Filed under: Economics of Eating, Ethics of Eating, Food Meanings, Wal-Martization, consumerism
Guest-Blogger Erin over at Crunchy Con raises an interesting point that is tangential to the notion that feminism and locavorism are in tension. For readers who are not familiar with “Crunchy Con” it is a blog ordinarily written by Rod Dreher, who wrote a book called Crunchy Conservatives, identifying a hitherto ignored part of the political spectrum: conservative Republicans who, disgusted with the disposable commercialism and spiritual bankruptcy of the present consumer-capitalist system, have taken it upon themselves to “opt out” by, e.g., homeschooling their children; repairing rather than replacing their clothes; growing their own food or even just cooking from scratch; getting rid of the television, and so on.
Erin identifies a social support network that has arisen among homeschooling moms, in which they are able to meet and share resources and techniques and success stories and give one another material and emotional support, the same is not true of the fathers who remain at work.
Some men find it necessary to keep the information that their wives “don’t work” very private, because some of them have learned to their detriment that they will face attitudes ranging from derision to open contempt and hostility from their co-workers who have made different choices. Add to this information the fact that your wife is homeschooling your children, and you might as well show up for work in Amish attire, as out-of-touch and otherworldly as your choices will seem, to many, to be. Even if a man is lucky enough to work in an environment where his colleagues are relatively laissez-faire about his family’s choices, many of the socialization opportunities his co-workers engage in will be closed to him: for instance, though he may not particularly mind sports bars, the odds that he’s going to want to spend several hours in one after work when his priority is to spend time with his family is pretty low.
I thought that was interesting, and, particularly to the extent that “crunchy con” values intersect with locavore values (probably not a perfect intersection, but certainly not negligible) I think Erin’s comments illustrate that the greater and more important tension may not be between feminism and locavorism but between work and home.
Industrial agriculture and fast food enable both parents to work outside the home, yes, but it increasingly seems as if the economy in which industrial agriculture and fast food are possible requires both parents to work outside the home. Which requires in turn that we overproduce and overprocess our food.
In another post, Erin writes about the recent phenomenon of the ready-made Thanksgiving dinner as an indicator of misplaced values, work over home particularly. If we’re not working to enable ourselves to make dinner for our families and the ones we love, on Thanksgiving of all days, then why are we working at all? Is the job really its own reward? Has it made you a stranger in your own kitchen?
I can understand, and I certainly don’t judge, people who buy Thanksgiving dinner whole because they have emergencies and can’t spare the time. But if your emergency is not being able to afford not to work on Thanksgiving, then something is terribly wrong: our economy is overshadowing your humanity.
Moreover, the problem creates a feedback loop: the more people have to work on Thanksgiving, the more demand there is for provision of goods and services on the actual day of Thanksgiving. The more demand, the more workers are expected to work on Thanksgiving.
I was also struck by a quote from Rod’s book: “Every one of us can refuse, at some level, to participate in the system that makes us materially rich but impoverishes us spiritually, morally, and aesthetically. We cannot change society, at least not overnight, but we can change ourselves and our families.”
And on that note, I hope that you are able to make time for your family, that you travel safely and can leave your day-to-day pressures behind. I hope, instead of shopping on Friday, that you read a book to yourself, or to a child to whom you are related. I hope you are well. Happy Thanksgiving.
Posting will be light this week as I have an early final (which is nice, because I get it out of the way) followed by the biggest food holiday on the U.S calendar. It seems to be a characteristic of food bloggers that we a) started doing our own Thanksgiving in college for ourselves and our friends who couldn’t go home, and b) had so much fun doing it that we’ve kept it up, and your humble author is no exception. I started my Senior year of college, when I finally had a house and a kitchen, and I’ve kept it up every year since, and loved it every time. This year I’m cooking for a small number of law students staying in town, after which we’ll probably play Trivial Pursuit or Taboo or something.
