Your Teacher Said What?! (22 page)

As they did, Americans started spending less and less on food. In 1930, when that first King Kullen opened, grocery shopping took twenty cents of the average American's disposable income. By 1947, when supermarkets were still a curiosity—depression and war had slowed their growth to a crawl—the number was down to nineteen cents. Ten years later, though, it had fallen to fifteen cents, twenty years later to nine cents, and, well, you know the rest.

By traditional measures, this is a triumph: more food for less labor than at any time in history. The much-debated costs of this particular triumph, obesity and related diseases, are, it seems to me, pretty high-class problems to have, at least in historical terms.

Not everyone agrees. There's at least one supermarket whose guiding philosophy is that Americans should pay
more
for their food.

Our local Whole Foods is pretty typical of the chain. Like most supermarkets, the produce is close to the entrance, though I think it's safe to say that some of the ingredients on offer are, well, unusual. One emu egg, for example, will set you back $29.95, which seems like a lot until you notice that an ostrich egg costs ten dollars more. The fact that it's supposed to make an omelet that will feed twelve to fourteen people (or a cake the size of a golf cart) might ease the sticker shock for some shoppers, but not me. Or Blake.

 

“Dad?”

“Yes, Blake?”

“Do people actually
eat
those?”

“I guess. Probably not very often.”

Blake considered the ostrich egg again.

“You know what I think?”

“What, Blake?

“I think they're showing off.”

 

You bet. According to the folks at Whole Foods, an ostrich egg doesn't actually taste much different from chicken eggs, so it's a good bet that anyone who is paying six times what even Whole Foods charges for eggs from organically raised, free-range, and thoroughly contented chickens (and
fifteen
times what two dozen eggs cost at a normal supermarket) isn't doing it for the flavor. A big chunk of the appeal of Whole Foods, and places like it, is the fun of telling someone else about your superior taste.

Blake's favorite spot in the entire store, in fact, is the rack of weird and wonderful salts from around the world, including Alderwood Smoked Sea Salt and pink Himalayan rock salt, whose magical flavor that justifies a $15.99 per pound price (for salt!) we're not likely to find out about.

Though it's easy to make fun of Whole Foods' high-priced luxury foods, no free-market capitalist should be too fussed about them. After all, almost all luxury products, from Hartmann luggage to Armani ties, depend on some element of status appeal, and while we do our best to teach Blake and Scott that it's usually a bad idea to spend a lot for a label, free-market means freedom to spend your money any way you want. John Mackey, the supermarket chain's founder, is probably as well known for his libertarian economic beliefs as for his free-range eggs.

There are, however, some less harmless aspects to the Whole Foods experience, which has evolved a lot from its health-food-store origins. The “health food” audience was—and remains—convinced that food that includes ingredients like the preservatives and stabilizers that make it possible to ship food all over the world without spoiling were, on the scale of healthiness, somewhere between drinking weed killer and chewing razor blades. In fact, simply eliminating the taint of artificial preservatives and flavorings—and especially artificial sweeteners (obesity is the one health issue that Whole Foods completely ignores)—isn't enough. A typical Whole Foods devotes at least three aisles to nutritional supplements, vitamins, homeopathic medicines, antioxidants, eleuthero (I don't know what this is, either), and black cohosh (ditto). And as if that weren't enough, literally dozens of different foods, from yogurt to breakfast cereal, are now fortified with strains of something called “probiotic” bacteria.

You might think that Whole Foods shoppers—and anyone spending serious money on nutritional supplements—would have a problem explaining why, by any measure, the human life span and quality of life have continued to improve at almost the same rate that the food industry has added deadly poisons to the diet. Think again. A true devotee doesn't care about the lack of any proof that organic food is healthier and sneers at the sort of study done by the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
, which reviewed more than 160 papers published over the last fifty years and found that organic food offers no nutritional advantage over conventionally grown food. Despite the safest food supply in human history (the fact that outbreaks of
E. coli
—whose incidence of contamination in beef has
fallen
45 percent since 2000—and salmonella are now front-page news is actually a testament to their rarity;
all
food-borne illnesses are responsible for only a third as many annual deaths as, say, alcohol-based liver disease), the nutrition-paranoia business is healthier than ever. After all, even if people aren't keeling over from unclean food and water, they're still getting cancer—and cancer takes long enough to appear, and is mysterious enough in its origins, that preventing it is the number one reason people try to improve their health nutritionally.

Now, I don't claim to know a whole lot about nutrition. But I spent a good bit of my youthful academic life working at the most prestigious cancer labs in the world, under the supervision of Nobel Prize winners (one of the reasons I now earn my living commenting on the world of finance is the realization that I might be smart—but not
that
smart), and I can say, with a great deal of confidence, that cancers are so diverse and their causes so varied and complex that the whole notion that organic food is less likely to cause a malignancy is just about as sensible as throwing salt over your shoulder or practicing animal sacrifice.

That salt would be, of course, Alderwood Smoked Sea Salt. And the animals for the sacrifice: only free range and grass fed.

It's probably a little unfair to hammer Whole Foods for what is a much more widespread set of delusions. The fetish of the moment is for food that is “organic, local, and slow”—food that is grown or raised without anything artificial, as (mostly) protection against cancer; grown or raised within fifty miles (or so) from the kitchen table where it is eaten, to protect the planet against climate change from the burning of fossil fuels; and grown, raised, and especially prepared in the slowest, least industrialized way possible, to restore a lost golden age when Ma made pies from scratch and Pa picked the corn fresh for dinner. It's practically an article of faith to Progressives and, sad to say, to a lot of other folks who should know better.

