The Food Police

by Jayson Lusk

  There is perhaps no more critical question than how our society chooses to relate to food. After all, everyone must eat. Will we raise a generation of children who look at food with optimism and innovation, aspiring to be technological innovators such as Louis Pasteur or Norman Borlaug? Or will we raise a cohort of traditionalists who can find nothing better than what is in the past? By cultivating panics and promoting agricultural and environmental idealism, the food police have assumed the moral authority on food. Their message is deceptively appealing because of its traditionalist overtones and fear-mongering about the safety of food. Make no mistake about it, however, nothing short of our ability to feed ourselves and the world is at stake.

  Let me be clear: if we are to discuss the morality of food, foremost in our minds must be the ability of people (especially the poor) to eat. Whatever else the modern food elite may say—their push for soda and Twinkie taxes, their promotion of local foods, their attempts to regulate processed and fast food, their aversion to biotechnology—their actions make it harder for the poor to meet the most basic necessity of fending off starvation. The irony of many contestants on reality cooking shows such as Top Chef Masters is on display for all to see: they pledge to give their winnings to help the poor, all the while promoting a food system that’s sucking money out of the back pockets of the least advantaged. Abraham Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs” had a foundation, and this is it. And yet those of us who oppose the actions of the food police—the same food police who have turned Maslow’s triangle on its pointy and now unstable head—are called immoral? Please.

  I don’t care if you refrain from eating foods made with biotechnology or growth promotants or preservatives. But don’t tell me it is immoral to allow farmers to sell consumers these cheaper alternatives. I know the old left-wing canard that it’s not fair that poorer consumers can’t afford the local, organic veggies bought by the rich. Look—life isn’t fair. And until someone can fully articulate an alternative reality where perfectly happy egalitarians, working arm in arm, generate enough wealth to afford the things the rich now can, I regard such arguments as sentimental hogwash. As if people, deep down, want equality with the money they’ve earned. We are, after all, constantly trying to best our neighbors. As David Brooks put it, “We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.”30 Moreover, what arrogance is it to presume that if the poor had $1,000 more in their pocket, their highest priority would be to spend it on heirloom tomatoes? As the Economist magazine once put it, “Capitalism can make you well off. And it also leaves you free to be as unhappy as you choose. To ask any more of it would be asking too much.”31

  You don’t have to like all modern food technologies, but you should at least have the truth to know what you’re giving up—and what the food police will force others to give up—when they’re rejected. The hard, cold reality is that we can have expensive, fresh, “natural” food or affordable, processed, modern food. Choose what you will, but don’t deny others their choice.

  However else it might seem, my critique of the food police is a cry for humility in the face of uncertainty. The world is a complicated place. Anyone who claims truly to know that food was once “too cheap” or is now “too expensive” adorns a crown of arrogance. I have a few hypotheses about why more Americans are overweight than they once were, but I’m not sure we should do anything about it or what might happen if we did. Those who claim otherwise assume a level of competence beyond human limits. There is no food czar (at least not yet, thankfully). There is no top-down planning of our food system. The food elite seek explanations for the ills they see and ascribe malevolence to food companies and corporate farms, engaging in extravagant conspiracy theories. But the food system we have is a result of a complex emergent process that defies the limits of human rationalization. Conservatism, at its best, isn’t a knee-jerk reaction against all change, but rather a carefully considered recognition of the wisdom embedded in the unplanned outcomes that have emerged around us as a result of our individual actions. Liberalism, at its best, recognizes that people should have the power to choose for themselves and that we don’t have to do things the same way we always have. Between the best of these ideologies lies the right path for food.

  The food elite want a supposedly more rational food system that conforms to their vision of the world and to textbook theories of social order. Alas, the real world will not yield to romantic dreams. Look to the outcomes of those who have tried to rationally plan their nations’ food production. Stalin and Mao starved millions of Russians and Chinese in an attempt to impose a supposedly more rational economic order. The food system we have is not the result of a single top-down plan, but that doesn’t mean it is ill-informed; the food we eat and the prices we pay come about from billions of individual decisions made by consumers and farmers and agribusinesses and grocery stores all trying to make themselves as well off as possible within a framework of norms, rules, and institutions. Prices aren’t tools to be used by a more informed elite to direct the rest of us; they are signals about the world around us. The hubris of the food elite lies in their desire to replace this complex, evolved process embodying an immense amount of information with their own limited vision of the world. The truth is that no one knows enough to tell everyone else how to eat.

  Let me tell you what I do know. Both my grandmothers raised chickens in their backyards, and wrung a neck when it was suppertime. Unlike today’s generation, they didn’t farm their backyards to find existential meaning, but out of cruel, dirt-poor necessity. I’m all for people who want to move out to the country and try their hand at hobby farming. More power to them. But don’t lecture those who’ve been there and done that. My grandmother might occasionally reminisce about simpler times, but she remembers well the unplumbed, un-wired house in which she raised my father and his siblings, and those of us that close to a life the food police romanticize and seek to return to, even if by regulatory force, say, “Enough!” We’ve had our backyard chickens, and Tyson is just fine.

