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Food Politics: The Reactionary Diet
I think that many of the trends in food politics are profoundly Conservative — reactionary, even. This is a terrific opportunity for Republicans to gain new adherents as many groups that have not been Republican constituencies adopt Conservative approaches to eating. Their reaction is a result of the failure of the federal, progressive attempt to manage our nation’s food production.
I ended my post “The Obesity Epidemic And Federal Dietary Guidelines” with this quote, and my observation:
Mainstream America has done to itself what it did to native American and other indigenous cultures worldwide, with the same result: Obesity through malnutrition. Whoops.
Well, American Indians are figuring this out too:
Bit by bit, the farm at Little Earth is growing.
So, too, is a movement among Native Americans across the nation to improve their health by rediscovering ancestral foods and connections to lands once lost…
“It’s growing in the last 10 years within the Native communities in the United States,” said Susen Fagrelius, coordinator of Little Earth’s community health initiatives. As more people realize they can grow a significant amount of vegetables on a small parcel of land, they discover that “they have the ability to take back their food system.”…
Across the country, projects like the Little Earth Urban Farm are taking aim at the staggering obesity and diabetes rates that plague American Indian communities. Indian adults are twice as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes as the general population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….
When Indians were forced onto reservations, government commodities replaced the unprocessed, nutrient-rich foods they were used to eating, said Mihesuah, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma who runs the American Indian Health and Diet Project at the University of Kansas.
Type 2 diabetes didn’t start showing up until after the Civil War,” she said. “Up until that time there weren’t any pictures of (Indian) people being fat.””
It’s a revolution.
The Republican Party can endorse this, and move to roll back a good part of the Progressive Administrative State, and gain the good will of millions of people. Many of them on the Left, and long-time progressive constituencies. This is the sort of opportunity that Lyndon Johnson faced with the civil rights movement. He embraced it, claimed it from the Republican party, and set his party to a position of dominance that lasts to this day.
This is a huge opportunity. And one that’s entirely consistent with conservative principles of Liberty and small government.
Published in General
As if the Republican Party would ever endorse ending the farm subsidies which contribute to the proliferation of processed and commodity foodstuffs.
You won’t win over “food freedom” activists by paying lip-service to backyard gardens, urban chicken coops, and raw milk. They’ll always be able to point out how much money Republican candidates get from folk like ADM and Cargill.
With all due respect, let’s leave this one for the medical community and nutritionists. The government has a few other things on its ‘plate,’ don’t you think?
LOL. Nobody can outdo the Republican Party when it comes to missing opportunities.
“You won’t win over “food freedom” activists by paying lip-service…”
But you can ease regulation and cut subsidies. These are Republican goals (in principle, anyway), and can peel off constituencies.
Joel Salatin is a Christian Libertarian, and a hero to a lot of Liberal Democrats for his rants against Government regulation. Untie that knot…
The Government *caused* this…
The medical community and the nutritionists parrot the unscientific food recommendations promulgated by the Government.
They will not fix it, although they’re slowing coming around.
a) I won’t hold by breath about any of ’em cutting subsidies, promises to the contrary notwithstanding.
b) I do not believe that “food freedom” activists would be very pleased about any easing of regulation that would apply just as equally to corporate producers as it would to family farmers.
But I’m an incurable cynic.
I work weekends at a local Farmer’s Market. It is a stone-cold fact that the vendors– who represent the farmer’s themselves and their part-time help– are absolutely more conservative in temperament than the customers.
But this conservative temperament is more of a populist temperament. Corporate subsidies and regulatory micromanagement are anathema. Building community with what used to be middle-American values is a given. Participating in a local food culture, market, and community is part of the whole gig; and if it that gig is promoted by zoning regulations and state-sponsored land trusts, then that’s state regulation that works for them.
But what parts of the GOP platform bother them? International free trade, union-busting, off-shoring, litigiousness, Wall Street bailouts…these things are not popular. And, generally, they may agree with you about lots of social stuff, but consider it bad form to make a big stink about it.
Yes, I know it just so happens my assessment happens to recommend my own positions on various hobby-horses. Whaddayagonnado?
Yes, I’ve noticed this, too. I remember being asked by a big “locavore” I knew in college to sign a petition to allow small vegetable growers to compete on an even footing with the big corn and soybean growers. “So, does this petition advocate that the subsidies to the big growers get cut?” “No, it advocates that the little growers get the same kind of subsidies.”
Doctors have to deal with an enormous amount of FDA regulations, but the good ones practice faithfully according to their skill sets and experience. I have a couple of doctors who complain constantly about govt intervention, but practice the way they want to despite ever increasing malpractice insurance premiums.
Overwhelmingly, these doctors are over 60, male, and confident in their ability. My radiologist is 80 years old, still teaches a class at U-F medical school and bucks the system every time he advises his patient why she or he does not need exploratory surgery. He is always right.
And I’m grateful for good doctors, especially if I ever need surgery. However, in the vast majority of my health-related decisions, I’ve been so disillusioned by mainstream medicine that perhaps you’ll forgive me if I go rogue. I don’t advocate quackery, but I do advocate consumers informing themselves, and yes, questioning conventional wisdom when it comes to nutrition and medicine.
As I mentioned on another thread, all the “hippies” I know in real life are conservatives. I’m always amused by the attempt to paint organic food or herbal medicine, say, as dumb liberal projects. They aren’t.
Also, subsidies make me mad. I don’t understand why that particular Big Government Intrusion gets so much conservative support.
You’ve surely noticed that there have been Republican efforts in this direction, from Bush’s veto of a farm bill for excessive subsidies to the various efforts in 2013. I see no reason to believe that efforts that come close to succeeding with a less conservative Congress should not succeed when we have a more conservative Congress and a conservative President.
Organic food, free range chicken, farmer’s markets, etc. are luxuries that we can afford because America is extremely rich. The notion that US government Ag policies subsidise food prices making them cheaper to consumers is exactly backwards. The vast majority of US agricultural policies are subsides to farmers not consumer and in almost every case cause food prices to be higher than they would otherwise would be. My grandfather got paid for many years to NOT grow wheat. Tell me how reducing the supply of a commodity reduces its price? The two areas of US food production that are the most lightly regulated are vegetables and meat and poultry production – exactly those area most common at farmers markets.
Wait, what? How many pictures do we have, exactly, of Indians before the Civil War? If memory serves, photography was invented sometime in the 1830’s. That doesn’t leave much time for extensive documentation of a population before her cutoff point. Assuming a small number of Indians being photographed, it’s entirely possible that no one took photographs of fat people because they aren’t as nice to look at.
Secondly, finding very few obese people in a population might indicate that they’re getting not enough food, instead of just the right food.
Fair points, Hank, but there’s a great deal of evidence on this subject. We don’t have to just rely on however many photos there are.
This, for starters: “Effects of traditional and western environments on prevalence of type 2 diabetes in Pima Indians in Mexico and the U.S.”
Height and skeletal conditions are excellent indicators of nutritional status, and can be used to distinguish between well- and under-nourished populations:
“The Tallest in the World: Native Americans of the Great Plains in the Nineteenth Century“