Life happens, and the people you wind up cooking Thanksgiving dinner for are rarely your own closest set of friends. Usually it works out that it’s the stragglers and strays, the ones in your community you know but aren’t close to, acquaintances and colleagues. The mood is better somehow for being less jocular, less familiar than cooking dinner for one’s friends; it is more hospitable, in what I think is the true sense of the word, which is making people feel at home. And everyone walks in the door ever so slightly bittersweet and melancholy for the family they’re not sharing the holiday with.
Kate writes, rightly, that food is about “that too brief moment when your brain is flooded with endorphins and takes you out of your head into an ethereal body of ecstasy.” It’s also about sharing that experience with others, even strangers. It is no mistake that the breaking of bread together has cultural and religious significance throughout the ancient world, or that those significances persist in cultures more directly tied to the old world: sharing a meal is one of those things that makes the world seem a little less bleak and unfeeling, a little warmer.
Okay, back to work. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I’ll write something a little more Law For Food and a little less autobiographical for Saturday.
Filed under: Economics of Eating, Ethics of Eating, Wal-Martization, consumerism
Not technically food related at all, but I suspect many readers will find interesting this discussion of the inverse relationship between happiness and materialism. Money quote:
Most of us want more income so we can consume more. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. In fact, the First World has more depression, more alcoholism and more crime than fifty years ago. This paradox is true of Britain, the United States, continental Europe and Japan.
Yes, it’s probably more complicated than that, but I thought this was an interesting example of the same sort of attitude I attributed to my mother this weekend.
Filed under: Eating and Justice, Economics of Eating, Ethics of Eating, Fair Trade, Food Policy, Quotations, Subsidies, food politics, local v. industrial
For some reason, a number of stories have made it onto the radar about the apparent tension between feminism and locavorism. Nathalie Jordi, an acquaintance of mine, writes:
[T]he very things that the young liberationists of my mother’s generation eschewed have become real pleasures for (some) of the liberated women of mine. We don’t necessarily see cooking, mending clothes or growing food as oppressive. Of course, that’s because we have the luxury of choosing not to do these things. Still. I see my friends run toward the stove at the same speed my mother fled from it. How quickly the tables have turned!
In an interview at Eating Liberally, Dr. Nestle considers, but fails to locate, the guilt for industrial, processed food with the late Peg Bracken, second wave feminist and author of The Compleat I Hate to Cook Book:
EL: Overworked, stressed-out moms are taking a lot of heat from some quarters for getting out of the kitchen, but who’s really to blame for our convenience food-dominated diet? Was the I Hate to Cook Book a progressive, pre-Friedan feminist manifesto, or a culinary cop-out?
MN: . . . If we want people cooking, and teaching kids about where food comes from and how to cook it, the doing of all that needs to be easy and fun and the results need to taste great at the end. People have to start somewhere. It’s just fine with me if they start with Rachel Ray. If she gets people — men, women, and children — back into the kitchen once in awhile, she is performing a great public service.
Back in June, Jennifer Jeffrey asked whether cooking and eating locally is just another way for women to feel inadequate, and whether local, sustainable eating is “friendly to the larger community of women.” In a follow-up post, however, she eloquently addresses the greater dimensions to local, sustainable eating. I don’t want to put words into Jennifer’s mouth, and I want to give her own words greater exposure:
The System is Broken. It’s not the fault of the farmer’s market that I feel overstressed. Rather, the game itself is rigged. The workforce rewards people who are willing to put in ridiculous hours and disregard personal health and long-term wellbeing. It does not reward self-nourishment or play or rest. Even more insidious is the fact that our buy-more culture has lured us into a devil’s bargain with debt. Even if we’re working at a job we love, it requires an insane juggling act to live a balanced life. That there aren’t enough hours to nourish ourselves properly, or that we have to make a choice between eating well and building our careers is just… craziness.
Convenience Has a Dark Side. Convenience has been our friend, but not a trustworthy one. We can put dinner on the table in 30 minutes or less, but those cans and jars are slipping us toxic additives and chemicals on the sly. Like the friend who keeps borrowing money but never pays it back, Convenience has become a liability. The fault lies with us: we haven’t set proper boundaries. We need to speak out, vote with our dollars, and support products that are healthy and safe.
