The shadow work behind your supper

Mother Jones printed an article I agree with that wasn't written by Kevin Drum.

This doesn't happen very often, so let's go into more detail. It's a few years old, but it's new to me. In the piece, Tom Philpott challenges the idea that cooking at home is cheaper than eating fast food.

First, a little background information. Poor Americans are more likely to be overweight, and one explanation is that they lack access to healthy foods and buy fast food because it is easier to get and costs less money. I don't buy that explanation, but I've never found the counter-argument compelling either; that it's cheaper to cook at home than to eat fast food.

The New York Times printed a column and infographic by Mark Bittman showing a hypothetical McDonald's meal and contrasting it to a meat and potatoes meal at home. According to Bittman, the home-cooked meal is both cheaper and healthier.

But Philpott noticed a key difference: One is a prepared meal, ready to eat, while the other is just the raw ingredients.

But what about the time it takes to plan the dinner, shop for the ingredients, transform them into a meal, and then clean up the resulting mess? 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tells us that the median hourly income in the United States is $16.27. Let's say it takes two hours to put the Times' meal together and clean up afterward—for the median US worker, that's about $32 worth of labor. Voilà! Our chicken dinner now costs around $46. Suddenly, that $28 Mickey D's excursion looks like quite the bargain. 

Here's what I saw as Philpott's first flaw in the article: His $16.27 an hour figure is for a median hourly worker, but that's not a valid figure for a poor person. Their time will be worth significantly less. Let's forgive his poor choice of numbers and instead look at this as an opportunity cost issue.

Cooking for one's family is an example of shadow work, or unpaid labor that could otherwise be performed by a middleman. Without trying to put a specific dollar amount on it, people's time does indeed have value. They may be extremely busy and lack the time to cook a full meal, or see it as wasteful. There may be other things they want to do with their time.

Despite what Philpott says, the family who gets take -out is not leveraging "the fast-food industry's cheap labor pool for a fuss-free meal." No, they are leveraging the economies of scale that comes from purchased food, as opposed to cooking it at home in a small-scale operation that frequently ends with extra perishable ingredients and may have to throw them out.

While I don't agree with the details Philpott used, his overall idea is correct that preparing cooked foods and raw ingredients will always be an apples and oranges comparison.

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Being a contrarian conscious consummer

Today I was about to by some roasted red pepper hummus at the grocery story. There were four different brands and for the first time I spotted a little voluntary label on the front of the container from my normal brand, boasting that the contents did not contain any genetically-modified ingredients.

I am a steadfast supporter of GMO technology. The basic idea is that human beings can use science to improve the foods we eat instead of blindly following what nature has provided us. Opposition to GMO's is a hysterical pseuoscientific cultlike movment akin to creationism and alternative medicine. The anti-GMO crowd is the left wing equivalent of global warming denialists.

Suddenly, I didn't want to buy that brand of hummus anymore. It's not that it's dangerous or unhealthy to eat foods that lack genetic modification, but that I was concerned about the message I would be sending as a consumer. I pictured a marketing team combing through sales data and trying to figure out if the GMO-free label brought in more sales.

Sadly, I imagine it does. Looking through the display, I could only find one brand of hummus that didn't declare itself to be GMO-free, and that was Sabra.

Sabra was a little cheaper than the other brands, which could mean it's by a lower-quality product. It could also mean the company isn't wasting money on overpriced organic, GMO-free ingredients, so that issue was a wash.

What did stay my hand was that there were no roasted red pepper containers from Sabra, while the other brands still had them in stock. I contemplated buying one of of the GMO-free brands to get my preferred flavor, but opted not to. I didn't want any market researchers to falsely conclude that I was encourage to buy their product because of the GMO-free label.

I ended up buying Sabra's roasted pine nut hummus instead. I wasn't sure what pine nuts tasted like, but it turned out to be superb.

