The Food Police (5 page)

In the idealized world of the food police, we’d all eat in fine restaurants—of course, passing on the foie gras appetizer if the nutritionist or animal rights activist is watching from an adjacent table or if you live in one of the places, such as California, where the food police have already banned it—and someone else would pick up the bill. We’d eat leafy greens and
feel just as satisfied as if we’d eaten prime rib. This is nothing more than utopian nonsense.

F. A. Hayek, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, adequately summed up the difficulty some people have acknowledging the reality of tough choices: “People just wish that the choice should not be necessary at all. And they are only too ready to believe that the choice is not really necessary, that it is imposed upon them merely by the particular economic system under which we live. What they resent is, in truth, that there is an economic problem.”
¹⁵
Wishing we didn’t have to make tough economic trade-offs is one thing. Ignoring them altogether is downright dangerous.

By all means, if you want advice on finding delicious food, look up a Michelin-rated chef. Want to drop a few pounds? Find the advice of a trained nutritionist. (Which one, I’m not exactly sure—just take your pick from the hundreds of diet books on the market. You can lose weight by eating only meat. Or is it no meat? Or is it only liquids? Or is it only by thinking happy thoughts? Just save the fifteen bucks, eat less and exercise more, and that should do the trick.) If you want to know how to eat eggs from happy chickens, go find popular books by philosophers. (Better yet, go for the more obscure books by the animal scientists.) But don’t ask these folks to run your life.

That’s the problem with specialists. They are … well, special. They take the
one
thing that is important to them and assume it should be most important to everyone else, too. Anthony Bourdain, the bestselling author and former chef, thinks everyone should know how to cook. He asks of his idealized world, “What should
every
man, woman, and teenager
know how to do?”
¹⁶
According to Bourdain, we
should
all know, at a minimum, how to chop an onion, make an omelet, prepare a vinaigrette, cook meat and veggies to the right degree of doneness (without a thermometer no less), clean a fish, steam a lobster, and make beef stock from scratch. It’s this kind of thinking that leads folks such as Alice Waters to promote policies to turn public schools into training grounds for future farmer-chefs.

I can make vinaigrette, but I can’t imagine why
everyone
should or why our world would be better if only Suzie in Omaha knew how to make beef bourguignon. After all, Newman’s Own is pretty tasty. Pre-chopped onions and premade beef stock are all readily available in my supermarket—and they’re cheap, too. If I want steamed lobster or well-cleaned fish, I know which restaurant to patronize.

As if we didn’t have better or more enjoyable things to do with our time than learn to cook rice by the pilaf method. What makes our modern world so wealthy is the diversity of our interests and our willingness to trade what we do well for what others do well. Why would a
chef
want you to know how to cook well, thus rendering his services obsolete? It must be a natural human tendency to take those values from our own narrow world, so all-encompassing to us, and project them onto others who haven’t a clue about the Culinary Institute of America or what its graduates such as Bourdain want. I’ll tell you what I want from the Culinary Institute of America: I want it to produce graduates I’m willing to pay to do all the things they think I
should
know how to do.

At least Bourdain limits his idealized vision for you and me to the pages of a wildly entertaining book. Other foodies
aren’t so restrained. The real trouble comes from those who seek the power to make decisions for us. By now you won’t be surprised to hear that nutritionists think we should all be eating more nutritiously, environmentalists think we should all be eating in a way that is more environmentally friendly, and social justice advocates think the poor should have more access to veggies.

Herein lies the danger in our “food crisis.” An “epidemic” such as obesity provides the traction for the specialists to implement their vision for the world. Everything unseemly is said to cause obesity: supporting corporate farms and manipulative agribusinesses, being poor, eating processed foods, eating too much meat, eating nonlocally, and on and on. With one problem we unite an unholy alliance of the antibusiness activist, the social justice activist, the chef, the nutritionist, the animal rights activist, the environmentalist, and all the rest. Never mind the fact that none of these people would agree among themselves how to make our brave new world. But that’s beside the point. They have a problem that can advance the agenda, regardless of whether they know where we are advancing. The reality is that we each have our own individual goals and values, and there is no single objective free of tough trade-offs upon which we can all agree.

Obesity is but one item in the smorgasbord of food crises. After all, “[y]ou never want a serious crisis to go to waste”—especially if it’s one you’ve helped create.
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The overarching solution sought by the alliance of the food police is a return to nature. The food elite seek to achieve a kind of a false traditionalism in food that never actually existed and cannot work in practice. The story of the modern progressive food movement
is largely one about a reaction to technological change in food and agriculture. Ideology has led the food police to denounce the benefits of technology as accruing to greedy agribusinesses, fast-food restaurants, and corporate farms, and has led to an agenda seeking false agricultural idealism. By denying the massive efficiencies of modern food technologies, the food police are starving the folks they say they’re trying to help. In their vexation over obesity, many of the food police seem to have forgotten that more than 14 percent of American households—more than 17 million people—are currently classified as “food insecure,” which means they have financial difficulties providing enough food for their families to eat.
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In actuality, the progressives’ plan for slow, natural, and organic food production has been tried. It’s called Africa.

Modern technologies allowed our forefathers to leave subsistence living in the countryside to pursue other dreams, and over time, fewer farmers have been feeding more and more people. Less than 2 percent of Americans make a living farming; the remaining 98-plus percent of us enjoy the fruits of a system that generates one of the safest and least expensive food supplies in the history of the world. Americans spend half as much of their disposable income on food today as they did in the 1950s. Not only do we spend less of our income on food, but we eat better, too—even if we don’t like to admit it. As John Steinbeck put it when traveling across America in the 1960s, “Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days.”
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The food police take these changes for granted and appear
oblivious to the challenges of a fast-growing global population that will threaten farmers’ ability to feed the world. It is true that many Americans today are more threatened by obesity than starvation, but this is the far lesser of the two evils, especially for the poor among us. And just because we have enough to eat
today
doesn’t guarantee the same for the future—especially if we tie the hands of innovators and wait until a crisis is upon us.

