He says some things we’ve all thought from time to time:
Any advice about food?
I’ll tell you. Alice Waters annoys the living shit out of me. We’re all in the middle of a recession, like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic. I mean I’m not crazy about our obsession with corn or ethanol and all that, but I’m a little uncomfortable with legislating good eating habits. I’m suspicious of orthodoxy, the kind of orthodoxy when it comes to what you put in your mouth. I’m a little reluctant to admit that maybe Americans are too stupid to figure out that the food we’re eating is killing us. But I don’t know if it’s time to send out special squads to close all the McDonald’s. My libertarian side is at odds with my revulsion at what we as a country have done to ourselves physically with what we’ve chosen to eat and our fast food culture. I’m really divided on that issue.
Yeah. I mean, I love me some roast lamb and champagne granita as much as the next guy, but … yeah.
Elsewhere: Me on Alice Waters’s crypto-conservatism; me on Slow Food snobbery.
Filed under: food, libertarianism, politics
I share your concern with food and eating. Unlike Bordain’s demon of the nanny dietitian, I would come down on the developers. I don’t really give a rat if they eat MickyDs in the burbs. What I’m concerned with is that they plowed up good farm land in flood plains to build cheap housing. My wife’s family is from Norway. I was amazed on a visit a few years ago by the farmland near and around Oslo, something disappearing in many of our cities. I was told that it is illegal to build on arable land. This makes sense to me. My favorite politician was the Republican Governor of Oregon, Tom McCall. He was the first to create land use restrictions and even instituted bottle deposits. It’s hard to imagine a Bush/Palin conservative seeing this as anything other than leftism, but, with the recent scares of Chinese food it seems to me ultimately conservative to me.
Thought you might be interested, Bourdain and Waters are going to be onstage live together in May. Duff from the Ace of Cakes is going to be there too http://ctforum.org/events/events.asp?event_id=118
Thanks, Katie! And Pan: I feel the same way – land use restrictions can be a tricky business, but they’re certainly a more legitimate function of government than restrictions (or targeted taxes, etc.) on what people eat and drink. Part of what’s so crappy about Obama’s agenda on this stuff is that he’s likely to support the latter sorts of policies even as he goes in for ethanol subsidies and other handouts to Big Ag. McCain’s platform was actually much better than Obama’s on that latter front …