  FROM COPS TO ROBBERS

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF FOOD PROGRESSIVEM

  F. A. Hayek lived in Austria in the aftermath of World War I and witnessed the rise of socialism and fascism firsthand. When he later immigrated to England to work at the London School of Economics, he was alarmed to find many of the same intellectual undercurrents at work in Britain that had led to the ravaging of his homeland. Writing in The Road to Serfdom, he warned his new countrymen of the fate of such thinking:

  Contemporary events differ from history in that we do not know the results they will produce … It would be different if it were given to us to live a second time through the same events with all the knowledge of what we have seen before. How different would things appear to us; how important and often alarming would changes seem that we now scarcely notice! … Yet, although history never quite repeats itself, and just because no development is inevitable, we can in a measure learn from the past to avoid a repetition of the same process.1

  Fortunately, the British made a U-turn on the road to serfdom—perhaps in part because they could see the consequences of their actions in the not-so-distant history of their neighbors. We, too, might learn a thing or two about where we are heading by turning back the clock to more fully appreciate the origins of the food police and the unintended consequences of their policies.

  Perhaps the best place to start is to see that despite the fact that exotic organic veggies seem chic, interest in them has been around for centuries. Indeed, the tension between traditional grain-growing, mono-crop agriculture and the lure of alternatives is old news. As the British historian Joan Thirsk noted in her book Alternative Agriculture, animosity toward conventional grain farming has been around since at least the fourteenth century.2 But cries for change throughout history fluctuated with the economy. When growing conventional grains became less profitable, alternatives were sought. In the cyclical transitions in and out of alternative
agriculture, the food police rode the tides. Each time, the argument wasn’t that more profitable alternatives existed, but rather, that grain-growing was wrong and alternative cropping systems were good and righteous. Thus, it apparently wasn’t sufficient to change old ways.

  Farmers and nobles promoting alternative agriculture wrapped their decisions in a cloak of morality. Economic incentives are apt to be interpreted as moral imperatives, especially when we want others to make the same choices we do. Throughout British history, foreign food trade was, at times, seen as both moral and immoral. So, too, was growing grain. And these views correlated almost perfectly with the prevailing economic climate. So, if you find yourself on the receiving end of a condescending sermon by the food police, just wait a few decades and you may find the shoe is on the other foot—if you choose to wear it.

  At least the modern-day food police can find some comfort in knowing they have a long heritage. In medieval Britain, a commodity couldn’t be exported without a license, and a new crop couldn’t be grown without the king’s permission. Farmers were required to tithe their commodities to the state church or were otherwise imprisoned. Before modern capitalism, crony capitalists fought to get monopoly rights for growing new crops. And yes, even in the 1700s there were government payments for growing grain. It shouldn’t be surprising that some Brits were clamoring to leave this system behind.

  When the Pilgrims left England and eventually came to America in the early seventeenth century, they brought with them the ideals of family, individualism, and education that would lay the foundation for the emergence of a new democratic republic a century and a half later. But when it came to food, it seems that puritanical idealism got the better of them.

  When the Pilgrims arrived in what came to be called New England, Governor William Bradford set up a communitarian agriculture system. Food and supplies were pooled and then doled out by officials based on equity and need—a system he called common course. And what a beautiful idea it was. The immigrants to the new land were in it together, helping their fellow man, all the while skirting the corrupting influences of the market. Although Karl Marx wouldn’t be born for another two centuries, the Pilgrims’ agricultural system embodied his ideal, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

  No matter how devout were the Pilgrims, they were but mere mortals. Rather than conceding to the planners’ good intentions, the layfolk responded to the incentives inherent in the system. When you can’t reap the fruits of your labor, why work? Bradford himself wrote in 1647 that the communal system “was found to breed much confusion and discontent,” in part because “young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense … this was thought injustice.”

  Bradford recognized the problem. Even a tribe so godly and righteous as to pick up, leave home, and traverse an ocean to begin a commune of sorts couldn’t be compelled to goodness through cajoling and community spirit. Bradford decided to give each family a private parcel of land from which they reaped all that was sown. The same men and women who were previously chastised for their idleness were now suddenly productive. Bradford wrote that the new system “had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” The modern food police would have us believe that more neighborliness and community spirit are needed to revolutionize the food system, but while much has changed over the past 350 years, human nature hasn’t.3

  The father of modern economics, Adam Smith, writing in the late eighteenth century, said it best: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”4 I certainly wouldn’t expect to find something even as mundane as buttered toast for breakfast if I relied on the altruism of the deliveryman, the wheat farmer, the salt miner, the dairyman, and all the other people who must be coordinated to provide the wheat, salt, milk, baking powder, and yeast. Everyone knows this to be true, but the food police unwittingly seek to undermine the profit incentives of the system that make it all happen. Alas, that’s unlikely to be the lesson our kids will learn in November when drawing hand-shaped turkeys at school—assuming the food police haven’t deemed the craft too degrading to the birds.

