The Food Police (8 page)

So, despite the lines at the soup kitchens during the Depression, the planners of the era deemed it morally acceptable to destroy food in an attempt to ratchet up farm prices. Fortunately the government no longer destroys commodities to control supply, but many of the price and income supports that arose as part of the New Deal remain, in convoluted forms, today. Ironically, today’s food progressives abhor farm programs and blame them for everything from obesity and diabetes to the massive growth in farm size and rural outmigration.

One would think the take-away lesson for progressives is that the results of government planning and control rarely match the good that was intended. Yet progressives apparently believe that the problem is one not of too much government control but of too little. In his pitch to keep Republicans from regaining office, Obama made this analogy for the recent economic downturn: Why would you give the keys back to a guy who has just driven his car into a ditch? The first generation of food police banned alcohol, destroyed crops, dismantled agribusinesses, sued farmers for making their own planting decisions, enacted obstinate farm subsidies, and issued wartime
food ration booklets. Do we really want to hand them back the keys?

Like the first Progressives, the 1960s generation was poised for a revolt against food industrialization. Those seeking peace and love also needed a new diet to fit their worldview. Generations removed from production agriculture, the hippies rebelled against the prevailing system and went back to the farm to grow and eat food that wasn’t being manipulated by the Man. Communes, food co-ops, and organics came to symbolize hippies’ dropping out of society and expressing their distrust in the prevailing economic order.

This was a generation raised in the atomic age. They were primed for fear, and that’s what they got. Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
made them fearful of pesticides and environmental degradation, Ruth Harrison’s
Animal Machines
sparked paranoia about the treatment of farm animals, and Paul Ehrlich’s
The Population Bomb
raised alarm about overpopulation and the mass starvation of humans.

The movement rejected technology as a potential solution to the problems; after all, it was technology that had created the nuclear weapons underpinning the fears they faced. Moreover, the hippies were rejecting a capitalist system that benefited the creators and owners of new technologies. At least with respect to food and agriculture, the hippies were becoming Luddites, and they were anticapitalist by creed.

They rediscovered organic food, which has its roots in the natural and organic food movements in Germany. In
the 1920s, after German scientists discovered a process to create synthetic nitrogen and thereby drastically improve crop yields at a much lower cost, a German philosopher and mystic, Rudolf Steiner, became appalled at this “unnatural” development and reacted by encouraging “biodynamic,” or organic, food production. The mystic and “natural” aura surrounding the process later engendered the hippies’ embrace of organic food.
²⁰

Although the hippies were a subculture, they had significant influence on American culture writ large. Not only did they influence a generation of teenagers to wear bell bottoms and listen to the Grateful Dead, but they affected the way Americans thought about food. A previous generation that had operated under the implicit assumption that newer food technologies were better—TV dinners, Tang, canned biscuits—now began questioning that wisdom. Although tie-dyed T-shirts soon went out of fashion, it took time for the fashion of “natural” and organic foods to take hold. Now organic has gone mainstream.

In fact, organic has gone too mainstream for the elite wing of the modern food progressives. Whatever we were told about the benefits of organic, it seems that it wasn’t actually about the food after all. In his bestselling book
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, Michael Pollan subtly makes this case by “exposing” the size of the modern organic farms. Of course, the problem with organic labeling standards, now defined by the USDA and FDA, is that they have nothing to do with social justice, small farms, or local production. The hippies promoted organic only to find now that they don’t like what they created. Just like all religions entering a modern world, organic-ism is
undergoing its own reformation. Disciples are now converting to the locavore-ist, vegetarian, terra-ist, or slow-food-ist denominations.

The modern food progressives are no longer disgruntled teenagers. They are now influential journalists, academics, regulators, and politicians. Their advocacy has led to a garden on the White House lawn, a new mandate for the FDA, Michelle Obama’s Childhood Nutrition Act, and a host of new proposals to regulate food and health. Unlike with the Progressives of the early 1900s, however, the scientific and technological optimism is gone. Today’s progressives want a revolt in food, a retrograde revolution seeking to return food and agriculture to some romanticized past. And to accomplish their objective, they have spread anxiety and fear about our modern food system and created a caricature that cannot withstand scrutiny.

How did we reach such a state of affairs? The American food system was once considered the envy of the world—we produced more, innovated more, and ate better and more cheaply than the citizens of almost every other country in the world. And by and large, we still do, no matter what romanticism is expressed by progressives about European food. It is common to hear American travelers in Europe remark, “We don’t have anything like this in the States,” but as the European politician Daniel Hannan retorted, “Yes you do: They’re called restaurants, for heaven’s sake.”
²¹

Before we accept the premise that our food system is in need of revolution, it is prudent to look back, see where we’ve been, and recognize how far we’ve come. In the midst of the industrial revolution, self-described socialists wished to put
an end to capitalist-driven industrialization by overthrowing the bourgeoisie. But they, like the food police today, failed to appreciate the incredibly positive change brought about by technological development and the capitalistic system. In her book
Grand Pursuit
, Sylvia Nasar beautifully articulates what escaped their notice:

Over the past two centuries, we have witnessed what can only be described as a miraculous transformation in the safety, quality, and quantity of the food we eat. Yet, at least in the realm of agriculture, it seems the food police would tie our hands, wrest the controls from the engine of growth, give the gods back their fire, and let nature run its course. With history as our guide, let us not yield to the demands of the food police but anxiously await what more the technological innovators have to offer.

ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW WHAT TO EAT?

We make about two hundred food-related decisions each day.
¹
With so much practice, isn’t it obvious that we are capable of knowing what to eat? Not so, according to the food police.

When it comes to the healthfulness of our dietary choices, we are apparently unable to think clearly. Our wants and desires must be transformed. When answering a question about what the government is doing to reduce food waste and make nutritious foods more appealing, Tom Vilsack, Obama’s secretary of agriculture, told a crowd, “It’s going to take time for people’s taste to adjust … So, we have to make sure that what we do is create the appropriate transition.”
²
I wasn’t aware that my taste buds needed a transition.

In a recent speech promoting her Let’s Move! anti-childhood-obesity campaign, Michelle Obama said, “It’s not about telling people what to do.”
³
That’s normally what people
say right before they try to guilt you into doing what they want you to do. It does make one wonder what the First Lady’s campaign is all about if she isn’t trying to tell us to do
something
.

It is not just that the food police want us to make different food choices—advertisers, after all, routinely try to accomplish this feat—it’s that our choices are deemed incorrect or morally defunct and must be changed even if it means using the government’s regulatory power to do so. Whereas we can choose to ignore the advice of preachers or advertisers, the same cannot be said of regulators.

To see how the food police are gaining the helm of power, we have to turn to the halls of academia and to the seemingly obscure work of a group of psychologists seeking to rewrite the rules of economics with a field of study called behavioral economics.
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Why worry about some academic squabbling? Because behavioral economics has provided the philosophical basis and the real-world traction for supplanting our own preferences and beliefs, as revealed in our individual choices, with those of the food elite. If you want to know why food paternalism will be around a long time after the Obama administration is gone, you have to understand that the elite have created a pseudoscientific theory for why their helping hand is needed.

The influence of behavioral economics should not be underestimated. It has reached such influence in the food policymaking arena that the USDA held a conference in 2010 entitled Incorporating Behavioral Economics into Federal Food and Nutrition Policy and has published reports with titles such as “Could Behavioral Economics Help Improve Diet Quality for Nutrition Assistance Program Participants?”
⁵
Even economists who tend to be sympathetic to consumer sovereignty have begun to argue with points such as “behavioral economics … may expand the scope of paternalistic regulation.”
⁶
With the popularity of bestselling books such as
Predictably Irrational
and
Nudge
, behavioral economics has gone mainstream. The ideas have permeated the highest levels of regulatory decision making at the USDA and the FDA, and one of the authors of
Nudge
was recently appointed as President Obama’s regulatory czar. Make no mistake about it, behavioral economics is the engine behind the new food paternalism.

My critique of the specific food policies proffered by the food police will come later in the book. In this chapter, I take on a powerful emerging motivation underlying the call for new food policies. It is the idea that you are unable to make wise choices for yourself. If you cannot choose wisely, then the food police have all the motivation they need to decide for you. The paternalistic food police will cite scientific studies to tell you why we need Uncle Sam’s helping hand. We’ll see why those same studies imply no such thing.

Behavioral economics shows that people are … well, human. Behavioral economics suggests that we are irrational and biased; that, on some level, we are incapable of making coherent choices that serve our best interest. If we cannot act in our own best interest, then the food police believe they can step in and make our lives better.

So, what is the evidence that people cannot choose wisely for themselves? Some of the most interesting examples can be
found in Brian Wansink’s fascinating book
Mindless Eating
. Wansink shows that our eating decisions are influenced by subtle cues that seemingly defy logic. We eat more jelly beans the more colorful the bowl; we eat more food and stay at the restaurant longer when we think we are drinking wine from California rather than North Dakota, even though both wines are the same; and we often consume more calories when eating from packages with low-fat labels. If asked the question “When do you decide to stop eating?,” most of us will give answers such as “When I’m full.” Wansink’s research shows that we’re full of it.

In one ingenious experiment, Wansink asked a group of college students to join him for a free lunch. Half the participants were seated in front of a normal soup bowl, and the other half were seated in front of a soup bowl that (unbeknownst to them) was being continually refilled by a tube connected to a large vat underneath the table.

If we stop eating when we’re full, one would expect both groups of students to have eaten roughly the same amount of soup. But Wansink found that those eating out of the bottomless bowl ate 73 percent more soup than those eating from the regular bowl. Surprisingly, the students eating from the bottomless soup bowl thought they had eaten about the same number of calories (and rated themselves as being just about as full) as the students eating from the regular bowl—despite the fact that they had eaten 113 more calories on average! Apparently we stop eating when prompted by some external cues (such as when our bowl is empty or when our plate is clean) rather than entirely internal cues (such as when we feel full).