So tell me, doesn't that make me an ethical consumer? Usually, that label refers to people who buy products with flower power mission statements, such as Seventh Generation Dish Detergent, but why shouldn't the same logic apply to the other end of the spectrum?

For years I've boycotted organic products. That's because organic food production is wasteful, cruel to animals, environmentally damaging and provides no health benefits. That is to say, I consider it entirely unethical to give my money to organic companies and farmers. The higher prices organic merchants charge are just the whip cream on the sundae.

Being a contrarian doesn't mean one lacks principals, it just means that they have a different perspective. I can't see any reason that the banner of "ethical consumers" shouldn't include contrarians like me who oppose the very products mainstream ethical consumers champion.
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"Slow Money" is charity, not investing

"Slow Money" is branding itself as an alternative to traditional investment, but at the same time is not saying anyone will get back the money they put in.

The name is a take-off of the "slow food" movement and it has wrapped itself in all the same old "buy local" and locavore nonsense of creating a new world fed and clothed by low-impact, wealth-creating cottage industries and handmade products. See the "Buy Local" tag on this blog for many, many posts on why almost all of those claims are false and counterproductive.

This voiceless cartoon they made shows a woman putting her money in the bank and expressing concern that it is being invested in arms manufacturers, oil companies and cliche 18th century smoke-belching factories. The woman then gives her money to a local farmer, who puts the money in the ground and a big plant comes out, which eventually sprouts an identical amount of money that she put in. We then we see more plants grow more money, and eventually a farmers' market sprouts up.

This one minute, 45 second cartoon doesn't actually show the woman getting her money back, and people who participate shouldn't expect to either, but it's the closest thing to a coherent pitch the group has.

Slow Money is a network of ideologically-motivated investments clubs who give what they call "loans" to local food producers. Since local farms typically lose money, I imagine they have a high default rate. The Slow Money network has been around for four years and has given out $35 million. It's very telling that the proponents do not talk about how many borrowers pay back their loans. Instead, their website talks about their principals, which for some reason includes a quotation from a Hollywood actor,

I realize that Slow Money is trying to attract angel investors, people who are interested in the cause and the personality behind the business more than generating a profit, but for some reason they won't come out and flatly say it. I wouldn't have such a problem if the Slow Money people would just say that they deal in donations, instead of talking about "investments" and making vague references to building a new economy.

Why not just say that the money people give will not be returned to them, but instead will create things in the community they want to see? Why not just be straightforward with what they're doing, instead of presenting it as something akin to financial investments.

You have to dig deep, but their are times when the movement heavily implies that is the goal. To complete the checklist of a faux-intellectual movement, Slow Money leader Ari Derfel gave a TEDx talk in 2011. After dropping shallow buzzwords like "business 3.0", reading inspiring quotations and talking about someone's honest-to-god vision quest, he summed up what Slow Money is all about. Vaguely. In particular, he said:

What makes life worthwhile is not profit; it's relationships... We need to measure return on investment not simply by profit, but by things like soil fertility, by the jobs we make, the relationships we build, the ecology we restore.

Please note: He never said his "investors" won't make any interest, he just implied it. He never said one way or the other if they can expect to get their principal investment returned.

Before giving his brief summary, Derfel explained  that he would need "a whole TED Talk" just to explain what Slow Money is. Funny, the title of the video of his talk is "Slow Money." Was he really invited to speak about organic food in rich communities and cliche wise-Native-American stories? If an executive director of an organization can't sum up what they do in 15 minutes, they are either incompetent or dishonest.

He could have told us that Slow Money is an angel investment group-slash-charity that accepts the growth of small farms instead of fiscal profit? How hard was that?

Sadly, his vague summary is as close to straightforward as you will get from this movement. If you want to delight in seeing local farmers milling about your community, than you probably won't have a problem with not getting your principal investment back. You're already choosing to pay too much for food anyways. Just don't have any illusions that the money you give to this organization will eventually return to you. As in gambling, don't spend what you can't afford to lose.
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Local food is still not financially substainable

Let's take people with no understanding of basic economic theory and allow them to tamper with the economy.

