The Food Police (3 page)

A few years back I was asked to join a small group of faculty members in a discussion with a Burger King executive who had been invited to give a lecture on campus. I was eager to hear about the company’s challenges and business strategies, but one of my then-colleagues, a professor from the nutrition department, apparently saw fast-food restaurants as one of the greatest evils ever conceived. She lectured the executive on the sodium and fat content in the Whopper and, with all
the righteous indignation she could muster, asked how he felt about being responsible for the large number of heart attacks that occurred each year in America.

The executive’s response was as revealing as the professor’s diatribe. He rattled off the sales statistics for Burger King’s salads and other healthy offerings; those items had been an abysmal failure. Burger King’s primary customers, eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old males, apparently don’t order salads, and the executive stressed that if Burger King wanted to remain in existence and continue to write paychecks for its more than thirty-five thousand employees, it had no choice but to offer what its customers were willing to buy. The nutrition professor was undeterred by the reality of what people actually wanted in the real world. She and others like her have an agenda that must be pursued regardless of whether the intended beneficiaries actually want it.

I finally realized the extent of the absurdity last year, when I was asked to speak to the teachers of my university’s freshman English composition courses. I walked across campus prepared to give a five-minute spiel on writing strategies. Expecting questions on how I prepare students for the rigors of academic publishing, I was amused when a graduate student shot up her hand and asked what I thought about the documentary
Food, Inc
.

For the next half hour, I engaged in a lively discussion with about seventy-five graduate students and professors of English. I wasn’t surprised that they had questions about food and agriculture, and I was happy to answer them. What surprised me was the absolute moral certitude permeating the air. Many in the room had no doubt they were being poisoned
and fattened by an out-of-control food system. What facts did these folks have to bolster their case? Nothing more than what was presented in
Food, Inc.
, along with a few innuendos picked up in the Sunday paper. I would never have dared question them on the finer points of Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky. Yet they were certain that my explanations for why food is produced the way it is were wrong.

More shocking still was the fact that this debate took place not in Berkeley, California, or Cambridge, Massachusetts—there I might have expected some unusual views about agriculture, if for no other reason than that these locations are so far away from where most of our food is made. But this was Stillwater, Oklahoma. All these people had to do to see large-scale production agriculture was look out the window. Most of them probably lived within a mile of a real-life, flesh-and-blood farmer. They had no doubt stood next to a Monsanto chemical salesman in the checkout line at the grocery store. Yet they had come to believe that farmers were destroying their land and that agribusinesses were manipulating farmers and polluting the food supply. Many of my colleagues had swallowed a story whole from the food elite when they could have gotten closer to the truth simply by talking to their neighbors.

Unlike the food police, I do not have an agenda to change what you eat. Nor am I a defender of the status quo. One of the things I most like about being an economist is that we are generally agnostic about people’s preferences: Animal-loving vegans and BBQ-licking carnivores are treated all the same. Human nature is recognized for what it is. Rather than chastising people for who they are, a more fruitful path forward is
to look at the outcomes from our interactions with others and see what results are produced by our different rules, norms, markets, and policies. The famed Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises perhaps said it best: “Economics … abstains from any judgment of value. It is not its task to tell people what ends they should aim at … Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends.”
¹⁷

The food police wish people were different and seek to change our preferences and behavior through coercion and propaganda if necessary. Of course, reasonable people can change their minds about the desirability of modern food production, but ideally these decisions would be made with accurate knowledge of the world surrounding them. I wrote this book because I can no longer sit back while the truth about food, and economics, is so badly distorted.

Muckraking journalists are right to point out the errors and limitations in our modern food system, but we shouldn’t let that blind us to all that is good about how we eat. We have forgotten what we do well. As a result, we are on the verge of accepting cures that are far worse than the disease. It is fashionable to belabor all that is wrong with food and then pitch grand schemes that promise to save us all. I intend to do just the opposite. I seek to remind readers that we live in the greatest food-producing and -consuming nation in the history of the world, and to provide cautionary tales of the impotency, and sometimes outright lunacy, of the policies sought by the food police.

Lest one believes my claims are merely rhetorical embellishments,
let’s consider some facts about the state of food in America.