Reason Magazine issues a salvo in the fast-food restaurant labeling discussion, arguing that in our haste to regulate how much fat we eat, consumer protection advocates and supporters of mandatory nutrition information labeling have unduly singled out fast food operations and have forgotten that wretched excess in the consumption of saturated fats is not limited to the drive-thru window. Money quote:

Fast food makes such a savory scapegoat for our perpetual girth control failures that it’s easy to forget we eat less than 20 percent of our meals at the Golden Arches and its ilk. It’s also easy to forget that before America fell in love with cheap, convenient, standardized junk food, it loved cheap, convenient, independently deep-fried junk food.

While these statements may be true as far as they go, it seems to me that the author is playing fast and loose with the various argumenta ad antiquitatem, ad populum, ad hominem, and the old red herring.

To address each of these in turn: first, it may be true that U.S. citizens have been susceptible to overconsumption of the sorts of artery-clogging fare that typify the fast-food menu since long before the invention of the fast-food restaurant, but even if this proposition is true, it does not follow that our tendency to overeat is ordinary or good simply because it preceded the existence of some restaurants subject to regulation.

Second, nobody is arguing that at the current prices, demand for fast-food and fast-food-type food is high. If fast-food-type food weren’t popular, it wouldn’t be a major contributor to U.S. obesity, would it? Again, the fact that lots of people tend to eat fast-food-type food says little, if anything, about whether that tendency is something that we should address with regulation.

Thirdly, the author seems to be saying that because people overeat at independently-owned restaurants that sell, e.g., massive burgers as well as at chain restaurants that sell massive burgers, requiring chains to meet a standard that independent shops may avoid is hypocritical populism. This argument cannot be valid unless chain shops are no better off than independent shops at meeting the standard, and this is not the case for two reasons. 1) The franchisor (because let’s face it, in general we’re talking about franchises here) is more likely than the independent shop already to have access to information about portioning and nutrition. 2) the franchisor is able to design a single sign for use in multiple shops, thereby spreading the large costs of compliance over a wider population than the independent shop.

That is, if you’re Burger King corporate, when you determine the nutritional values of the Whopper and design a sign containing those values, you incur a single cost that brings all of your stores into compliance, but if you’re Ray’s Burger Joint, when you determine the nutritional value of the Ray’s Slider, and design a sign containing that information, you incur a cost that brings only one store into compliance. This cost will have to be replicated for every independent shop in the city. Thus it is not the case that failing to go after independent shops selling fast-food-type food necessarily stems from a desire on the part of the legislator to be seen as tough on big business and a friend of the little guy. It may simply be the case that these standards, although necessary, are more onerous on the independent diner than they are on the chain restaurant, and therefore the requirement of fifteen stores or more within the city constitutes a hardship exemption for smaller businesses.

Finally, all of these objections are another instance of Drive-by Libertarianism and how it obscures the issues. U.S. citizens ate too much beef in greasy-spoon diners in the 1950s for the same reason we eat too much beef in fast-food restaurants now, and it’s a reason that I should expect Libertarians to be more mindful of — government distortion of the market via subsidies.

It is fair to say that Federal Farm subsidies are really only half the problem, and that the other half is that we didn’t develop a firmly-entrenched food culture here in the U.S. prior to the distortions created by the farm subsidies. We didn’t then, and still don’t, have a sense of the difference between “food” and a “meal,” in the way that, for instance, the French do. It is further well-established that proteins and saturated fats and sugars are historically rare in the human diet, meaning that a feast-or-famine mechanism naturally kicks in when high-fat, high-protein foods are present. Unfortunately, the farm bill has made it those foods cheap and omnipresent.

Among my favorite statements about the law and justice is the following, by G.K. Chesterton:
“When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty. You do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.” It seems to me that when you badly and unintelligently distort the pressures of a market, you get regulation, and the regulation isn’t the problem.