That's what Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is doing, on behalf of our elected officials. The New York Times writes:

The United States Department of Agriculture plans to announce Monday that it will spend $52 million to support local and regional food systems like farmers’ markets and food hubs and to spur research on organic farming. 

The local food movement has been one of the fastest growing segments of the business, as consumers seek to know more about where, how and by whom their food is grown. 

But local farmers still struggle to market their food. Distribution systems are intended to accommodate the needs of large-scale commercial farms and growers. Grocery stores and restaurants largely rely on big distribution centers and are only beginning to figure out how to incorporate small batches of produce into their overall merchandise mixes. 

Farmers’ markets are proliferating around the country, increasing 76 percent to 8,268 since 2008, according to the Agriculture Department, but they have trouble marketing themselves. And few consumers are aware of a website the department created to help them find a farmers market in their area. 

“These types of local food systems are the cornerstones of our plans to revitalize the rural economy,” Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, said in a telephone interview. “If you can connect local produce with markets that are local, money gets rolled around in the local community more directly compared to commercial agriculture where products get shipped in large quantities somewhere else, helping the economy there.”

There's that same bogus broken window argument, that local people buying things at higher prices helps the economy here and deprives it elsewhere.

If these food movements are so successful, why can't they afford to market their own products? As pointed out on Mike Munger's blog, the writer just got done reminding us of how much money farmers' markets and local foods are bringing in, but the industry still needs a bailout.

Once again, the issue isn't simply that the local food advocates are making bogus hyper-protectionist claims based on myths and fallacies. It's that they want the rest of us to help pay for their expensive, luxury goods like local, organic and hand-raised foods. Local food programs need to be able to stand on their own, and it's shameful that influential people like Vilsack get to regurgitate this nonsense to a major publication like the New York Times with zero pushback. 

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Small farms won't feed the world

This week I interviewed a young farmer who is in the process of adding a dairy cattle herd to his farm and I had the chance to ask him about his breed choice. I wanted to know why he was picking breeds with lower productivity.

Growing up, our farm had a herd entirely composed of Holstein cows. Holsteins produce more milk per animal than any other breed, which has made them the most popular dairy breed in the country.

Yet, there were a few families in our 4-H clubs that had other breeds - Ayrshires, Brown Swiss and Jerseys. While Jersey milk has a higher fat content than the other breeds and has its own niche market, I never understood why small farms had brown cow herds instead of black and white. I assumed some of them were part of a family tradition, or the farm already had a sizable brown breeding population from previous generations and the current generation didn't think it was worth switching.

But why do the new first-generation farmers choose these breeds? Jim, the young farmer I met, is getting Ayrshires and Brown Swiss. Why opt for unproductive breeds, it's like choosing the Tiger missiles in Top Gun for the NES?

Jim explained it's really about marketing. The locavores he caters to associate Holsteins with factory farming, and brown cows with wholesomeness. Witnessing these breeds give them emotional comfort when they are making a purchase.

So there you have it. Once again, we see consumers flocking to marketing and packaged images at the expense of productivity. Jim is being rational by appealing to the prejudices of his customers.

Now keep this in mind when evaluating preposterous claims that the world should return to local food production. Holsteins are better at feeding the world than Ayrshires, but local farmers have incentives to choose inferior breeds.

A 2013 article in Hoard's Dairyman attempts to estimate the percentage of America's cattle population by breed. This is difficult because there's no official count, but about half of the cows are registered in the Dairy Heard Improvement program. These records show that the percentage of dairy cows who are Holsteins in America has fallen from 92.55 percent in 1985 to 85.56 percent in 2012.

However, this decline isn't from locavores, as small farms make up a small percentage of the national herd. The analysis concluded that a greater demand for cheese is pushing up the Jersey breed percentage, and well as an increase in mixed breeds. There is indeed a use for brown cows in the modern world, but notice the striking difference between choosing a breed for utility and choosing a breed for marketing.
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Is the local food movement doomed?