The Bar is Being Raised. The slow-organic-local movement is putting pressure on the mega-grocers and Big Ag in ways that will confer advantages to all women. I happen to think that WalMart’s foray into organic products and Safeway’s new “O” line are moves in the right direction; the more options, the better. The goal is for more people have access to better food. Hopefully, the bar will continue to rise, and “organic” will just be the starting point.
. . .
It Isn’t All or Nothing. One home cooked meal a week is better than none. One trip to the farmer’s market in a month will introduce locally grown vegetables and fruits into your diet and help support the local economy. Some weeks I’m going to have the time and inspiration to roast my own beets and make my own marinara sauce; other weeks, it’s not going to happen. And that’s okay.
. . .
The Slow-Organic-Local Movement is a Boon for Female Entrepreneurs. Here in the Bay Area, a new crop of small women-owned businesses has sprung up around the growing demand for quality food products. I don’t have the time or desire to make my own preserves, but June Taylor does, using the best fruit ever. Alison McQuade makes amazing chutneys (Glasgow Spiced Apple + double cream Brie = bliss). Donna Eichhorn and Shirley Virgil make incredible handmade tamales and corn tortillas. No matter where you live, I guarantee that you can find women who are taking advantage of this growing opportunity.
If not for the surge of interest in small, local producers, these women might not be in business. They are, and we all win.
Lastly, I’ve framed this discussion in a feminist context, but of course this is a universal concern. While I still believe that this issue is of particular importance to women, since women have historically been the “nurturers” and therefore the convenience and ready availability of food has been a key factor in the changing landscape of women’s rights, I’m really a “people-ist” more than anything – someone who desires the equality of all people, everywhere. I’m thrilled that the quality of our choices is growing, and that so many people are talking about the myriad ways in which food affects our lives.
I suppose you can guess which side of the fledgeling debate I find myself on. I don’t believe that it is wrong per se to outsource your domestic labor, but doing so on the scale that the industrial world has done distorts the whole food supply, and the costs of these distortions aren’t being equitably distributed. First, I think there is this residual underlying sense, left over from the second-wave, that housework like cooking is something that holds women back, and I think this idea is just plain wrong. It seems mistaken to say that the labor of cooking is in some sense intrinsically inequitable. Indeed, I’m not even sure what that would mean. The distribution of that labor may still be inequitably shared between men and women, but that doesn’t make the act of cooking locally unfair. Even if it were, it would be an irresponsible and regressive feminism which attempts to shift the burden of this labor from middle- and upper-class households onto the backs of lower-class and increasingly illegal laborers. Even if cooking is slavery, we still do not liberate women by enslaving Guatemalans.
Yes, it is difficult to balance the demands of a career with the expectations of locavorism, but locavorism is anti-feminist only if we retain the notion that women are solely or primarily responsible for nourishing the family. Why shouldn’t men share in the messy early-morning fun of the farmer’s market? If fifty years ago men were helpless in the kitchen, it a paltry equality indeed that has made women just as helpless today. Eating, like the consumption of any other good, is in the end a political act, and not liking to cook doesn’t exempt man or woman from the basic obligation to pursue justice and equality.
Update: Edited for clarity.
Update II: Ethicurean points out today that “locavore” is the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year, and that the term was coined by four socially-conscious women. (Readers: let’s make “ethicurean” the word of the year next year, shall we?)
Filed under: Economics of Eating, Ethics of Eating, Farm Bill, Food Policy, Food and Energy, Meat, Production, Quotations, Subsidies, Taxation, food politics, local v. industrial
I was blessed in my childhood by having a mother who was very food-aware. We became farmers almost of necessity, as we were always very poor growing up: if we had not grown our own food, we would not have eaten. We never could afford health insurance, and because of this, my mother always sought to use food in place of medicine, and always sought prevention prior to illness rather than cure afterwards. “We can’t afford to get sick” she would joke, or half-joke anyway.
I never appreciated it at the time, because I saw our food as a mark of poverty and difference. Why should I have to suffer, i.e., not get to drink soda and eat fast food just because my parents were hippies and bad businesspeople? Field trips in school were particularly painful — other kids got to bring money and buy McDonald’s, I brought a big slab of homemade cornbread and a mason jar full of water.1 “Five dollars for lunch!” my mother would exclaim. “I can make lentil soup to feed all of us dinner and then lunch the next day for five dollars!”
