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H 18°, L 6°Last week, Wisconsin farmers rightfully protested Michael Pollan’s environmentalist, anti-technology book “In Defense of Food.” Pollan’s ideas are an attack on modern farming and Western culture in general.
He doesn’t reveal this conclusion directly, but through a concerted attack on the values upon which Western culture and farming depend. For example, he disapprovingly states: “The industrialization of our food … is systematically and deliberately undermining traditional food cultures everywhere.”
But industry by definition replaces tradition. The car “undermined” the tradition of traveling by horse, the light bulb “undermined” the tradition of reading by oil lamp and supermarkets “undermined” the tradition of having limited food choices. To be against undermining tradition is to be against industry, technology and innovation.
As Bill Bruins, president of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, points out, “A nostalgic part of Pollan’s message is he wishes life would slow down; we’d all grow a garden and cook meals like his great-grandmother. … I wonder if he’d ask the medical profession to go back in time, or if he’s coming to Madison in a horse and buggy.”
Excellent point. Let’s ask farmers the same question: Aren’t farmers and their lobbyists in Washington seeking their own form of stagnation and resentment against industrial advancements and superior competition?
Decade after decade, farmers have been running to Washington for aid to prop up the prices of their products, buy their surpluses and pay them not to produce. This favoritism at taxpayers’ expense is allegedly justified, not because the industry of farming is failing but because it is too productive.
In response to falling milk prices, the Dairy Farmers of America ran to Washington this week to sick antitrust regulators on their competition. As The Wall Street Journal reported, “Some dairy farmers are irked that Dean Foods’ lower cost of milk supplies helped increase the company’s net income for the second quarter.” And so they run to Washington, indignant that they somehow aren’t getting their fair share.
And while these lobbyists rationalize their actions as attempts to increase competition and prevent price “manipulation,” it is, in fact, the lobbyists that seek actual price manipulation. Their real agenda is to gain favorable treatment and throttle more productive companies. In short, they are attacking the successful for being successful.
The National Milk Producers Federation, whose stated mission is to “promote programs that will help reduce price volatility and protect producer income,” lobbies lawmakers to purchase cheese and other products using taxpayer money. Under the Dairy Product Price Protection Program, the USDA purchases millions of pounds of dairy products a year at statutory-mandated prices in order to prop up the price of butter, cheese and milk.
When milk prices were rising a few years ago, farmers were doing well and expanding their herds, but now supply exceeds demand and prices are falling. Such is life. These are the kinds of risks and rewards that any business has to deal with. But, like Pollan’s unfounded nostalgia for tradition, the farm lobby claims an unfounded right to price stability and income protection.
But neither nostalgia for farming nor the fact that a farmer used to make a profit (last year, or the year before or a decade ago) justifies attempts to stabilize, protect or otherwise maintain the status quo. Fundamentally, such protectionist policies are an attack on industry and innovation.
Industry, by its nature, is dynamic and competitive. If some farmers cannot make a profit or manage the risks involved, they will go out of business. And the traditional family farm may be replaced as more productive enterprises win out. To oppose this by denouncing industry � la Pollan, or attempting to throttle it � la farm lobbies, is to undercut the very values that successful farming depends on. Namely, it goes against Western values of free trade, production and technical innovation.
It is admirable that many farmers recognize Pollan’s book for what it is — an attack on production, technology and innovation — and stand up for their values. It would be equally admirable if they recognized the farm lobby for what it is — an attempt to thwart economic realities and maintain the status quo — and stood up and defended the values of freedom and production and everything this implies.
Jim Allard ([email protected]) is a graduate student in the biological sciences.
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“To be against undermining tradition is to be against industry, technology and innovation.”
Gee, I wish I could have such a childish mindset. I thought the point of college (and especially post-grad studies) is to teach people to be able to distinguish between black and white thinking, and engage in true analysis. Are there really only two options, Jim? Either be against undermining tradition or be for industry, technology and innovation?
Case in point: I love the farmer’s market mainly because it is a traditional cultural experience in which I can connect with my community. However, I am also very much in favor of three separate things: industry, technology, and innovation. In other words, I like the farmer’s market AND I like high-tech computers and their technological profession.
Your assumptions and dichotomous thinking do not fit in within an academic setting and its frankly unfortunate that even as a grad student you think the way that young children do. Its unfair to the campus community that you announce these ideas. Please, in the future, engage in more nuanced thought before you sit down to type.
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8:23,
You assertions seem pretty black and white to me; may I assume you’re excluding yourself from the prohibition on “black and white thinking?”
Engaging in “true analysis” requires black and white thinking, no matter what you may learn in academia. Analysis requires distinguishing between what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, what exists and what does not, what is A and what is not A.
Enjoying the Farmer’s Market is not a case of being against undermining tradition, it’s a case of pursuing actual values. People don’t go to the Market because it is traditional, they go because it is a value to them.