The New York Times just ran an op-ed piece by sea-farmer Bren Smith lamenting that the small farm craze is terrible for the farmers.

The dirty secret of the food movement is that the much-celebrated small-scale farmer isn’t making a living. After the tools are put away, we head out to second and third jobs to keep our farms afloat. Ninety-one percent of all farm households rely on multiple sources of income. Health care, paying for our kids’ college, preparing for retirement? Not happening. With the overwhelming majority of American farmers operating at a loss — the median farm income was negative $1,453 in 2012 — farmers can barely keep the chickens fed and the lights on. 

Others of us rely almost entirely on Department of Agriculture or foundation grants, not retail sales, to generate farm income. And young farmers, unable to afford land, are increasingly forced into neo-feudal relationships, working the fields of wealthy landowners. Little wonder the median age for farmers and ranchers is now 56. 

My experience proves the trend. To make ends meet as a farmer over the last decade, I’ve hustled wooden crafts to tourists on the streets of New York, driven lumber trucks, and worked part time for any nonprofit that could stomach the stink of mud on my boots. Laden with college debt and only intermittently able to afford health care, my partner and I have acquired a favorite pastime in our house: dreaming about having kids. It’s cheaper than the real thing.

Combine this with Dan Barber's recent assessment that the local food system is failing because no one wants to eat the cover crops, and the ongoing problem of local producers dishonestly repackaging mass-produced goods to make ends meet, one wonders if this snobby food fad is going to burn out in the next few years. The "food miles" environmental argument has already been destroyed, and now with visible tears in the economic arguments the only thing left is aesthetics.

But, of course, right on cue Smith reaches for the big red button and demands a bailout to prop up luxury foods:

But now it’s time for farmers to shape our own agenda. We need to fight for loan forgiveness for college grads who pursue agriculture; programs to turn farmers from tenants into landowners; guaranteed affordable health care; and shifting subsidies from factory farms to family farms. We need to take the lead in shaping a new food economy by building our own production hubs and distribution systems. And we need to support workers up and down the supply chain who are fighting for better wages so that their families can afford to buy the food we grow.

Look, the problem with agricultural subsidies isn't that they are going to the wrong types of farms; the problem is that they exist in the first place. This is my big problems with the local food movement: They want their private indulgences paid with public money. Small farm artisan foods are luxury items and if patrons won't agree to higher prices the answer is to let the industry die, and not to shake down taxpayers for more subsidies, grants and tax breaks.

Interestingly enough, these tax breaks that Smith loves so much have introduced rent-seekers into the market, and they are driving down prices by increasing the supply of local foods. He writes:

Especially in urban areas, supporting your local farmer may actually mean buying produce from former hedge fund managers or tax lawyers who have quit the rat race to get some dirt under their fingernails. We call it hobby farming, where recreational “farms” are allowed to sell their products at the same farmers’ markets as commercial farms. It’s all about property taxes, not food production. As Forbes magazine suggested to its readers in its 2012 Investment Guide, now is the time to “farm like a billionaire,” because even a small amount of retail sales — as low as $500 a year in New Jersey — allows landowners to harvest more tax breaks than tomatoes.

It sounds like bailout farmers are being gored by their own ox.

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Farmers' Market franchisee

I was talking to a baker at a farmers' market yesterday. My girlfriend bought the loaf of break pictured to the left and I asked about where the recipe came from for the sold-out apple pie bread.

I turned out it came from another baker within the corporation.

As loyal shills of this blog will remember, I do not think there is anything wrong with going to a farmers' market or buying from a local company; I just don't see it as a virtue or a way to make the local economy wealthier.

However, the activists that do may feel bamboozled when they learn that Great Harvest Bread Company packages its food and surrounds itself in the veneer of what appears to be a locally-owned independent company but is actually a national franchise - one that costs $55,000 to $90,000 to join and charges royalties that start at 7 percent.

