“Eating Right”

[UPDATE: Moving to the front, as the article is now available on-line. Once again, consider this an open thread.]

My American Conservative cover essay, “Food for Thought”, arrived in my mailbox (together with the rest of the issue,* of course) this morning, which means it should soon be in your home or at a newsstand near you. Get a copy, have a look, and let me know what you think. (Consider this an open thread; I’ll update it and move it to the front when the issue goes electronic.)

The article is very much a “think piece” – and while that’s exactly what it was intended to be, it does bear the obvious marks of a writer who’s spent too long in graduate school and is more comfortable quoting books and citing studies than describing his own experiences or those of others. But I’m still pretty happy with how it turned out, and I think that it does a good enough job of systematizing some of what I’ve been thinking about of late.

It’s also a rather hopeful essay, which is a bit out of character for me – I’m pretty convinced that the economy’s going to crash, oil’s going to peak, the Earth is just going to get hotter, and Western culture is going to end up in hell by way of a handbasket. But in all of this, the possibilities for what I call “economies of place” – webs of interchange defined by region, season, and local custom rather than global market pressures – are only going to be furthered. If my wife and I have been able to find conservative bliss in one of America’s bluest and most economically frenetic corners, there may be hope for the rest of the country, too.

In this vein, I owe a response to Lee McCracken’s insightful comments on my post on (what he helpfully calls) “crunchy libertarianism”. Lee writes:

John makes the case for what I think it’s fair to call a libertarian approach to food production, the idea being that our current system is the result of excessive government intervention in the form of subsidies, tariffs, foolish regulations, etc. (as amply documented by Michael Pollan and others) and that small, local and organic farms would be in a better position to compete with WalMart and big ag under a more laissez-faire regime. I plead ignorance as to whether this would actually work, and I think that some regulation (at least to limit harm in the form of environmental externalities, animal cruelty, worker exploitation and so forth) is necessary, but I do find the aspiration of attaining green ends by libertarian means an appealing one.

So do I, which is why I get so damned gushy about it. And I while I am happy to profess that I am similarly ignorant about the extent to which this would be a perfect system, there can be no doubt that it would be better than what we’ve got right now. Of course I agree with Lee about the necessity for SOME governmental oversight, but it is one of my deepest convictions that less is usually better. And it’s also crucial to see that smaller – that is to say more local, and so more flexible and more responsive to popular concern – is better: in Joel Salatin’s new book, for instance, one of the very few actual victories against stupid nanny-statery occurs when he’s able to go down to Richmond and argue against a bill that would have made it illegal for him to cut his own lumber; he was only able to achieve this, though, because he was fighting a state-level regulation rather than a national one. More generally, while I don’t think this live-and-let-buy approach will save the world, I also think that (1) politics isn’t supposed to do that anyway, and (2) we’re in a pretty strong dialectical situation (albeit one with the forces of corporate agribusiness allied firmly against us) when we can argue that libertarian politics makes for crunchy results. (Again, consider this a partial response to Prof. Fox.)

Vive la Résistance, anyway, and let me know your thoughts.

* Including: Rod Dreher interviewing Michael Pollan; my friend Tim Carney on ethanol politics; Michael Brendan Dougherty on free speech in Canada; and much more. Get yo’self a copy.

[ADDENDUM: It would be remiss not to try to express my pretty much inexpressible gratitude to Dan McCarthy, Kara Hopkins, and the rest of the folks at TAC for giving a shot - and a cover, no less! - to a young writer, and for working to shape my unwieldy prose into a tolerable form. (And for paying me, too, which is an almost perverse thrill for someone following a career path that centers on working weekends to write things for free that no one will read.) So thank you, thank you, thank you so much.]

Filed under: agriculture, conservatism, economics, environment, food, government/law, libertarianism, media/culture, politics