Being against undermining tradition means advocating the traditional because it is traditional while condemning industry for being at odds with tradition.
Regarding what does and does not fit within an academic setting, let’s note that ad hominems do not constitute rational argumentation.
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Mr. Allard seems to not know that many of the agricultural subsidies were lobbied for by large corporations (or, to translate that into Ayn Rand-speak for him, the “Titans of Industry”) such as Tyson and McDonald’s to lower their costs of production. Cheaper feed (making up around 35% of agricultural subsidies, mostly in the form of corn, about 70% of which is fed to livestock) results in cheaper production costs to raise cattle, chicken, pork or other animals to gain greater profit. How else could you get a double cheeseburger for a buck? Or one could look at companies like Pepsi and Coca Cola who pump their products full of corn, in the form of high fructose corn syrup, to sweeten their sodas because it is cheaper than sugar. These large corporations are just as, if not more, complicit in the institution of these obscene subsidies now in place. I guess that’s okay, though, as long as there’s a John Galt getting rich, not some farmers going broke, right?
Mr. Allard also states that Mr. Pollan’s book is “an attack on production, technology and innovation.” Quite the blanket statement. Anyway, I am wondering how this is so. Yes, he derides the way that “big” agriculture is currently being produced and the technology that allows it, but he does not condemn these values as a whole. If Mr. Allard attended Mr. Pollan’s speech last Thursday at the Kohl Center he would have heard him praise Will Allen, recent recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant, and his farm in Milwaukee - one that is highly productive, incredibly innovative and makes great use of technology (not in the current sense of using machines for manual labor, but instead utilizing natural processes for more efficient production - like aquaponics, compost, worms (vermicompost) and greenhouses… check out his website at growingpower.org). Upon further and, to be quite honest, fairly effortless inspection, Mr. Allard’s aforementioned assertion is flimsy, to say the least. If anything, Pollan is calling for greater innovation and technology to solve many of the problems industrial agriculture has resulted in.
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2:27,
8:23 here. Your are correct wholeheartedly when you say that rational reason requires us to distinguish between true and false, between what is A and what is not A. That is in fact the desired process we wish to engage in.
However, to pretend that in such a complex issue that the writer is referring to that things are really as simple as a singular “A” vs. “A’s opposite” is dishonest. One need not be either against undermining tradition OR for industry, technology, and innovation. One can have a nuanced approach to this issue, as is rational, and realize that under certain paradigms, we should avoid undermining tradition, but in others we should give innovation the upper hand. Mr. Pollan’s argument is simply that when it comes to certain areas of nutrition, tradition should win out.
Jim’s mistake, and the one I call childish, is that he takes this very focused point and extrapolates it to Mr. Pollan’s entire worldview, mainly that Mr. Pollan’s book is “an attack on Western culture in general.” And in fact Jim does this EXACT thing when he foolishly creates a comparison between Mr. Pollan’s isolated views on ONE area of study (nutrition) to areas such as transportation innovation (the car), lighting innovation (the lightbulb), etc.
This is deceptive and childish, black-and-white thinking, that fails the test of logic. The following is Jim’s logic:
A: “Mr. Pollan is a traditionalist WHEN IT COMES TO NUTRITION”
B: “Anyone who is a traditionalist is attacking Western culture”
C: Therefore, Mr. Pollan is attacking Western culture”
Do you see the flawed logic and the assumption made here? Jim assumes that b/c Mr. Pollan is a traditionalist in regards to nutrition, that he is a traditionalist through and through, with no room for nuance or relativity. A traditionalist is a traditionalist, is a traditionalist, with no gray area. This, I am afraid to say, is childish thinking.
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5:54, Anyone who has actually read Ayn Rand knows that her heroes are exactly the opposite of the types that run to Washington for favors. She despised the type of selfless man who seeks to get rich by political pull.
“Some men are moved by actual guilt: they are the new type of businessmen, the product of a “mixed” economy, who make fortunes, not by productive ability and competition in a free market, but by political pull, by government favors, subsidies, franchises and special privileges; these are psycho-epistemologically and economically closer to Attila than to the Producer, and have good reason to feel guilty.” — Ayn Rand
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6:18:
It’s important to distinguish between the idea being promoted and the consistently in which it is held.
No one is saying that Pollan always sides with tradition or that he is against Western civilization on every issue or in all respects.
The point is that traditionalism, as an idea, is the antithesis of Western culture. So, to the extent that someone like Pollan is advocating traditionalism they are necessarily attacking Western culture.
This is an example of ‘A’ vs. ‘non-A’ thinking: traditionalism ‘A’ is fundamentally at odds with Western culture ‘non-A’.
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I have not read Mr. Pollan’s Book. Based on the response left by one of your readers, I wonder if food price manipulation is the cause of the problem Mr Pollan writes about. Subsides may favor certain groups, perhaps changing the structure of farms. Maybe it is government involvement and not technology that is causing him to write about defending food. Defend against whom?