triangle on its pointy and now unstable head—are called immoral? Please.

I don’t care if you refrain from eating foods made with biotechnology or growth promotants or preservatives. But don’t tell me it is immoral to allow farmers to sell consumers
these cheaper alternatives. I know the old left-wing canard that it’s not fair that poorer consumers can’t afford the local, organic veggies bought by the rich. Look—life isn’t fair. And until someone can fully articulate an alternative reality where perfectly happy egalitarians, working arm in arm, generate enough wealth to afford the things the rich now can, I regard such arguments as sentimental hogwash. As if people, deep down,
want
equality with the money they’ve earned. We are, after all, constantly trying to best our neighbors. As David Brooks put it, “We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.”
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Moreover, what arrogance is it to presume that if the poor had $1,000 more in their pocket, their highest priority would be to spend it on heirloom tomatoes? As the
Economist
magazine once put it, “Capitalism can make you well off. And it also leaves you free to be as unhappy as you choose. To ask any more of it would be asking too much.”
³¹

You don’t have to like all modern food technologies, but you should at least have the truth to know what you’re giving up—and what the food police will force others to give up—when they’re rejected. The hard, cold reality is that we can have expensive, fresh, “natural” food or affordable, processed, modern food. Choose what you will, but don’t deny others their choice.

However else it might seem, my critique of the food police is a cry for humility in the face of uncertainty. The world is a complicated place. Anyone who claims truly to know that food was once “too cheap” or is now “too expensive” adorns a crown of arrogance. I have a few hypotheses about why more Americans are overweight than they once were, but I’m not
sure we should do anything about it or what might happen if we did. Those who claim otherwise assume a level of competence beyond human limits. There is no food czar (at least not yet, thankfully). There is no top-down planning of our food system. The food elite seek explanations for the ills they see and ascribe malevolence to food companies and corporate farms, engaging in extravagant conspiracy theories. But the food system we have is a result of a complex emergent process that defies the limits of human rationalization. Conservatism, at its best, isn’t a knee-jerk reaction against all change, but rather a carefully considered recognition of the wisdom embedded in the unplanned outcomes that have emerged around us as a result of our individual actions. Liberalism, at its best, recognizes that people should have the power to choose for themselves and that we don’t have to do things the same way we always have. Between the best of these ideologies lies the right path for food.

The food elite want a supposedly more rational food system that conforms to their vision of the world and to textbook theories of social order. Alas, the real world will not yield to romantic dreams. Look to the outcomes of those who have tried to rationally plan their nations’ food production. Stalin and Mao starved millions of Russians and Chinese in an attempt to impose a supposedly more rational economic order. The food system we have is not the result of a single top-down plan, but that doesn’t mean it is ill-informed; the food we eat and the prices we pay come about from billions of individual decisions made by consumers and farmers and agribusinesses and grocery stores all trying to make themselves as well off as possible within a framework of norms, rules, and institutions.
Prices aren’t tools to be used by a more informed elite to direct the rest of us; they are signals about the world around us. The hubris of the food elite lies in their desire to replace this complex, evolved process embodying an immense amount of information with their own limited vision of the world. The truth is that no one knows enough to tell everyone else how to eat.

Let me tell you what I
do
know. Both my grandmothers raised chickens in their backyards, and wrung a neck when it was suppertime. Unlike today’s generation, they didn’t farm their backyards to find existential meaning, but out of cruel, dirt-poor necessity. I’m all for people who want to move out to the country and try their hand at hobby farming. More power to them. But don’t lecture those who’ve been there and done that. My grandmother might occasionally reminisce about simpler times, but she remembers well the unplumbed, un-wired house in which she raised my father and his siblings, and those of us that close to a life the food police romanticize and seek to return to, even if by regulatory force, say, “Enough!” We’ve had our backyard chickens, and Tyson is just fine.

FROM COPS TO ROBBERS

F. A. Hayek lived in Austria in the aftermath of World War I and witnessed the rise of socialism and fascism firsthand. When he later immigrated to England to work at the London School of Economics, he was alarmed to find many of the same intellectual undercurrents at work in Britain that had led to the ravaging of his homeland. Writing in
The Road to Serfdom
, he warned his new countrymen of the fate of such thinking:

Fortunately, the British made a U-turn on the road to serfdom—perhaps in part because they could see the consequences of their actions in the not-so-distant history of their neighbors. We, too, might learn a thing or two about where we are heading by turning back the clock to more fully appreciate the origins of the food police and the unintended consequences of their policies.