So much for that silly "keep the money in the community" nonsense.

Now, there is nothing wrong with Great Harvest Bread Co., they have been around a lot longer then the snobby local food movement and the bread I had from them was great. They make a product people clearly enjoy at prices they are willing to pay. This is not a criticism of their business, but a nod to their ingenuity.

It only makes sense that large corporations would tap into the locavore movement and the farmers' market game, such as Sprouts Farmers Market. What's clever here is that Great Harvest Bread Company is slipping seamlessly into the markets instead of trying to organize an entire market on its own.

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Choosing a side

I'm having a hard time trying to understand if foodies are supposed to be cultured cosmopolitans or backwards survivalists.

A few years ago I was seated in the audience waiting for an event to start when I heard the person sitting behind me declare that she and her husband "try to do everything as locally as possible." This included trying to live off locally-made food and limiting her purchases to local merchants whenever possible.

What struck me is how that statement was extremely elitist on the surface, but it bore the structure of something said by a backwater nationalist militia member who sneers at products that aren't made in America.

So which is it food-snob hipsters, do you want to eat ugly tomatoes and gamey meats from the farmers' market, or are you willing to indulge in globalist foods like Nutella, sushi and hummus?
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Wasting food is a virtue

Most of the restaurants my parents took me to as a kid had free refills on soda and I found myself ending up in the same situation time after time.

I would get a soda during the appetizer phase and slowly sip it. I would try to pace myself, but fail, and it would be gone by the time my meal arrived. The waitress would see I'm out when she delivered my plate and bring me another one. After I finished eating and had no appetite left, I'd have two-thirds of a soda left and I'd force myself to finish it.

Why? Because I was told it's wrong to waste food.

People have a religious opposition to wasting food in America. Throughout the history of civilization starvation has been a major problem and there are still people in other parts of the world who go hungry. In those situations, one should see knowingly wasting food as an act of savagery.

But that has nothing to do with choosing to finish a glass of orange soda over allowing the waitress to throw it away. Soda is notoriously unhealthy and I was so stuffed that drinking it was unpleasant. I thought I was doing something noble.

But when one eats or drinks something just to avoid throwing it away, they are treating their body as a garbage can.

Food is plentiful and cheap in America, and the country has an obesity problem. I could stand to lose 20 pounds myself. Ideally, people should stop eating before they are full. That's why it pains me to see adults in a social situation plotting to eat unwanted surplus guacamole to save it from becoming trash. They have decided to become human compost heaps.

Food should never be eaten when one is not hungry, does not desire it, will not benefit nutritionally from it and is not socially obligated to try it, such as food prepared by an insistent host at a party.

Right now I have some cooked rice soaking in a beaten egg and soy sauce in my refrigerator. It's one of several things that I'm not sure I'll be able to eat before it goes bad. However, what I'm not going to do is eat extra meals to avoid the sin of letting food spoil.

The pushback I usually get from people when I try to break them of their food sacredness is that we shouldn't be taking on this much food to begin with and portion control will keep us from having to waste food.
Well, yes, we should. Prevention is usually the best solution for any problem, but what do we do when it's too late and the mashed potatoes are lingering on our plate but we won't be able to take any leftovers to the performance with us?

Throw it out and be gone with it, then smile at yourself for having the integrity to buck tradition. When I waste surplus food I am prioritizing my own health over a cultural obligation to dead plants and cooked meat. In a society that overeats, the ones who reject eating unwanted food show true virtue.
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Buckwheat for dinner? No deal

Why is it whenever someone wants to get people to eat awful-tasting food for political reasons, they always introduce it as delicious?

Local food activist Dan Barber has declared on NPR that the local food movement has failed, but his solutions to save it are Band-Aids on a stab wound.

