"Keep your self-righteous fingers off my processed food"

Charlotte Allen takes on the we-should-be-spending-a-lot-more-money-on-food-clothing-and-everything-else crowd:

Demanding that other people impoverish themselves, especially these days, in the name of your pet cause -- fostering craftsmanship, feeling "connected" to the land, "living more lightly on the planet" or whatever -- goes way beyond Marie Antoinette saying "let them eat cake." It's more like Marie Antoinette dressing up in her shepherdess costume and holding court in a fake rustic cottage at the Petit Trianon.

Those who think that there is something wrong with owning more than two pairs of sneakers or that exquisite fastidiousness about what you put into your mouth equals virtue need to be tele-transported back to, say, the Depression itself, when privation was in earnest and few people had telephones, much less cellphones. Read some 1930s memoirs: Back then, people who couldn't afford "quality" furniture slept on mattresses on the floor and hammered together makeshift tables out of orange crates. They went barefoot during the summer and sewed their children's clothes out of (non-organic) flour sacks. That was what "cheap" meant then -- not today's plethora of affordable goods that the social critics would like to take away from us.

Not to mention that for over 95% of recorded history, one of the average person's main concerns in life was avoiding hunger, and social do-gooders complained, horrified, about starvation, and now that we have finally made some measurable progress, they're complaining bitterly about that, too.

I have the distinct impression that you just can't please some people.

Comments

[JorgXMcKie]

Deliver me from the self-satisfied, self-congratulatory types who have no freakin' idea what actually growing food requires.
I grew up on a farm. I want *all* those Bozo food Nazis to spend at least a full year living on a farm, doing all the work, and eating and wearing only that which they grew and processed themselves.
Then, and only then, should they ever be allowed to pontificate again about how the rest of us should live.
(Of course, if they actually did this, I'm guessing a substantial portion of them would have starved or frozen to death, so they wouldn't be around to pontificate.)
They gall of these people is beyond measurement.

[Norman]

I'm no fan of self-righteous and hypocritical rants, but my experience with people advocating a more natural diet has been rather different from that. The primary concern I've found is not that we need to be "in touch with the land" or "more like poverty stricken waifs in Africa," but that most people believe this cheap food is of a level of quality, especially nutritional content, that it actually does not have. The concern is about citizens being under-informed, misinformed, or victims of outright fraud rather than a failure to foster craftsmanship.

I think it is important that we not have the peculiar idea that utilizing new food technology is costless. If we selectively breed grains for size and quantity (definite benefits), we necessarily are not breeding grains for other things like nutrition (definite opportunity cost). If we genetically modify food to be disease resistant, we are not modifying it to be more easily digested, and are most likely making it harder. All of which may be just fine, as long as we are aware of the tradeoff we are making.

Too often, though, the incentives (and especially the system of regulations and subsidies) are set up to encourage developments in some areas over others, regardless of consumers' actual preferences, and then to hide the costs associated with the new products.