Huck on food

When people think of Mike Huckabee and food, they think about all the weight he lost. But they should also think about his ideas on agriculture, including these, from his website:

We must be able to feed ourselves as part of our national security.

Our agricultural policies must encourage young people to enter and stay in farming.

I haven't seen him talk in any detail about these points, nor has he been asked about them, to my knowledge, but they are consistent with crunchy conservatism, as is his attitude toward weight loss. Here's why.

1. On the weight loss, it's consistent with the idea that a big part of America's problem is overconsumption -- that our material abundance is making us unhealthy. A healthy polity, a healthy society, is one that knows how to consume moderately. Obesity -- eating too much, and of foods that taste good but aren't good for us -- is a metaphor for a loss of self-control and moderation, and consumerist decadence. I don't know that Huckabee believes that, but I do.

2. On agricultural self-sufficiency as a national security issue. It is not in our national interest to become dependent on foreign countries for basic foodstuffs. Mind you, I don't expect agricultural trade to decline in any serious way under a Huckabee presidency, but I would hope that he would pursue policies to encourage local production of a diverse array of crops that will help regions develop local agricultural economies. This is going to be particularly important as the price of oil rises (and rises, and rises), making the cost of imported foods more expensive, and even the cost of transporting food around this country to be prohibitive.

3. Finally, one way young people could be encouraged to go into farming would be to loosen regulations on small agricultural producers, artisans and family farmers, and giving incentives in the tax code to encourage small production (versus industrial agriculture). A few years ago, I wrote a piece for National Review in which I interviewed small ag producers (most of whom happened to be conservative), who talked about how the regulatory regime favored Big Agriculture over the little guy. Excerpt:

It's no secret that the small family farm is nearly extinct in the United States, quashed by economies of scale that make it virtually impossible for small farms to survive. Some milk and dairy farmers are attempting to stay afloat by serving the tiny but growing market for premium meats (typically free-range and free of hormones and antibiotics), specialty cheeses, and the like.

But what's happening to independent beef farmers in Wyoming shows how the health code can stymie their efforts. It is illegal, for example, to ship across state lines meat processed at a non-USDA-inspected facility. Yet Wyoming's meat-processing plant is only state-approved. To sell meat out of state, beef farmers have to transport their cattle over hundreds of miles for slaughter, which adds tremendously to their costs. Large operators are in a better position to afford this. Wyoming may follow the lead of Washington state, which recently purchased the nation's first mobile USDA-certified slaughter facility, a 24-foot trailer that will travel the state processing meat on farms.

USDA approval is economically crucial in other ways too: It allows farmers to sell directly to stores, realizing two to three times more profit than if they used a processing plant -- and it thus removes the greatest barrier to providing non-factory-farmed meat to consumers at affordable prices.

But why should the average consumer care whether his meat and his milk come from small farms, as long as he can be reasonably sure the food is clean? Flavor aside, most consumers would agree that the loss of family farms is a small price to pay for safe meat and dairy products. Rick Heinrich, a Tennessee health official with whom Jenny Drake has tangled, says: "If someone wants to slaughter 200 chickens or so per year, it's not cost-effective for them to follow the regulations. But do we want to let people slaughter meat in the backyard and sell it on the sidewalk?"

Small farmers counter by saying that the current system doesn't guarantee safety at all, and may make American meat more risky. Besides the issue of antibiotics and hormones, there's the more serious matter of food-borne pathogens. In the best-selling book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser argues that factory-farming livestock in crowded, diseased feedlots and the rapid, assembly-line processing of meat through a handful of slaughterhouses before dispersing it throughout the country create ideal conditions for mass spreading of contamination.
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Also vanishing are rural populations, and the small farms that used to be the backbone of rural America. Done right, says Joel Salatin, reform of the health code could reinvigorate the countryside "by freeing up the entrepreneurial spirit here." As one rural-affairs expert told the New York Times recently: "We give a lot of tax breaks and direct payments to big agriculture companies that don't do much for the local economy, but rarely do we give anything to the little guy trying to start a business and stay in town."

President Huckabee could change that. He could lead a small revolution in agriculture by freeing the countryside up for farmers like Joel Salatin. And hey, he could count as advisers the Hale family of Windy Meadows Farms, the Christian organic chicken farmers in Texas, who were a big part of "Crunchy Cons." They're fired up for Huckabee's campaign, and ready to go.