Or maybe it’s bash-on-ethanol day here at Law for Food. According to the Food Law Profs Blog, some CAFOs are feeding cattle corn that is a by-product of ethanol production, and that this practice is leading to increased E.Coli presence in the cattle’s digestive tract. I don’t pretend to be a scientist, but my guess would be that the ethanol is produced by fermentation, and that the fermentation lowers the pH of the corn by-product, and that the corn by-product lowers the pH of the digestive tract so as to create an optimal environment for E.Coli to breed.

I don’t think I need to remind readers that quite a lot of meat has been recalled in the past tweve months.

Craft beer connoisseurs will be facing higher prices due to a hops shortage driving prices up about 400% in a single year. According to the linked article, there had been a hops glut which made it difficult for individual growers to remain profitable, and a lot of farmers shifted from growing hops to growing subsidized corn for ethanol. Astute readers will recall that corn-based ethanol yeilds one sixth of the energy required to produce the ethanol in the first place. (Which reminds me, come to think of it, of the story, probaby apocryphal, that rabbit flesh requires more energy to digest than it yeilds in digestion, giving rise to the expression, again probably apocryphal, “starving to death on rabbit”.)

I want to say things about commmodity production, the various corn subsidies, and the way markets are supposed to operate, but I’m in the middle of studying for finals, so posting will be light.

Andrew Sullivan asks, “Since when did the federal Congress have the right to micro-manage what school-kids get from snack machines?”

Since at least 1933.

I know he was probably being rhetorical, but I’m guessing that the
Cato-at-Liberty article to which he links is actually being disingenuous when they point out that nowhere does the Constitution say “Congress shall have the power … to hector schools about the contents of their vending machines.” In fact there is such a power.

Since the legislation to limit the contents of vending machines is attached to the 2007 Farm Bill, I’m guessing that this proposal is somehow tied to the spending power, which SCOTUS has found to be pretty near infinite. In United States v. Butler (1933) the Court adopts the Hamiltonian position that congressional spending power is a free-standing power among the powers enumerated in Article 1 § 8 of the U.S. Constitution. That is to say, Congress may tax and spend for any purpose that it believes serves the general welfare. If the proposal makes certain federal spending contingent upon the states’ compliance with a rule about, e.g., what goes into their school’s vending machines, it’s lawful under Butler, and is in a vein of thinking that goes right back to the founders themselves.¹

Ordinarily I wouldn’t write a letter like this to address what I suspect is a rhetorical question, but this one kind of got under my skin: Mr. Sullivan often writes hopefully of the transformative nature of the Paul and Obama campaigns, and I am disappointed to see him occasionally fall into the same tired narratives of government intrusion and nanny-statism. I don’t think this narrative applies: there’s no time-honored tradition or civil right to sell candy to kids in school vending machines. The practice is itself an innovation of the past few decades, and it is not unconservative (as Sullivan defines the term, if I understand him correctly) to discover that innovations require modification.

Moreover, the proposal takes place in the context of a vibrant debate about the nature and extent of U.S. farm subsidies. For instance, it is not controversial to note that subsidies distort market behavior. It is hardly controversial to point out that the farm subsidy shifts the costs of raw inputs such as corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup from the consumer onto the taxpayer. The net effect is that Americans are able to purchase more calories for their retail dollar, particularly in the form of processed foods containing lots of fat and high-fructose corn syrup: in essence, U.S. taxpayers are paying to create the conditions for our own health and obesity crisis.

Seen in this light, the proposal is an attempt to correct a situation Congress has created. I might agree with Mr. Sullivan that Congress shouldn’t do this, but I am more inclined to say that Congress shouldn’t have to do this.

Update: A reader points out that no discussion of the Congressional spending power is complete without at least the mention of South Dakota v. Dole, which lays out four requirements which limit the spending power as a conditional tool to compel state action, albeit in a largely theoretical manner. The four requirements are: the condition must 1) promote the general welfare, 2) be unambiguous, 3) relate to a federal interest in national projects and programs, and 4) not fall afoul of other constitutional provisions (e.g., it is theoretically possible to condition spending in such a way as to violate, say, the equal protection clause: such a conditioning would be unconstitutional.)