My mother believes that food can replace medicine, that you could eat foods which kept up your immune system and avoid foods which depleted it. She had read studies on refined sugar, for instance, and always pointed out that not only does it rot one’s teeth, it apparently kills white blood cells. To my mother, it wasn’t that soda, for instance, or juice, was a pleasure which you should deny to avoid tooth decay and empty calories. It just didn’t make sense to drink it when water was free, for the same reason you wouldn’t pay somebody to hit you in the face with a shovel.
Naturally, I had a few years after I left home during which I ate all the foods that we kids weren’t supposed to eat. I think it’s interesting, though, how unintentionally I came back around to natural eating and food policy. I took a job at a deli in college and I loved it. It was down the street from my apartment and I was the opener; five, six days a week I would drag myself out of bed at six in the morning and run through the bitter cold (because it was always winter in those days, in my memory), and turn on the lights and make the coffee and set up the shops and do the preps and check in deliveries and try to make the morning cheerful for the early-birds and commuters. I loved it.
One thing led to another, I started working in food, and by the time I got to being a purchaser at Zingerman’s I had been cooking for a few years. I read Fast Food Nation and experienced two contradictory sensations. 1) During the act of reading the book I always really wanted a cheeseburger, and 2) every time I set the book down I didn’t want to eat anything that I hadn’t actually watched come up out of the ground. I kind of feel like that was a turning point for me. At the same time, I became very interested in the raw milk cheese ban and the science behind dairy production. What has struck me lately, thinking about this, is how holistic and connected all of these topics are. Raw milk takes you to e.coli takes you to grain feeding takes you to corn subsidy takes you to processed food and HFCS takes you to impending obesity crisis takes you to mediterranean diet takes you to local, seasonal eating and next thing you know you can’t. shut. up. about. food.
Which pretty much catches you up to the existence of Law for Food. Yesterday morning on my bike ride to school something else my mother used to say popped into my brain and stuck. Her friends used to ask how she managed to cook for all of us (and anybody else who happened by) the way she did (from scratch, often beginning with an armful from the garden or a quick trip to the root cellar) and she would explain that it was because didn’t work outside of the home. Then she would say how she believed that the peasant diet was the healthiest, most balanced diet you could eat. She would talk about how poor people can’t afford to get sick, so they don’t have the luxury of eating things that are bad for them, and she would also talk about the importance of the table, about how food builds community and how poor people have a better sense of community than the wealthy. Then she would say, and this always kind of confused me, “of course, nowadays you have to be rich to eat like a peasant.”
And it struck me how far I had come back around to seeing food the way my mother did, all those years ago when I was embarrassed to eat home-made food. It struck me that my mother’s little observation winds up being about the Farm Bill after all, and that, pace Marion Nestle, food is both love and health when your attitudes toward those things are in order.
Now, I realize how fortunate we were to have bought that farm outright, when my folks inherited some money, and that the reason we were able to eat so well was because we were land-rich and cash-poor. A lot of talk about nutrition can come across as unrealistic hectoring that doesn’t take into account the time and work constraints that we’re all under. Even if you own the land, growing your own food is a lot of work and requires a complete change in lifestyle and in attitude, and isn’t something everyone should or even can do. But we can do better than this. We can do better than inverting the economics of eating and promoting these unhealthy2 faux luxuries with the public funds.
Ultimately, the farm bill can never and should never put filet mignon on every table, but it can and does put ground beef — cheap, unsustainably-grown, overcrowded, medicated beef — in the drive-thrus and waterlogged cold cuts the lunchboxes. There are a lot of reasons, on the surface of it, to think that sustainable food, local food, and the rest of it are regressive; that what some of us are proposing is a return to the 19th century; that eliminating CAFOs and industrial food will raise the price of food, which will most hurt those who can’t afford local and sustainable food.
