The Food Police (2 page)

These are but a few examples of the growing intrusions by the food police. Taken in isolation, any one of the regulations might not seem so bad and may even appear helpful. Therein lies the danger. You won’t yet find a single omnibus piece of legislation restricting your food freedoms, but the planks in the road are slowly being replaced without the travelers even realizing construction is under way. And guess who is left to pay the toll at road’s end? With a ban on trans fats here, a fat tax there, here a local foods subsidy, there a pesticide ban, everywhere an organic food—before you know it, Old McDonald has a new farm.

Michelle Obama’s White House garden was a symbolic nod granted to the growing reality of a movement that seeks more control over what we eat. Even New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg supports the encroaching government hand in food. After congratulating himself on helping New York City ban trans fats, successfully pressuring food companies to reduce salt, and selectively licensing “green” produce vendors, Bloomberg told the UN General Assembly that “Governments at all levels must make healthy solutions the default social option. That is ultimately government’s highest duty.”
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Never mind national defense or the government’s duty to life and liberty or leaving unenumerated powers to the states: healthy food is now apparently the be-all and end-all of good government.

These are many of the same people who scream, “It’s a woman’s body,” any time the subject of abortion comes up. According to them, a woman has the right to do what she wants with her body. That is, unless she wants to eat something deemed morally defunct. You know, something as reprehensible as a Nestlé Toll House cookie or a Big Mac.

Susan Dentzer, former PBS news correspondent and current editor in chief of
Health Affairs
, wants to change our eating habits by creating a “broadbased set of interventions comparable in scope to the four-decade assault on smoking.”
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Others are “turning to multilevel interventions, which … target … the individual, the social network, the community, and policy.”
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What exactly are these interventions? Consider the proposal mentioned in
Harvard Magazine
: “There was once a very successful U.S. government program aimed at changing eating habits … It happened during World War II, and it was called ‘food rationing.’ They made it a patriotic thing to change the way you ate. The government hired the best people on Madison Avenue to come to Washington and work for the War Department. It worked splendidly.”
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Food rationing! Really? I suspect that many of the millions of people who actually lived through food rationing during World War II would recall the policy as being anything but splendid. But apparently if the food police are to have their way, we must be prepared to stand in line and register for a coupon booklet to buy sugar, bread, and flour. It’s as if we have already forgotten the dreaded food lines of the USSR.

W
hile these obsessions about food have captivated a modern generation of consumers far removed from the farm, I must admit to being befuddled. The sirens of paranoia and pronouncements of cataclysmic catastrophes ring hollow. Although many of the food police are truly concerned about our diets and health, and not all are avowed ideologues, the real trouble comes when we take a closer look at the consequences of the proposed solutions offered by those with a romanticized vision of agriculture. If the food elite are disenchanted with the way food is now produced, many in the agricultural community are mystified that city-dwelling journalists presume to know so much about how to run a farm. It might be fun to play farmer for a few days, but a lifetime of such work is not only difficult for most to imagine, but something that few truly desire. The truth is that for the past one hundred years, people have been leaving the countryside in droves seeking a better life in town. I know, because I’m one of them.

I know the people who run the farms and factories that are demonized by the food police. You’ve been shown but one small part of the picture. Bestselling authors and journalists tell the stories of the folks selling a few chickens at the local farmers’ market, but where are the people who actually feed America?

My love of food began as a child, when I entered my mother’s beef Stroganoff recipe in a local 4-H cooking competition. Although the judges weren’t particularly impressed with my efforts, I became fascinated with the way disparate food ingredients could be combined to produce an entirely new and wonderful taste. Perhaps it was my parents’ insistence that we children eat at least three bites of everything put on our
plates that led me to see food as a medium of experimentation and learning. And learn I did. In high school, I became one of the best dairy food judges in the state of Texas. (Yes, there is such a thing as dairy food judging, and yes, Future Farmers of America [FFA] students all over America still do it today.) As strange as it may seem, being able to discriminate among thirty different milks and cheeses was apparently sufficient qualification for receiving a scholarship to study food technology in college. Not only did I develop a palate, I learned where food comes from.