Disparaging modern production agriculture, Michael Pollan could conveniently write in 2005 about a corn supply that was “too cheap.”
²⁰
Likewise, back in 2002, Marion Nestle argued that “food is too cheap in this country.”
²¹
Little did they know that that only a few years later, in 2008, corn prices would more than double, jumping over 150 percent, even as production rose. As I write this, many commodity prices are near their highest levels in recorded history. In 2011 the
New York Times
published an editorial titled “Food Crisis”—this time not because of the intrusion of evil industrialists into the food chain but because worldwide “food prices are soaring to record levels.”
²²

Apparently, the food elite haven’t agreed on how to handle their contradictory message. In one corner, we have a cohort sticking with the old message. Writing for the
New York Times
only a few days after the same publication ironically pronounced the crisis of high-priced-food, Mark Bittman asserted that “prices for these foods are unjustifiably low.”
²³
In the other corner are the food police who tell us, “We are in a food emergency. Speculation and diversion of food to biofuel has contributed to an uncontrolled price rise.”
²⁴
So, which is it? Are food prices too high or too low? Are government policy
and the agribusiness conspiracy pushing food prices to an unjustifiably high or low level? The good news for the food police is that their recipe calls only for overwrought emotional appeals, not consistency of message.

As recent history illustrates, falling food prices are not a guarantee. We have thankfully avoided the Malthusian nightmare
so far
, but past performance is no guarantee of future success. In
The Great Stagnation
, economist Tyler Cowen demonstrates that the overall rates of productivity growth that we have come to take for granted are diminishing. In agriculture specifically, some commodities, such as wheat, are beginning to show slowdowns in yield growth. Such facts have led some eminent agricultural economists to observe that “on the heels of a recent rapid run-up in global food commodity prices, old doubts have resurfaced about our collective ability to sustain increases in global food supplies that outstrip the growth in demand.”
²⁵
I don’t put much stock in the doomsday predictions about peak oil and population bombs, but only because of my faith in the ability of humans to innovate and adapt. But if the food police get their way in stifling innovation and impose one-size-fits-all regulation, no doubt about it, prices will rise, and I fear all faith will be lost.

Two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, we seem to have forgotten the kind of food to be expected from a government empowered to control the food production system. In the 1980s-era Soviet Union, “[s]hortages, food rationing, long lines in stores, and acute poverty were endemic.”
²⁶
Because of food shortages, “the average intake of red meat for a Soviet citizen was half of what it had been for a subject of the Czar in 1913.” There was no need to ration fruits and vegetables,
because there were none. They were “permanently out of stock and thus out of reach for the people of the socialist state.”
²⁷
Things were so bad in Russia that Boris Yeltsin’s visit to a Houston supermarket in 1990 caused such a “traumatic experience” that it “led him to conclude socialism was a pipe dream and that capitalism might be the only realistic path to prosperity.”
²⁸
The food police may not advocate communism or even see themselves as socialists, but their readiness to empower government to control food businesses; to centrally direct agricultural output through heavy taxes, subsidies, and public agency purchasing requirements; and to override consumers’ free choice with everything from a gentle nudge to outright ingredient bans is slowly leading us down the road to serfdom. By enacting policies that idle the capitalist engine of our prosperity, the food police are killing the goose laying the golden eggs.

None of this is to say that there aren’t problems associated with our modern food system. There are. In many cases, the food police have properly identified adverse consequences of a highly efficient, consumer-driven food production system. The key question is what to do about the problems. Any reasoned approach must be rooted in a belief about the imperfectibility of man and nature; recognize the knowledge and wisdom embodied in emergent institutions and markets; and rejoice in the abundance and prosperity that man has been able to accomplish through his interactions with food—rather than offer complaints about the utopia that we don’t have and will never achieve.

The progressive worldview asserts that man in his natural state is basically good. As a result, the world’s problems are
not a result of a fallen man but of unjust institutions and social systems. With special knowledge of how the world works, the progressive elite believe they can reengineer social systems and usher in a utopia. Once man is freed from unjust socially constructed institutions, he can flourish. The constraints that bind us are artificial, institutionally determined results of bad policy or bigotry.

All this carries over into the food elite’s views on nature. We are told that nature is basically good. As a result, our problems with food are a result not of nature or biology but of unjust institutions and inequitable farming systems. Man should work with nature, not against it. The lack of food safety, food security, nutrition, and profitability is a problem not inherent in nature but with unjust societal systems and institutions.

Yet anyone who has ever raised a two-year-old knows that man (or, in this case, child) has an ornery streak. Humans, while capable of great compassion and generosity, will never be perfect, and Mother Nature can be cruel and unforgiving. The food abundance we’ve enjoyed is a triumph of human ingenuity over nature’s indifference to us. There are real trade-offs that must be made, and scarcity is a reality of our world. As the author and economist Thomas Sowell reminds us, beware that “many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world—differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing.”
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There is perhaps no more critical question than how our society chooses to relate to food. After all, everyone must eat. Will we raise a generation of children who look at food with
optimism and innovation, aspiring to be technological innovators such as Louis Pasteur or Norman Borlaug? Or will we raise a cohort of traditionalists who can find nothing better than what is in the past? By cultivating panics and promoting agricultural and environmental idealism, the food police have assumed the moral authority on food. Their message is deceptively appealing because of its traditionalist overtones and fear-mongering about the safety of food. Make no mistake about it, however, nothing short of our ability to feed ourselves and the world is at stake.