Barber is saying that local food was supposed to replace industrial agriculture with a massive cottage industry of small-scale productions, which it has failed to do. This is 100 percent true, but I resent his assertion that changing to clumsy local food production would be progress.

He also talks about how the coveted cover crop system of planting things to replenish the soil isn't economical because no one wants to eat buckwheat and barley, so local farmers end up feeding these pricey crops to their animals. Barber concludes that in order for the system to work, humans would have to eat those filler crops as well as the main crops.

This is the precise moment where the wheels fall off the bus. Barber has a fair point that adopting to a local food system would require people make radical sacrifices to their diets, but then he turns around and suggests they actually do so.

Sorry Dan, but it's not going to happen. He must realize this on some level because customers at his restaurant are consistently complaining about the food he now serves them and how it's composition fails to meet their expectations of a meat-based main course.

A caller does chime in at the 16:30 mark and reveal the central flaw in the local food movement - that local food is great for uppity snobs with money to burn, but we need large, efficiency farming techniques to make enough money to feed the world.

Barber's response involves a tall-tale claim that local farms produce more calories in total than modern farming, but most of those calories are in things people don't like to eat. I don't believe that for a second, and once again he wants to play dictator and require people to eat unwanted plants to keep his dream afloat.

The good thing about this interview is that Barber made a strong point - the local food movement can not simply exist as an alternative source for the foods people already like. It is instead a radical, misguided approach that would require its participants make great sacrifices and changes in their diet if they wanted to live its ideals.

Good luck getting people to eat buckwheat, Dan.

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The luxury of not starving

Here's an image that is being spread along social media. There are many like it, and this one is perfectly representational of the genre.

There are so many things I could stay in response, as all of these so-called problems are shallow nonsense, but one stands out above the others.

There is no food crisis in America.

We have an abundance of cheap, healthy food, and that's because of forces like technology, international trade and capitalism. It is not because of agricultural subsidies, drum circles or the natural gifts of Mother Earth. It is because of human innovation and cooperation. Thank globalization, not food activists.

There is no lack of safe, nutritious and affordable food. Some people choose to eat unhealthy alternatives, but that's out of preference and no necessity.

Having to depend on local food is a recipe for mass starvation and poverty, and the people who want to return to those primitive days are coming from a place of ignorance.

We have all the good food we need. There is no food crisis here.
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I, Nutella

That simple spread of hazelnut and cocoa that everyone loves has a cross-continental pedigree, as emphasized in a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Nutella combines vanilla flavoring from France, hazelnuts from Turkey, palm oil from Malaysia, sugar from Brazil and cocoa from Nigeria. The OECD used it as an example in a recent report to demonstrate global supply chains and it's gathered a lot of attention.

Nutella would not be possible without globalization. Like a famous essay said about the pencil, each jar contains the labor of thousands of people across the globe. There's no single location on earth that could ever make it without outside help.

Unlike other foods with a lot of ingredients, such as sour cream and salsa pork rinds, Nutella has a highborn reputation. It's artsy to like Nutella. The spread is borderline pretentious. That's very different from the low-status products that are usually associated with globalization like McDonald's food.

Globalization needs a new symbol that can engage people, and Nutella is a perfect choice. Globalization simply means the extension of human cooperation over international lines, instead of restricting it to the immediate area. Violent mobs and fringe speakers have given the word an unpleasant edge to the general public and not enough people name "globalization" as something they support.

Only a gullible fool would balk at spreading delicious Nutella across their bread. Nutella is the beautiful child of international cooperation, and people need to appreciate and understand that origin along with its captivating taste.
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Sadly, it wasn't true

Remember that Reddit post about sous chefs stealing from someones garden? That thing I said was probably a hoax?

The author admitted it was a hoax on a podcast. Before doing that, had gone on a local TV news station to reiterate the story, adding more artful, unlikely details like finding beard nets and recipe cards left behind. This thing is faker than a socialist utopia.

