Food, the market, and traditionalism

Another interesting piece from NR this morning is by Warren Bell, who says he’s conservative on everything but food:

I am against the modern food industry. I think industrialized food, especially beef, is a menace to our way of life. I stand athwart the checkout line, shouting “Don’t eat that crap!” The weird thing is, this is a fairly new belief. When I was 21 and voting Crazy Insaneson for President, my favorite food was a snack of my own brilliant design called Fri-Nuts — take a bag of Fritos and a jar of Planter’s, mix, enjoy. My left-ward progress regarding food began with a 2002 New York Times Magazine article by Michael Pollan called “This Steer’s Life.” After that, it was Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and then some other books and articles, all leading me to the same conclusion — food as big business is a disaster.

[…]

The profit motive of the food industry drives them to do two things: They need to make food cheaper, and they need to make it taste better. This couplet of motives is not in itself bad, but one of the outcomes is the feedlot system of raising cattle. If you want details, read the sources I’ve cited, but the goal of the cattle farmer is to feed a cow as much corn as possible as fast as possible and then slaughter the cow just before eating all that corn kills it. The corn diet causes diseases in the cow, so bring on the antibiotics. The corn also makes the meat more fatty, what we beef-lovers call marbled, and this is why the phrase “corn-fed beef” is still used to mean a top-quality steak. It really means “cow that was poisoned” and double up on that Lipitor.

But maybe such a stance isn’t so “liberal” after all:

[F]ood should be natural. I’m not saying that all natural things are good, and unnatural is bad — for instance, Pamela Anderson is fine by me. But food is a thing found in nature, and the food industry has turned it into Food, a scientifically derived substance found in your supermarket. Cookies are made from flour, sugar, and butter (and a few other mystery things — what is baking powder?). So why do the major brands have those other 42 ingredients? Well, one makes the cookies stay crispy even after a month on the shelf. Another makes them that awesome rich color. Another dozen or so are the hydrogenated oils that create truly unbeatable taste — that make cookies taste better than cookies! This witchcraft is the inevitable result of the “Better Living Through Science” ethic of the post-WWII generation, and what has it caused? Generation upon generation of Americans conditioned to eat only the zestiest, new and improved, nacho cheez crème-filled food-like product substances. Real food is dull in comparison.

Hey, wait a second. Follow me here. I am against the modern food industry. I prefer more natural foods, cows the way they used to be raised, cookies the way they used to be baked, real food without science’s “progress.” When it comes to food, I am a…traditionalist.

Amen, brother!

Start thinking like this, though, and you may end up questioning several tenets of the modern conservative creed. Unhampered corporate capitalism is hostile to traditions in areas besides food. Watched TV lately? And how about the replacement of small tight-knit communities by sprawl and big box stores? Hard to see anything particularly traditional about that.

As Marx saw, capitalism is actually one of the most revolutionary forces in history, not a conservative one. Which is why the alliance between social conservatism and libertarian economics has often been an uneasy one.

In fact, the article on “traditionalist conservatism” from the New Pantagruel I mentioned yesterday offers a more genuinely traditionalist take on economics. The author, Mark C. Henrie, writes that traditionalists (as opposed to libertarians) are concerned to “box in” the market with strong social and cultural institutions:

To box in the market would mean, first of all, to recognize that there are some things which should not be bought or sold because to do so would directly violate human dignity or the common good. Thus, drugs, pornography, and prostitution are appropriately controlled. So too, perhaps, various biotechnologies. In a more speculative mode, religious traditionalists even raise questions about nursing homes and day care: ought care to be placed “on the market?” To embed market logic within a strong social setting also means to recognize man as something more than a consumer. Thus, no one would disagree that Wal*Mart and free trade spell lower prices and often greater choice for Americans as consumers. But, to take the case of Wal*Mart, is there not something lost, some kind of social capital, when the proprietors of a small town’s chamber of commerce are “converted” into corporate employees — even if, as managers, they may earn a higher wage?

Henrie mentions Swiss economist Wilhelm Roepke, an economist in the Austrian tradition who nevertheless broke with the more extreme laissez-faire views of thinkers like von Mises. Roepke was a free marketeer, but he advocated what he called a “humane economy” – a decentralized, human-sized economics that had some affinities with distributism or the views of E.F. “Small is Beautiful” Schumacher.

More crucially, Roepke insisted that the rules governing the free market should be hedged in by strong social institutions; a strong framework of law and morality is necessary both for the effective functioning of the market and to ensure that the values of the market don’t displace higher human values (which, for Roepke, a Lutheran, were largely to be identified with those of Christendom).

A traditionalist, therefore, will not necessarily be averse to regulation of the market, but it will be in service to traditionalist values, rather than the values sometimes championed by left-wing critics of the market. The food industry is just one manifestation in which corporate capitalism as it currently exists will tend to undermine the values traditionalists cherish.