There weren’t many options for out-of-work teenagers in rural West Texas, so every summer from 1987 to 1994, I donned boots and a baseball cap to rid the earth of the weeds that were the bane of the local farmers’ existence. Those years spent working cotton and soybean fields and waking up mornings to feed sheep and hogs taught me an important lesson: farming is not the romanticized profession it is often made out to be. It is a lot of hot, sweaty, backbreaking work. Real pigs that live on farms aren’t anything like Wilbur or Babe; they bite, they poop, they break fences, they stink, and they can’t go a day without food or water, no matter what the outside temperature is or what vacation plans have been made.

Food journalists like to talk about being one with the land and of “nature’s logic,”
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but make no mistake about it, agriculture, by its very definition, is a struggle against nature. After all, there’s nothing more natural than death. Nature isn’t our friend. It’s trying to outcompete us.

Those summers working in the fields were all the motivation I needed to finish college. If farming wasn’t for me, I thought my place in life might be one step up the food chain.
I decided to study food science and technology at college. There I learned more valuable lessons. Eating is inherently risky, and it is the development of food technologies (some very old and some very new) that make eating safe. But perhaps the best lessons I learned in college were during the summers working in a food processing plant near Dallas.

There I discovered that the people working in agribusinesses—both the owners in the corner offices and the factory-line workers screwing caps onto salsa jars—were regular people just like you and me. Neither was exploiting or being exploited, despite what I’d been taught in my history classes or read in books from ivory tower academics (of which, ironically, I am now one). Even though it was hard work, almost everyone I encountered in that processing plant was committed to putting out high-quality, safe food, probably because they knew that if they didn’t, their competitors would. At my first day on the job, I received a tongue-lashing when I unwittingly cleaned the inside of a stainless-steel mixing tank with a brush designated for floor sweeping. The corrective came not from a manager but from a minimum-wage-earning high school dropout, who simply said, “How’d you like to stick your mouth on the ground? ’Cause that’s what you’re doing.” After all, the food that came out of that tank was the same food he fed his own family.

My mistakes didn’t end there. Once, while working a late-night shift, I was responsible for measuring the thousands of pounds of ingredients to make a fettuccini sauce for a major restaurant chain. The next day, much to my horror, I learned that I had included twice the amount of butter required for the sauce. (Despite three semesters of engineering calculus, I
had mistaken kilograms for pounds!) Having lost the company thousands of dollars, I could easily have been fired, but I wasn’t. This experience, and others like it, helped me realize that it was the interaction between food
and people
that was most interesting, and there was no better way to look into the matter than through the lens of economics. My passion became learning why people ate the things they did and figuring out how people dealt with the difficult trade-offs between health, safety, and taste when their paychecks wouldn’t let them have it all. I became a food economist.

When people find out I’m an economist, they usually ask me what will happen to stock prices or interest rates. I haven’t the faintest idea what to tell them, and truth be told, most economists don’t know either. Deep down, economics isn’t really about financial markets. It is the study of how we make decisions when our wants are bigger than our wallets. Food economists spend their time thinking about how to eat more and better with less; providing information about food supply-and-demand conditions to farmers, agribusinesses, nonprofits, consumers, and government agencies; and projecting the impacts of private and government decisions.

I have spent the last fifteen years studying the economics of food—trying to figure out things such as how much consumers are willing to pay for better-tasting meat and why they seek to avoid controversial food technologies. I’ve written hundreds of academic papers on food economics, consulted nonprofits, agribusinesses, and governments, served on the editorial councils of a half dozen of the top academic journals in agricultural and environmental economics, and sat on executive boards of the three largest U.S. agricultural economics
associations. I tried to approach the study of food regulation from an objective standpoint by comparing the costs and benefits of the policies in question—seeing which actions and policies made the best use of our scarce resources given all our competing desires. I labored under the assumption that this was the key issue in determining the merits of a regulation. I was naive.

Today, food policies are increasingly motivated by ideology rather than projected economic consequences. The merits of a policy are primarily judged not by whether they benefit all the people affected but by whether they advance the fashionable agenda of a new food elite. It was once the case that those proposing a new food policy had to offer serious analysis illustrating its impacts, but now the simple mention of a food problem—the rise in obesity or poor nutritional intake among the poor—is apparently sufficient justification for a policy intervention regardless of any evidence that it might work. All that is required is to demonstrate sufficient empathy for those in need. Jonah Goldberg recognized that modern liberalism “is an ideology of good intentions” wrapped up in a “cult of action.”
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And so it is with the food police.