These objections do not make it past a surface analysis. Eliminating the farm subsidy means that the inverted food pyramid we currently consume will become a great deal more expensive; it means that Coke will no longer be price-competitive with water; it means that the marginal price difference between ethically-conscious meat and feedlot meat will diminish — reducing overall consumption of meat, making all meat more of a luxury and making ethically-conscious meat less of a luxury by comparison; it means we’ll be eating less food, but that the food we eat will be better. Most of all, it means we won’t be using federal money to make it easier for people without health insurance to buy foods that make them unhealthy, and harder for them to buy the foods that we all ought to be eating more of. It shouldn’t be necessary to own your own farm just to eat healthy.
1. This experience was formative in so many ways. For one thing, I have little patience now for parents who say that their kids just won’t eat vegetables. Eventually, they will, and even later, they will appreciate vegetables for what they are. For another, I will never be less than genuinely grateful for a home-made meal, no matter what. I resent the term “food snob” because I would rather have lentil soup with love than filet without. Because of my experiences in as a cook and seller of high-end food, and because I’m someone who frankly talks about food or food policy all the damn time, many of my friends say that they would never cook for me because they can’t cook well enough, and although I think they mean it as a compliment, it offends me a little. Early in our relationship, I was impressed when my significant other said to me, “I bet none of your friends ever cook when you’re around. I’d like to make you dinner.”
2. Lest we get into trade disparagement issues, I should point out that from a health standpoint everything is unhealthy when consumed in sufficient quantities, and that these quantities are different for different categories of food. It is simply a fact, though, that Americans in general overconsume in the fat and protien categories and underconsume in the vegetable and whole grain categories. From a health standpoint, there’s nothing wrong in principle with eating meat, just like there’s nothing wrong in principle with eating ice cream. There is, however, something wrong with eating ice cream at every meal, and the same thing is wrong with eating meat at every meal.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I’ve added Ruhlman, and via Ruhlman, Wolly Pigs, a blog by a man raising pigs for custom slaughter. I’ve also lately been enjoying Becks & Posh, and I can’t believe I didn’t already have Serious Eats on the roll.
Enjoy!
Filed under: Food Safety, Inspections, Pasteurization, Production, Raw Milk, Regulation, Science Diet, labeling
New to me, but back in 2003, Maciej over at Idlewords.com compared a week’s worth of school lunches in the U.S. to a week’s worth of school lunches in France. His observations are twofold: 1) in France, all meals have cultural significance, and 2) pasturization has had the effect of lowering our standards as to what’s consumable by humans.
First, and briefly, the article notes that the French lunch is highly structured in a way that leads him to conclude that it is considered a part of the education. The U.S. lunch, on the other hand, is centered around a bread-and-meat entree (usually a hamburger, chicken fingers, or pizza) with optional (usually terrible, readers will recall) hot vegetables or salad. What is interesting is that school lunches prove to be a part of the U.S. education as well, but because teachers and administrators don’t think about it as education, we wind up sending all kinds of terrible messages about food:
Finally, notice how hard it is to eat a healthy diet at the American school. You would be relegated to a ghetto of garden salads, ’soups of the day’, and whatever nutritious innards you could pull out of the breaded main dish. The message American kids get is that healthy food is second-rate and tastes bad, that they should eat lots of meat, cheese and potatoes, and that eating fast food every day is a normal diet.
(Emphasis added.)
The second observation is related to something I posted yesterday about pasteurization and accountability. Pasteurization, as you know, is a way of killing the bacteria that are on or in our food by heating the food to above 160° fahrenheit. Pasteurization can reduce our exposure to bacteria that will cause illness by reducing our exposure to bacteria period. However, the economics of commodity food production have turned pasteurization into a panacaea for any and all structural flaws in the production of food. Because they can cook the germs off, producers don’t take the same care with food. From the article:
The dirty fact about American school lunches is that they are a dumping ground for surplus and substandard beef, chicken and dairy products. Many of these foods cannot be served fresh because they would be too dangerous to eat. This is especially true for ground meat, which is at times so contaminated with bacteria that it would not be legal to sell it in a supermarket. A couple of hundred years ago, Louis Pasteur (a Frenchman, of course) discovered that you can kill bacteria in many foods by heating them to an elevated temperature for a certain period of time. Pasteur’s discovery was revolutionary. Pasteurized foods (like milk, honey, cider or wine) could be stored longer without going off. And of course pasteurization can render dubious foods safe. But the legacy of Pasteur’s invention, in this country, has been perverted. Instead of improving the quality of our food supply, we’ve used techniques like pasteurization and antibiotic prophylaxis to make it possible to create food on an industrial scale, artificially fighting back the disease and contamination that would otherwise make modern factory farming impossible.
