And why should a nation produce its own food when others can produce it more cheaply? A dozen reasons leap to mind, but most of them the Steven Blanks of the world–and they are legion–are quick to dismiss as sentimental. I’m thinking of the sense of security that comes from knowing that your community, or country, can feed itself; the beauty of an agricultural landscape; the outlook and kinds of local knowledge that farmers bring to a community; the satisfaction of buying food from a farmer you know rather than the supermarket; the locally inflected flavor of a raw-milk cheese or honey. All those things–all those pastoral values–globalization proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth.

Though you do begin to wonder who is truly the realist in this debate, and who the romantic. We live, as [Wendell] Berry has written (in an essay called “The Total Economy”), in an era of “sentimental economics,” since the promise of global capitalism, much like the promise of communism before it, ultimately demands an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain things we value here and now we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future time. As Lenin put it, in a sentiment the WTO endorses in its rulings every day, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. — Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, p. 256

I’ve been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma back-to-back with Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, and hope to have some more to say about them soon.