Horrors Organic Has Been Kidnapped By Wal Mart - Road to the Middle Class

OVER THE LAST century many upper-class Americans have agitated for the classification of certain areas of the nation as wilderness, that is, areas that should remain unaffected by humans.

Starting about half a century ago many upper-class Americans have agitated for the replacement of conventional farming techniques by “organic” techniques, that is, as defined by Wikipedia, farming that “excludes the use of synthetic inputs, such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and genetically modified organisms.”

But now Wal-Mart is going to start selling organic food, at about 10 percent more than conventional food, and you can imagine that the folks at the New York Times Magazine aren’t happy. Writes Michael Pollan, a journalism professor,

Assuming that it's possible at all, how exactly would Wal-Mart get the price of organic food down to a level just 10 percent higher than that of its everyday food? To do so would virtually guarantee that Wal-Mart's version of cheap organic food is not sustainable, at least not in any meaningful sense of that word.

Well, that is the environmentalists’ story, and they are sticking to it.

The trouble is that the organic narrative is false, just as the wilderness narrative is false.

Our idea of wilderness is based upon the way we imagine the United States looked when the white man first arrived in the seventeenth century. But the land in those days had been painstakingly modified by native Americans for their own benefit. The inhabitants of what we now call New York State used to burn the underbrush regularly to make the environment more hospitable for the deer that they hunted for food. And the Plains Indians modified the Great Plains to make it more hospitable for buffalo.

So it is with agriculture. Humans have cut down vast forests over the last few thousand years to clear their fields; they have bred—that is to say genetically modified—wild animals into domestic slaves. And they used whatever came to hand when it came to controlling weeds. Was that sustainable?

It is certainly a sad thing that intensive farming techniques confine animals in pens and factories and reduce wild grasses to monoculture wheat fields. But the original sin was committed centuries ago when the first man tamed the first wild beast and the first farmer began to cultivate rather than just harvest the wild grasses in the hills of Mesopotamia.

It is totally phoney-baloney to drive a stake in the ground circa 1850 and define every change in farming practice since then an attack on sustainability.

The truth is that there is no such thing as sustainability. Nature fluctuates in all time scales.

And one result of intensive farming practices is that farmland in the United States is being returned to forest.

Still, when Wal-Mart is selling organic food it is surely time for journalism professors and fashionable New York Times reader to move on to something else.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close 0