Perhaps the best place to start is to see that despite the fact that exotic organic veggies seem chic, interest in them has been around for centuries. Indeed, the tension between traditional grain-growing, mono-crop agriculture and the lure of alternatives is old news. As the British historian Joan Thirsk noted in her book
Alternative Agriculture
, animosity toward conventional grain farming has been around since at least the fourteenth century.
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But cries for change throughout history fluctuated with the economy. When growing conventional grains became less profitable, alternatives were sought. In the cyclical transitions in and out of alternative agriculture, the food police rode the tides. Each time, the argument wasn’t that more profitable alternatives existed, but rather, that grain-growing was
wrong
and alternative cropping systems were good and righteous. Thus, it apparently wasn’t sufficient to change old ways.

Farmers and nobles promoting alternative agriculture wrapped their decisions in a cloak of morality. Economic incentives are apt to be interpreted as moral imperatives, especially
when we want others to make the same choices we do. Throughout British history, foreign food trade was, at times, seen as both moral and immoral. So, too, was growing grain. And these views correlated almost perfectly with the prevailing economic climate. So, if you find yourself on the receiving end of a condescending sermon by the food police, just wait a few decades and you may find the shoe is on the other foot—if you choose to wear it.

At least the modern-day food police can find some comfort in knowing they have a long heritage. In medieval Britain, a commodity couldn’t be exported without a license, and a new crop couldn’t be grown without the king’s permission. Farmers were required to tithe their commodities to the state church or were otherwise imprisoned. Before modern capitalism, crony capitalists fought to get monopoly rights for growing new crops. And yes, even in the 1700s there were government payments for growing grain. It shouldn’t be surprising that some Brits were clamoring to leave this system behind.

When the Pilgrims left England and eventually came to America in the early seventeenth century, they brought with them the ideals of family, individualism, and education that would lay the foundation for the emergence of a new democratic republic a century and a half later. But when it came to food, it seems that puritanical idealism got the better of them.

When the Pilgrims arrived in what came to be called New England, Governor William Bradford set up a communitarian agriculture system. Food and supplies were pooled and then doled out by officials based on equity and need—a system he called common course. And what a beautiful idea it was. The immigrants to the new land were in it together, helping their
fellow man, all the while skirting the corrupting influences of the market. Although Karl Marx wouldn’t be born for another two centuries, the Pilgrims’ agricultural system embodied his ideal, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

No matter how devout were the Pilgrims, they were but mere mortals. Rather than conceding to the planners’ good intentions, the layfolk responded to the incentives inherent in the system. When you can’t reap the fruits of your labor, why work? Bradford himself wrote in 1647 that the communal system “was found to breed much confusion and discontent,” in part because “young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense … this was thought injustice.”

Bradford recognized the problem. Even a tribe so godly and righteous as to pick up, leave home, and traverse an ocean to begin a commune of sorts couldn’t be compelled to goodness through cajoling and community spirit. Bradford decided to give each family a private parcel of land from which they reaped all that was sown. The same men and women who were previously chastised for their idleness were now suddenly productive. Bradford wrote that the new system “had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” The modern food police would have us believe that more neighborliness and community spirit are needed to revolutionize the food system, but while much has changed over the past 350 years, human nature hasn’t.
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The father of modern economics, Adam Smith, writing
in the late eighteenth century, said it best: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
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I certainly wouldn’t expect to find something even as mundane as buttered toast for breakfast if I relied on the altruism of the deliveryman, the wheat farmer, the salt miner, the dairyman, and all the other people who must be coordinated to provide the wheat, salt, milk, baking powder, and yeast. Everyone knows this to be true, but the food police unwittingly seek to undermine the profit incentives of the system that make it all happen. Alas, that’s unlikely to be the lesson our kids will learn in November when drawing hand-shaped turkeys at school—assuming the food police haven’t deemed the craft too degrading to the birds.

The Pilgrims learned another important lesson, one that literally meant the difference between life and death. With help from the Native Americans, they learned how to grow corn. The uncivilized crop grown by uncivilized people did not sit well with settlers accustomed to the wheat and barley of their homeland. Fashion, however, gave way to necessity, and the versatile and productive corn became a staple. Soon the American colonists not only were able to feed themselves but began exporting agricultural commodities back to the Old World.

There is nothing more infuriating to the elite than to witness an event they can’t explain—or control. As a result, the cultural elite of the time decried the transition to the unfamiliar corn, and ironically today’s cultural elite do the same. Modern food advocates deride the commodity in scathing documentaries such as
King Corn
. Writers such as Michael
Pollan are disgusted with our “river of cheap corn” and are appalled to find remnants of corn in our DNA. With some effort, we might remove corn from our diets, but its influences cannot be whitewashed from history. It is not just our bodies that have been genetically influenced by corn; corn and agriculture have affected the very DNA of our nation itself.