The process shows no signs of slowing, either. The current push for irradiating meat (under the euphemism of ‘cold pasteurization’) is an attempt by the beef industry to make meat safer not by improving hygiene at the slaughterhouse, but by rendering contaminated meat harmless. Presumably, it doesn’t matter whether meat in school lunches has been in contact with cowshit, as long as it is no longer infectious.
I haven’t looked at the specifics, but I suspect that pasteurization is one of the reasons we have seen so many millions of pounds of meat recalled in the last few months. If that seems counterintuitive, just bear with me.
Pasteurization does not eliminate bacteria from food. What it does is yeild a logarythmic reduction bacteria counts. When you have an ordinary amount of bacteria, reducing them to a fraction of their number by pasteurization may render the food safe because your immune system can handle the bacteria in this smaller amount. However, since in 2002 the FDA approved the use of the term “cold pasteurization” to refer to irratiation of meat, meat producers have been able to rely on irradiating their meat as a means of killing bacteria. Meat packing is a highly competitive business, with ever-narrowing margins and faster production times. Because we can use cold pasteurization to kill bacteria at the end of the process, it is not worth the expense of introducing safeguards against bacteria throughout the process.
However, as noted above, pasteurization isn’t a catch-all. It doesn’t kill all the bacteria, only the vast majority of them. So, the more bacteria that the meat is exposed to before pasteurization, the more that will be there after pasteurization. Between this and the absense of colonisation effects discussed yesterday, I think we are looking at a cure that costs more than it benefits.
Filed under: Cheese, Food Policy, Food Safety, Inspections, Pasteurization, Production, Raw Milk, Regulation, local v. industrial
From the Dairy Reporter, a story on probiotic dairy products intended to replenish the sorts of gastrointestinal flora that we used to get from food. Money quote:
[Walker] said that measures intended to improve public health, such as food pasteurisation and sterilisation and use of antibiotics means that there is a decreased exposure to micoorganisms – leading to a gap in colonisation and weaker defences against disease.
First of all, while this research doesn’t surprise me, I am a bit bothered by the fact that Nestlé is profiting off of mandatory pasturization and sterilization of food.
The sequence of events seems to go like this: unpasteurized foods contain a great deal of bacteria, most of which is harmless. Exposure to these bacteria would promote the immune system. (Note: I don’t have a scientific background, but my understanding is that these bacteria compete for resources with harmful bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, which means that harmful bacteria wind up fighting a two-front war against both the immune system and these other bacteria. This means that the immune system doesn’t get overwhelmed by harmful bacteria. Any biologists care to comment?)
As it is now, a great many foods are pasturized or sterilized, either by regulation or voluntarily, and do not expose the consumer to these harmless bacteria. Which means that consumers’ immune systems get weaker. Thank god there’s Nestlé to put back in the stuff that was in the food to begin with.
I am reminded of something that Ari used to talk about when I worked at Zingerman’s. He was presenting on raw milk cheeses and he said that pasteurization was a bad idea is because it enables producers to lower their production standards, because they know that any bacteria that get into the milk will be cooked when they pasturize it. Pasturization destroys accountability because the dairy co-op or factory cheesemaker doesn’t know and doesn’t care whose milk might have been dirty: they can put it all into the same big vat and heat it up and it doesn’t matter.
Only, turns out it might matter.
