I’m no Crunchy Con, but I confess to being sympathetic to the organic food movement in the United States. Although I do not always buy organic, I am glad that the market caters to the segment of the population that does. Locally-grown and otherwise farm fresh meat, vegetables, milk, and eggs often taste better and are healthier than the output of the mega-farm operations in other parts of the country, although you pay a premium for them.
Friends of ours–farmers from outside of Birmingham–often complain to me about USDA regulations that favor their big-farm competition and force naturally grown and organic foods to become relatively more expensive, and I agree with them that the output from mega-farms is greater than it would be without government interference. Nonetheless, I am sure that, absent the USDA, we would still have a preponderance of large farm operations. By creating economies of scale and maximizing output, these operations have made food so inexpensive that we have moved from being a society that 30 years ago was concerned with hunger to one today that is concerned about obesity. This shift is welcomed. It is nothing short of miraculous.
But there are activists who would snuff it out if they could, and who would use the state to require locally-grown and organic food as the only food option. People like Boston University’s Ellen Ruppel Shell are shocked–shocked!–that the poor pay less for food than they did in decades past, and would force them to pay more, even in serious economic times such as these. Indeed, they condemn any effort on the part of the market, not only in the area of food production, to exploit economies of scale and mass production techniques in ways that help the poor. Economic output with lower costs and higher quantities? How dare they!
Thankfully, Charlotte Allen has an eye on the situation, and in a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, she delightfully skewers such efforts. An excerpt:
In an online debate with the Atlantic’s economics writer, Megan McArdle, Shell observes with disapproval that, when prices are adjusted for inflation, Americans today spend “40% less on clothes, 20% less on food, more than 50% less on appliances, about 25% less on owning and maintaining a car” than they did during the early 1970s. Over that same period, Census Bureau tables show, U.S. median household income rose by at least 18% in constant dollars — despite the much-lamented (by Shell and others) decampment of “once flourishing” manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere. That’s why even America’s poorest people nowadays can afford automobiles, cellphones and TVs.
Yet a significant number of social critics wish they couldn’t. Robert Pollin, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst — cited approvingly by Shell — has argued for higher clothing prices and steep taxes on fossil fuels in the name of various social and green causes, even though, as he conceded in a January article in the Nation, the latter measure would “impose higher energy prices on businesses and individuals.”
The most zealous of the spend-more crowd, however, are the food intellectuals who salivated, as it were, at a steep rise in the cost of groceries earlier this year, including such basics as milk and eggs. Some people might worry about the effect on recession-hit families of a 17% increase in the price of milk, but not Alice Waters, the food-activist owner of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant, who shudders at the thought of sampling so much as a strawberry that hasn’t been nourished by organic compost and picked that morning at a nearby farm — and thinks everyone else in America should shudder too. “Make a sacrifice on the cellphone or the third pair of Nike shoes,” Waters airily informed the New York Times in April.
Read the whole article here. As with most of Allen’s writings, It is well worth chewing on.
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You wrote, “Locally-grown and otherwise farm fresh meat, vegetables, milk, and eggs often taste better and are healthier than the output of the mega-farm operations in other parts of the country, although you pay a premium for them.”
Really? I can’t comment on your tastes of course but let’s review the literature on the ‘healthier’ part.
From the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:
From a total of 52,471 articles, we identified 162 studies (137 crops and 25 livestock products); 55 were of satisfactory quality. In an analysis that included only satisfactory-quality studies, conventionally produced crops had a significantly higher content of nitrogen, and organically produced crops had a significantly higher content of phosphorus and higher titratable acidity. No evidence of a difference was detected for the remaining 8 of 11 crop nutrient categories analyzed. Analysis of the more limited database on livestock products found no evidence of a difference in nutrient content between organically and conventionally produced livestock products.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/90/3/680
Aleksander – This article doesn’t go into the steroids and hormones and other additives that go into conventionally produced products, and this is what I was referring to. Still, I have heard of this paper but have never seen it. Very interesting!
Check out a book called Real Food at http://www.amazon.com/Real-Food-What-Eat-Why/dp/1596911441.
Laws stopping us from getting real food have harmed farmers and our health. Organic and local don’t matter as much as processing.
qu’ils mangent du gâteau!
I can only account for my own experience growing up on a pork farm, but I often find people assume non-organically grown livestock/plants are filled with antibiotics and other external substances.
On our farm, and as far as I know most of the farms I’ve ever been to, when we did use antibiotics or any other treatment, we stopped treatment well before slaughter to ensure that nothing was left in the animal’s body.
I’ve heard a million other assumptions about non-organic farming that are exaggerated or simply untrue about the farm I grew up on and the others I’ve visited. Especially about how the animals are supposedly mistreated.
I wont deny that Bad Stuff happens in the farming industry, but from my experience they are exceptional cases, not the norm. I can’t account for the larger “factory” farms, but to me they appear to just be larger, more systematic forms of what I grew up with.
Unfortunately, the smear campaign against non-organic farming appears to be a major influence for anti-property-rights legislation against farmers. The farmers in my county, for example, are banned from building or upgrading any hog facility on their own land! I have nothing against organically grown food, but I thought I’d share my experiences to show that at least some non-organic farms don’t fit the evil mold assigned to the entire industry,
“Indeed, they condemn any effort on the part of the market, not only in the area of food production, to exploit economies of scale and mass production techniques in ways that help the poor. Economic output with lower costs and higher quantities? How dare they!”
The costs are higher, but they are paid for by environmental destruction (and I don’t mean some rare toad being driven to extinction, but rather the wholesale destruction of the land and water resources), illegal labor, lower quality, and subsidies upon subsidies.
Rome had the exact same policies – look where it got them.
“Nonetheless, I am sure that, absent the USDA, we would still have a preponderance of large farm operations. ”
The IRS also plays a key role in this – the estate tax effectively prohibits the children of farmers from inheriting the family farm.
“By creating economies of scale and maximizing output, these operations have made food so inexpensive that we have moved from being a society that 30 years ago was concerned with hunger to one today that is concerned about obesity. This shift is welcomed. It is nothing short of miraculous.”
The problem used to be a shortage of affordable healthy food. That problem remains unsolved, and now we have the problem of huge excesses of dirt cheap but very unhealthy food. Once again the government takes one problem, adds a solution, and ends up with two problems and no solution.
This is a gigantic fraud, a food pyramid scheme, but it is no miracle.
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