And as I mentioned above, we Kernens don't really have a huge problem with people deciding to spend their money on organic food or pink Himalayan sea salt; free markets are free. If Michael Pollan, professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and author of local-organicand-slow classics like
The Omnivore's Dilemma
, wants to eat paté made from a wild boar he killed, gutted, and dressed in the Berkeley hills, then good for him. At the very least he's probably helping to defend Berkeley from wild boar attacks. The problem with Pollan and other gurus of the movement, like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse restaurant in—wait for it—Berkeley or Michelle Obama and her White House kitchen garden, is that they aren't satisfied just to wallow in their own virtue—to argue, as Pollan did in an interview with the
Wall Street Journal
, that eggs
should
cost $8 a dozen. Like most Progressives, they are determined to make everyone else just as virtuous as they are. This is always done for our own good, which is the same thing I said when we had our dog neutered.

Even this kind of self-righteousness would be easier to take if it weren't expressed with such confident ignorance. Attacking modern farmers for applying “industrial” science to their soil, for testing it chemically for nutrients and acidity, for correcting levels of nitrogen and phosphorus, and especially for the specialization that permits fewer than 2 percent of the U. S. population to feed the other 98 percent (this is one-tenth the number of only sixty years ago) is a bit like demanding that we go back to copying books by hand, which would at least cut down on the number of Michael Pollan books. Eliminate herbicides? If so, better be prepared to eliminate no-till farming, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons a year. Say no to factory-made nitrogen fertilizers? Okay, but Norman Borlaug,
³²
the Nobel laureate, agronomist, and father of the Green Revolution, which freed nations like India and Mexico from famine, estimated that the planet can support only four billion people using purely natural sources. If Europe tried to feed itself organically, it would need to put under cultivation an amount of land equal to the remaining forests of France, Germany, Britain, and Denmark combined.

Even on environmental grounds, organic food is a solution in search of a problem—one that industrial food production is already solving. Food production in the industrial world increased 5 percent between 1990 and 2004—on 4 percent
less
land, producing 4 percent
less
greenhouse gas emissions, and using 17 percent
less
synthetic nitrogen. The reasons are largely an infusion of technology: drip irrigation on fields leveled with lasers to reduce runoff and GPS-equipped tractors that automatically keep equipment on straighter paths and plot location down to the meter, allowing them to use chemicals only where needed. Infrared sensors are now used to identify the color of crops, calculating where fertilizer is needed and where it isn't. It's not the sort of technology that was used back in the days when the average farm was less than one hundred acres. And farms weren't that small because of farmers' desire to live closer to the land; that was the amount of land that could be cultivated by animal power alone.

Of course, a significant number of Whole Foods shoppers are sort of down on animal power, as well. In fact, they're sort of down on animal
anything
. They're called vegans.

Vegans are, of course, what happens when vegetarians feel a need for even
more
self-righteousness and make a point of avoiding not only meat but also milk, eggs, and any other product derived from what they call the “subjugation” of animals, like gelatin, leather, or wool. How they resolve this with the thousands of insects they “subjugate” in the course of driving their electric cars (or riding their bicycles) or the billions of bacteria they destroy every time they brush their teeth is a complete mystery.

And anyway, the nonvegan organic-food activists probably want to return to animal power as well, since the internal-combustion engines at the heart of both farm machinery and the trucks that deliver farm produce to market are, to the same Progressive mind-set, modern farming's most dangerous aspect of all.

Unlike most ten-year-olds, Blake has already developed a taste for coffee, which is not so wonderful, since her energy level is already at the point where the caffeine in a single Coca-Cola works a lot like turbocharging a Corvette. On the other hand, I wish I got a similar jolt from my morning cup of coffee—no surprise when you remember my work day starts well before 5 A.M.

The coffee I drink every morning isn't anything special. I neither need nor want the various specialty coffees that have made Starbucks into a billion-dollar brand (and certainly don't need the calories in their lattes or Frappuccinos). Even so, I am impressed with the sheer range of coffees for sale in even a normal supermarket. There's French roast. Special morning blend. Hawaiian Kona. Jamaican Blue Mountain. Ethiopian harrar. Low acid. Espresso ground. Fair trade.

Fair trade?

“Dad?”

“Yes, Blake?”

“Is this spelled right? Is it the same as ‘free trade'?”

 

Not much.

The first time I saw the term, I was as confused as Blake and had to do a little digging to find out just what the noble-sounding term “fair trade” actually meant. As usual with the sort of feel-good economics so beloved of Progressives, there's a lot less here than meets the eye. Fair trade, in one form or another, has been around for nearly fifty years, but until the late 1980s it was mostly a way for Western liberals to assuage their guilt about their own prosperity by paying a higher price for handicrafts like jute shopping bags, straw hats, and rope sandals in the belief that some of their money would find its way back to the rural villages where the stuff was made. For the last twenty years or so, “fair trade” labeling organizations—there are at least four—have certified that the chain of transactions that leads back to commodities like cocoa, sugar, and especially coffee wasn't enriching “middlemen” at the expense of farmers.