Rereading my post about it, I'm glad to see that every single line I wrote about it was skeptical. However, I still feel kind of sheepish that I didn't hit home a firm conclusion. In my defense, I didn't grasp that all of the items he accused them of stealing were weeds. I thought there was a garden somewhere in there too.

That being said, the idea of food snobs going out of their way to eat weeds is very real.
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Local Kleptocracy

Are locavores really so entitled that they will steal from local gardens. A recent Reddit post from Portland, Ore. claims they are.

Homeowners: How do you keep local sous chefs from harvesting urban edibles on your property?

I have tried posting signs, yet they still seem to find a way into my yard to harvest everything from nettles and catmint to borage and grape leaves. I even built a six-foot tall fence, but they are still managing to get in. I have called the offending restaurants to ask them to tell their sous chefs to stop trespassing, but so far they seem undeterred. I have also offered to let them onto my property with my supervision, but they mostly seem to come out while I'm at work so everything can be prepped for their dinner service. It was fine when they were just harvesting pineapple weed and mallow from the alley and the parking strip, although it was admittedly a little off-putting. I'm also totally cool with them picking the crab apples because some of the branches are in the public right of way. But yesterday my neighbor called to let me know she had to help a sous chef who got stuck on top of my fence holding a baggie full of chicory leaves. I get that part of living in inner SE is dealing with locavore sous chefs and all the problems that follow them, but it is frustrating and kind of scary knowing that they are constantly combing my yard for garnishes while I'm away.

I'm skeptical about the authenticity of this post. The caller somehow knows which restaurants to call. The repeated name-dropping of herbs seems like a literary device. Most quizzical of all, there are plenty of dishonest people that sell to locavores by lying about the origins of their ingredients, so why wouldn't they simply lie to people instead of taking such strange risks?
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Silent snobs

The pretentiously-named New York City restaurant "Eat" serves all of its meals in total silence. No one, not even the waitstaff or diners, are allowed to speak once they enter.

Of course, it's also got a plan to save the world.

Our philosophy is simple: Local organic food is best for the community, the environment, and your body, and that is what we choose to serve.

The facts say otherwise about local and organic, of course, but let's set that aside for a moment. How could anyone possibly enjoy local, organic food if they can't spend half of the meal praising themselves for sacrificing excessive amounts of money on versions of food that are out of reach to common people? Are we to believe they simply gloat in silence?



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"Unregulated" isn't scary

If you haven't seen it yet, the CBS affiliate in New York City created the most entertainingly alarmist piece on for-pay dinner parties. Here's an excerpt:

Clandestine dinner parties like the one Leitner attended have become more common in New York City. And insiders told Leitner they are completely unregulated. 

When asked at the dinner, “do you ever worry about getting caught?” Michael Patlazhan responded, “I definitely do.” 

Patlazhan is a professional chef who also hosts underground supper clubs. He cooks with blow torches, nitrogen and even a vacuum machine to create unusual meals.

In the broadcast version, I swear every time the reporter says "unregulated" I think we're supposed to shiver in fear.

Art Carden made the obvious point already so I've link to him:

I don't think the people concerned about unregulated dinner parties are going far enough. You know what else is unregulated? The kitchen at my house. Think about what the means for a second. It means that my children--children, mind you--are being fed food that's prepared in unregulated, uninsepected, and possibly less-than-sanitary conditions. The burgeoning field of Helen Lovejoy Political Economy demands that something must be done. For the children, of course.

Of course, there's a much easier solution to how to spin these illegal meals our friends on the left have given us. Simply call them undocumented kitchens.
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Anthony Bourdain on slow food

There's a summary of celebrity chef Antony Bourdain's quip on the logistics of slow food (SOLE food, local food) that's been in my brain ever since I read it in The Locavore's Dilemma. The only way to get it out is to paste it here.