  The Pilgrims learned another important lesson, one that literally meant the difference between life and death. With help from the Native Americans, they learned how to grow corn. The uncivilized crop grown by uncivilized people did not sit well with settlers accustomed to the wheat and barley of their homeland. Fashion, however, gave way to necessity, and the versatile and productive corn became a staple. Soon the American colonists not only were able to feed themselves but began exporting agricultural commodities back to the Old World.

  There is nothing more infuriating to the elite than to witness an event they can’t explain—or control. As a result, the cultural elite of the time decried the transition to the unfamiliar corn, and ironically today’s cultural elite do the same. Modern food advocates deride the commodity in scathing documentaries such as King Corn. Writers such as Michael Pollan are disgusted with our “river of cheap corn” and are appalled to find remnants of corn in our DNA. With some effort, we might remove corn from our diets, but its influences cannot be whitewashed from history. It is not just our bodies that have been genetically influenced by corn; corn and agriculture have affected the very DNA of our nation itself.

  The emerging agricultural basis of the American colonies was not just a way to make a living; it helped define the nation’s cultural and political identity. In the years surrounding the Revolutionary War, the colonists had to find an identity separate from the British culture they had previously aspired to emulate, and agriculture provided the means of differentiation. In A Revolution in Eating, the historian James McWilliams writes that the rejection of British culture “led Americans to embrace the virtues of the farming life as an explicit cultural and political cause. Thus the virtues of the frontier, as a conscious choice, rather than out of necessity, became an animating force in American life.”5 Americans were simple farmers eating simple food and they were proud of it. As the contemporary Thomas Jefferson put it, “Agriculture … is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness.” And so began our romance with agriculture.

  When the industrial revolution took hold and the process of urbanization began, the changes were thus seen by some as almost un-American. At the time of the Revolution, approximately 90 percent of the American labor force consisted of farmers. By the 1850s the figure had dropped to around 65 percent, and by the early 1900s, farmers made up less than 30 percent of the labor force.6 With the growth of cities, the rise of textile mills and food manufacturers, the mechanization of farming, and the influx of immigrants, it seemed that a way of life that had defined a nation was being lost. The technical changes that were afoot set the stage for the rise of progressivism and the first epic of the American food police.

  The Progressive movement that began in the late 1800s was intimately interested in food and agriculture. In fact, the longstanding importance that progressives have placed on food and health is often underappreciated—as is their paternalistic attempts to influence what others eat.

  The Progressive movement can be seen, in part, as an outgrowth of Christian social gospel. It is perhaps no mistake, then, that in the late 1800s the two Kellogg brothers, following practices of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, established what would eventually become known as the Battle Creek Sanitarium. There, such famous patients as Henry Ford and President Warren G. Harding obtained spiritual and physical healing through dietary reform and a host of therapeutic treatments, including frequent enemas. The Kelloggs encouraged exercise and hygiene, but became best known for their promotion of a low-fat, low-protein, high-fiber diet, which was embodied in
their new flaked breakfast cereal. The Kelloggs were just a small part of the larger grassroots pure foods movement.

  While the Kelloggs were trying to convert all who would listen to their preaching on the latest dietary fad, others were intent on reforming the whole country—by force, if necessary. A confluence of economic and political events in the 1920s gave that period’s food police the leverage to outlaw the sale of alcohol.7 Prohibition became entangled with the suffrage movement, the establishment of the income tax, religious fervor, and anti-immigration sentiment. Class paternalism was a key motivator for Prohibition, and Progressives were at the forefront of the movement to save lower-class drinkers from their own defective judgment. Some leftists were motivated by the belief that liquor was a tool used by the capitalists to keep the working man in his place. If the capitalists were at fault, I’m not sure who was to blame when people took to the speakeasies and backwoods stills of their own volition.

  Rather than ushering in a sober utopia, Prohibition yielded all sorts of chaos and unintended consequences. Banning alcohol only increased the incentive for the likes of Al Capone to provide what customers wanted, only now underground and in a deadlier fashion. The economic foundations of towns such as St. Louis and Milwaukee were devastated. Those with political connections enriched themselves and went their merry way. Religious groups were still allowed to use wine for sacramental purposes, and one rabbi in Los Angeles found a new devotion to the faith—with his congregation increasing from twenty to a thousand families after Prohibition went into effect. There were more than a few O’Malleys and O’Connells claiming Jewish heritage. Policemen willing to turn a blind eye suddenly found their bank accounts ballooning.8 Fortunately for those who wanted to blow off a little steam, state and federal governments realized they needed the liquor taxes, and Roosevelt repealed Prohibition, concluding, “I think this would be a good time for a beer.”