Filed under: Economics of Eating, Farm Bill, Food Policy, Production, Regulation, Subsidies, Taxation, food politics
Not news, exactly, and readers of this blog probably already know all of this stuff, but a fairly conservative friend of mine asked me my opinion of the analysis contained in Michael Pollan’s recent New York Times op-ed about the 2007 Farm Bill. I wrote the following in return, and it occurs to me that I haven’t seen all of these points laid out on one page like this. Here’s a little cut ‘n paste magic from the email:
I think Pollan is exactly right, and what fascinates me about the Farm Bill debate is how it seems to have aligned so many different and traditionally opposed interests. Let me see if I have it right:
1) Fiscal conservatives, libertarians and economic commentators on the one side object to the farm subsidy because it distorts the market by causing farmers to plant more of a particular commodity than consumers would demand at the natural price and is therefore inefficient.
2) Animal welfare people object to it because the grain subsidy makes it cheaper to raise food animals in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) than via free-range. The situations at CAFOs place a great deal of strain on the cattle, which means that they require a great deal more antibiotics than they do if they are raised naturally — indeed the U.S. meat industry is the largest user of antibiotic medicine.
3) Environmentalists object to it for a number of reasons — CAFOs are terrible for the environment, for starters, and the kind of monoculture that big factory farms are planting to grow the subsidised crops destroys the soil, requires the use of ever-increasing levels of non-selective herbicides such as Round-Up as weeds develop immunity to the herbicide — and in recent times is requiring the use of genetically modified crops which are able to tolerate being grown in fields heavily laced with herbicides.
4) People who are taking a hard look at the immigration situation in the U.S. have come to discover that one of the reasons the Mexican corn industry went belly-up last year is the farm subsidy — and now there are some 170,000 Mexican agricultural workers without jobs and a lot of jobs in U.S. agriculture. The farm subsidy creates a situation in which we have to spend more money to keep immigrants out than we would if the economies of other countries were not placed at such a disadvantage.
5) On a related note, the farm subsidy is TERRIBLE for the economies of many third-world countries, for just the same reason: they have to compete with subsidised grain from the U.S.
6) Nutritionists tend to think that the farm subsidy is terrible for the American waistline because it subsidizes hydrogenated oils and animal products and high fructose corn syrup. Eliminating the farm subsidy would drive up the prices of many foods, but 1) most of those foods would be foods which are overabundant in the U.S. diet and which consumers ought to cut back on, 2) these prices are unnaturally low to begin with, and 3) the money saved on the Farm subsidy could, and should, in part be used to ensure that the truly poor do not starve. Indeed, the farm subsidy encourages all of us to eat things that are bad for us, but this encouragement become more and more pernicious the more a consumer has to stretch his or her food dollar.
The thing is, these are all sound economic arguments, and they all point to the same thing: the public interest and general welfare are not served by the farm subsidy as it is currently written. There is no metric to measure which shows that the farm subsidy is a good idea, outside of the share prices of big agribusiness. This legislation is corporate welfare in its most blatant and worst form. I highly recommend the first two sections of an essay entitled “That Which Is Seen and That Which is Not Seen” by F. Bastiat, for some traditionally conservative, laissez-faire economic reasons why this kind of spending is a terrible idea.
I have also found an op-ed by Victor Davis Hanson about why the farm bill is a terrible idea from a straightforward economic standpoint. I have no desire to discuss national politics, but I should like to say that this may be the first time I have agreed with Professor Hanson about a topic unrelated to classical philology. Opposition to this farm bill comes from all sides of the political spectrum.
In the NYT today there’s an article about how the New York City Health Dept. is cracking down on that scourge of modern life, the bartender who places the lime in your corona bottle with his naked hand.
Now, I understand that the regulations state that ready-to-eat food is to be handled with gloved hands, and I understand why that is a good idea in general, but this seems overzealous to me.
According to the FDA, most bacteria cannot grow in solutions with pH lower than 4.6. Also according to the FDA, limes have a pH of between 2.0 and 2.8.
Any chemists out there care to weigh in on this matter? Is it reasonably safe, from a chemical standpoint, to handle limes with one’s bare hands?
One possibility might be that the inspectors are concerned about foreign material (crumbs, ashes, bits of glass &c.) might find their way into the bottle. I should think, however, that a requirement to wash one’s hands would be less onerous and at least as effective.