Bourdain is a food hedonist, and has little truck with those who want to load up our eating habits with moralism. Consider the way he wades into the so-called ‘Mother of Slow Food’ and the epitome of Californian organic, locally produced cuisine, Alice Waters. Bourdain notes that the labour-intensive, pastoral vision that Waters promotes means that either lots of the citizens of wealthy countries like America and Italy are going to have to take up farming again - unlikely - or ‘we’ll revert to the traditional method: importing huge numbers of poor brown people from elsewhere - to grow those tasty, crunchy vegetables for more comfortable white masters.

The paragraph is from a review by Rob Lyons of one of Bourdain's books.
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Taking a bite out of food snobs

If you thought the things I've written about self-described foodies was harsh, then you owe it to yourself to read Steven Poole's recent piece in The Guardian, where food snobs are compared to hipsters, drug users, gluttons and members of fringe religions. All of it is compelling.

"Foodie" has now pretty much everywhere replaced "gourmet", perhaps because the latter more strongly evokes privilege and a snobbish claim to uncommon sensory discrimination – even though those qualities are rampant among the "foodies" themselves. The word "foodie", it is true, lays claim to a kind of cloying, infantile cuteness which is in a way appropriate to its subject; but one should not allow them the rhetorical claim of harmless innocence implied. The Official Foodie Handbook spoke of the "foodism" worldview; I propose to call its adherents foodists.

The term "foodist" is actually much older, used from the late 19th century for hucksters selling fad diets (which is quite apt); and as late as 1987 one New York Times writer proposed it semi-seriously as a positive description, to replace the unlovely "gastronaut": "In the tradition of nudist, philanthropist and Buddhist, may I suggest 'foodist', one who is enthusiastic about good eating?" The writer's joking offer of "nudist" as an analogy is telling. I like "foodist" precisely for its taint of an -ism. Like a racist or a sexist, a foodist operates under the prejudices of a governing ideology, viewing the whole world through the grease-smeared lenses of a militant eater.

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Growing sugar cane with astroturf

Our current generation of food "experts" is ill with pseudo-intellectual phobias over things like non-organic crops, internationally-grown produce, genetically-modified crops, BPA, lean beef trimmings and high-fructose corn syrup.

As I wrote last year, high-fructose isn't a healthy product simply because it's sugar. There are no health benefits to replacing it with cane sugar or honey, despite what most people believe.

That myth is perpetuated on some level by hapless rubes, but there's also a sinister element behind the popularity of the misconception. As Timothy P. Carney wrote in the Washington Examiner this week:

Citizens for Health, a "natural health" nonprofit, has joined in the anti-corn-syrup fight. CFH has lobbied the FDA to require clearer labeling and enforce restrictions on fructose content. The group has also launched an anti-corn-syrup PR campaign. 

But, as always, follow the money. The Sugar Association has funded CFH's anti-corn-syrup campaign. Adam Fox, attorney for the Sugar Association, told me Friday that the Sugar Association is not directing CFH's campaign, but it is bankrolling it for "six figures" because of the two groups' "shared opposition" to corn syrup. 

This echoes a similar campaign CFH launched against artificial sweeteners last decade. The Sugar Association also funded that campaign, as Andy Briscoe, CEO of the Sugar Association, testified in a court deposition in 2007.

It's ironic that the rank and file anti-corn syrup food elitists, many of whom are Earthy-crunchy power-to-the-people types, have become pawns in a corporate propaganda campaign.
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Pierre Desrochers on food security

Pierre Desrochers is becoming one of my favorite commentators on this subject. Behind, of course, me.

On NPR's Marketplace he recently stated:

The most preposterous claim of locavores is that their prescription increases food security. Yet, no local food system can ever be completely protected from insects, plant and animal diseases, drought, floods, earthquakes and other natural catastrophes. Fortunately, trade liberalization insures that the surplus of regions with good harvests can be channeled to those with below average ones. In the long run, good and bad harvests cancel each other out. Locavorism, by contrast, puts all of one's agricultural eggs in one regional basket.

As always, be sure to click the link for the deliciously enraged comments from locavores.
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