If this had been a legal argument, I would certainly have been expected to address Dole, however it doesn’t seem to me that this spending proposal fails any of the Dole requirements. Moreover, my understanding from ConLaw is that the spending power is more or less unrestricted save in theory, and that as a result conditional spending is almost never challenged.

Is American Cheese the new American Wine? Is the faltering dollar good for the domestic artisanal food industry — or at least those parts of it which don’t rely on imports?

What has been good for wine has been good for cheese. The rising wealth and strong dollar of the 1990s sent Americans flocking to Europe, returning with a new understanding and appreci­ation of continental eating. Food has emerged as hip entertainment, with its own vibrant press, TVnetworks, and rock-star chefs. Movies about food and wine have found large, sophisticated audi­ences (“Eat, Drink, Man, Woman,” “Sideways,” “Big Night,” “Like Water for Chocolate,” “Ratatouille”). Increased concern for health and a growing sus­picion of conventional agriculture, spurred by crises like mad cow, bird flu, and tainted spin­ach, have focused the nation on small-scale local farming and the sustainability and traceability of our food supply. Meanwhile, Whole Foods Market has planted 263 stores around the country (many through acquisitions of regional chains) since the first opened in 1980. And who could have pre­dicted the French Paradox—the notion, according to a bestseller about the eating habits of France, that you can eat plenty of fat and stay slim? Or Dr. Atkins urging eager dieters to eat pork and but­terfat? More recently, the flaccid dollar and robust euro have made American wines and cheeses seem veritable bargains.

I have for a while maintained that there is more excitement and energy in the U.S. artisanal cheese industry than there is in European cheese. In part, this is surely due to our having farther to go: try speaking, reading, or typing the words “American cheese” without picturing something gummy, preternaturally orange, oversalted and individually wrapped.

However, I also suspect that european cheesemakers and regulators have done the industry a disservice in the long term due to the AOC/PDO/DOP/DOC system of trademark regulation. (Each of these terms, in a different language, stands for “Controlled Name of Origin” and I shall refer to them all under the term “DOP” for simplicity’s sake.) The DOP system sets characteristics that must be met if a product is to be referred to under a traditional name; i.e., if you want to call your blue cheese Stilton you have to use milk from these sorts of cows, and make it into wheels this big and age them for this long and so on. In a number of cases, qualification is tied to a region: you can’t call your blue cheese Rocquefort, for instance, unless you have made it from sheep’s milk and then aged it in caves in the department Aveyron, where they will be exposed to the airborne, naturally-occurring penicilium rocqueforti that lives there. This system allows for the same sort of protection that individual firms get through trademark law, but enables the protection to be shared by every firm that makes a product meeting the qualification.

However, there are times and occasions in which the DOP system can backfire. Because the definitions are backed by law, it can be difficult to adapt them to new circumstances. Last year, Newcastle Brewing Company ran into this problem. Newcastle had successfully petitioned for the creation of a DOP defining “Newcastle Brown Ale” as ale that was, inter alia produced in the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. When the brewco decided to move its operations across the river to Gateshead, it was required to petition again to expand the legal defintion of “Newcastle Brown Ale” so that ale produced in its new facilities could be marketed under the same label.

As another example: the DOP for Stilton was written some years ago and requires that “Stilton” be made with pasteurized milk, despite the fact that pasturized Stilton is a historical latecomer, and that the cheese had been made with raw milk for centuries prior to industrial cheese production. When Joe Schneider and Randolph Hodgson revived the traditional stilton recipe, they were prohibited by law from calling the product “Stilton” and instead have had to market it under the name “Stichelton”, which is the Middle English name for the city of Stilton.

DOP protection has done some good in protecting quality standards for traditional food products, and I certainly do not oppose its use. However it seems to me that, absent DOP protection, artisanal cheesemakers in the U.S. have more opportunities to innovate in their cheesemaking techniques which are driving quality and variety in American artisanal cheesemaking. I have little doubt that if the DOP system were introduced into the U.S., it would in short order be co-opted by industrial producers, and thereby used to constrain this innovation, and I have some fears that European cheesemaking, which enjoys DOP protection, doesn’t have the same opportunities to innovate.

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.

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.

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?)

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.