The case for culinary conservatism
Monday July 7, 2008
Categories: Conservatism, Food
The new issue of The American Conservative is a must-read, not only because Your Working Boy interviews the great Michael Pollan in its pages. It also features this wonderful essay by John Schwenkler, making a case for why traditional ways...
Filed Under: conservatism, food
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Historian Harvey Levenstein has argued that the spate of government regulations in the wake of early 20th-century food-safety scares played a crucial role in the rise of industrialized agriculture and centralized food processors.....
But the safety scares, such as Upton Sinclair's book, didn't contribute to the birth of big agribusiness in anything like the way the New Deal did. It is almost impossible to explain the rise of factory farming without looking at the vast subsidy programs of the New Deal and their post-Wickard v. Filburn acceptance and expansion. I understand Roosevelt is a sacred cow, but you don't get from millions of small family farms to ADM/ConAgra/Cargill without the New Deal. All of the USDA health reqs ever created did less to create our big agribusiness monstrosities than corn and cotton subsidies.
I think this is wonderful! For too long, I would tune in to right-wing radio and here nothing but how evil liberals were. Then I'd open up a left wing rag, and hear about sustainability, organic gardening, walkable communities, and I'd think... what?! What evil?
There is a great joy to be had in ignoring such things and chomping down on a good messburger.
Charles,
You got that right. There's a little Blues bar here in Dallas called Hole-In-The-Wall that makes the best burgers in town during lunch hours. It's in a ratty old building in an industrial district but there is a line out the door by noon each day. Awesome. Love Fatburger too when I get to the west coast occasionally. Wish they were in Texas.
Z,
The evil comes with some of their prescriptions--population control, lack of even reasonable use of the environment, and a "mother hen" watching over you to make sure you don't use more than your share.
Roger C.,
Other than a few fringe quacks, I haven't seen those solutions seriously proposed, as government policy, in decades. On an individual level, people may make personal choices about the size of their family or how they use resources consistent with their values. The only thing I have seen enviros push for that YOU might consider not allowing reasonable use of the environment comes from preserving national parks. That isn't just limited to the left. Hunters and fisherman are huge conservationists. They don't want logging roads or oil spills spoiling their hunting or fishing, either.
Hate to say it, but I don't think that the food one eats really says much about one's political orientation.
For example, I have often tried to cut down on my trans-fat and saturated fat intake, but being a strong supporter of "the free society" (a term I hear the free market economist Milton Freidman use once), I didn't like New York City's ban on trans-fats. I prefer that people make their own decisions about food based on information that they get from non-government sources.
But I imagine that there are many health food folks out there that would like to ban the Big Mac. Also, I would bet that there is more than one Michael Moore out there, someone who eats a lot of food but supports more government regulation over the food marketplace too.
Z,
Have you ever read Thomas Sowell's work regarding housing availability in places like San Francisco? Can't build out due to green space requirements, can't build up because of height restrictions. Rent controls mean that a landlord can't get market value for his or her capital. It makes for more expensive housing. Or taxation? For a long time, the standard deduction didn't take the cost of living into account--it still doesn't. In some ways, that's soft population control, by ordering society where children are a cost, not a benefit. See the demographic decline of native Europeans for the consequences there.
Not all things that are evil are obvious about it. If they were, evil would never be attractive.
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