The US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance has decided to shift tactics from bunker mode to PR blitz, probably because they know Bittman and others are shifting the discourse, much as other front groups might try to intervene. The resulting Food Dialogues are trying to harness social media and to fight back against Meatless Mondays and other gradualistflexitarian programs. (If ever I’ve seen a sign that things like Meatless Mondays – or even meatless weekdays, for the more committed – are powerful policy tools, this kind of backlash would be it.)
The image above is from a study conducted by the USFRA, and I think this post by Civil Eats does a good job deconstructing it. Especially this: “While I believe the majority of our nation’s ranchers and farmers are respectful stewards of the land with the public’s best interest at heart—they’re working hard to reduce their environmental impact and address pesticide, artificial hormone, and antibiotics overuse—the USFRA clearly is not representing them. Instead, a look at the Alliance affiliates reveals that it is made up of, and funded by, the biggest players in the food industry, including those who profit most from toxic agricultural chemicals, polluting farming and food processing practices, and concerning animal welfare policies. No wonder, then, that that limiting protections from toxic pesticides and pushing back against antibiotic regulation are just two of the current policy priorities of USFRA affiliates.”
This response from La Vida Locavore is slightly more activist, but this passage gets at a core problem here: “Farmers, no matter how they actually farm, say they CARE about the environment and animal welfare. Which adds up to roughly nothing in reality, since the question does not ask what the farmers actually DO on their farms. But the last question is a loaded question.” Since environmental stewardship and good animal treatment are perceived as unmitigated goods by the public at large, only an idiot would say otherwise. Calling the Congo a “democratic republic” comes to mind — everyone wants the cachet of democracy, so they use the keywords and void them of meaning in the process.
All of which is unfortunate, because a real food dialogue would be a wonderful thing. Yes, Pollan et al can be disconnected from the concerns of the average producer and/or consumer, but to turn around and say that Monsanto has the answer? This Habermasian says thanks, but no.
(It should also be a red flag that this ‘dialogue’ is funded mostly by the checkoff programs, a.k.a. the people who try to figure out how put more cheese on pizza. Thanks to the schizophrenic mandate of the USDA, this is a program where following image, from the Onion‘s “World’s Fattest Town Makes, Consumes World’s Largest Mozzarella Stick”, would be right at home.)
So the food plate is replacing the useless food pyramid version 2.0, and everyone is having their say. The consensus opinion seems to be that it’s a definite improvement over previous iterations, most of which showed the stamp of the animal ag lobby. (For a visual example of food lobbyists at work: the CSPI’s work often needs grain-of-salting, but this video is an excellent example of the murkiness of the science-policy interface. Oh, and the embedded video above is…about vegetables.)
A brief overview of the impressions I’ve come across. Some bemoan the absence of exercise, which was visually represented in the otherwise baffling food pyramid. Some see it as a small but much needed step towards reclaiming government authority over food leadership in a Beck/Palin age of ‘hands off my food’. Some questioned whether the USDA, a federal body with the promotion of American agriculture as its core mandate, is really competent to chair this discussion. Others, mostly in the comments sections, tooted their low-carb horns. Vegan dieticians questioned the inclusion of the dairy satellite on grounds of redundancy. The use of a plate rather than a pyramid was generally hailed as a common sense transition. There was, of course, varying degrees of snarky skepticism over the role of government as food nanny. (I’m setting aside, for now, Reason‘s derisive use of the term ‘nanny’, which until its libertarian appropriation was unequivocally positive in tone–Martha Nussbaum addresses this issue in the film Examined Lifehere). And, as usual, the Atlantic Wire has a pretty good overview of various other positions.
Marion Nestle’s first impressions are worth reading. She is generally supportive of the change, although she acknowledges that these are small steps, and that US ag policy under Vilsack needs to be brought into line with these recommendations. Her main quibble: “Protein. I’m a nutritionist. Protein is a nutrient, not a food. Protein is not exactly lacking in American diets. The average American consumes twice the protein needed. Grains and dairy, each with its own sector, are important sources of protein in American diets.“
I see her point, but this is a case where a one-plate-fits-all food is problematic, and ‘protein’ may be the best middle ground available. Vegan.com’s Erik Marcus approved of the protein moniker because it’s sufficiently broad as to allow for non-animal as well as animal proteins, and because it takes up less of the plate than the fruit and veg portions. On the other hand, the nutrient protein is present in three of the four foods listed (vegetables, grains, and dairy), making it possibly redundant–especially considering that most Americans get way too much protein, but are too macho and meat-addicted to take this seriously.
Edit: Nestle has a follow-up barrage of links here.
I told my sister I would write a layman’s post on “Animal Ethics 101″ soon, and was planning to make that my next post, but as you can probably gather from the title of this post, I’m putting that off for a bit. Tonight’s dinner–gnocchi with tomato and broccoli sauce and a side of mussels–got me to thinking about food ethics and whether something like veganism is necessarily deontological rather than consequentialist in nature. I don’t imagine many vegans would eat mussels, even if they don’t technically ‘have a face’, but the ethics of food choices are way too multifaceted for me to be able to put them in a single, convenient moral compartment. Let me explain what that means to me.
To start from the top: the second law of thermodynamics and the nature of ecological pyramids essentially guarantees that no trophically high-up omnivores (I’m using this in the biological, not normative, sense here) can have a truly guilt-free diet. There are just too many factors involved, especially for the now-majority of the world’s population that’s urbanized and increasingly ‘alienated from the means of production’ (I was just teaching on Marx…). This is not to say that some diets will have bigger or smaller ecological footprints–a diet that eats lower down on a food chain/web (whether sardines or soy, etc., depending) will, ceteris paribus, have a smaller net impact on the world’s biogeochemical systems, which are coming under increasing pressure as the world’s consumption patterns balloon. Rather, it’s just to point out the obvious fact that livings things keep living by converting other living things into usable energy. This will remain true until humans develop the means to become autotrophs.
More concretely, I want to return to two points from my previous post on Rorty. 1) that we live in a tragically configured moral universe, and 2) that the aesthetic private impulse and moralizing public impulse may not ultimately be reconcilable. Rorty would have us coexist comfortably with this uncomfortable knowledge–indeed, this is the main challenge for the liberal ironist–but the reason I bring this up here is to point out the disconnect between the foodie vocabulary and the vegan vocabulary, to the extent that both can be pinned down. In its most civic-minded manifestations, the former tries to bridge aesthetic-moral divide by embracing both food-as-pleasure and a certain kind of food ethics, while the latter is more specifically concerned with food as morals.
Food activists of an animal abolitionist bent would respond that ‘mere gluttony’ is not a sufficient ethical justification for what they perceive to be animal slavery, but I think there’s a problem here–food choices are deeply embedded in our social and cultural lives, and to dismiss them as gluttonous, full stop, is to drastically simplify a complex picture.
To return to the first point–Isaiah Berlin’s claim that we live in a tragically configured moral universe–the ethics of food choices are as complex as we’re willing to track the positive and negative externalities down the food supply chain. In my environmental studies class, I just had my students hand in a life cycle analysis paper (the assignment was to track the environmental costs of a given product from resource extraction through manufacturing through distribution through consumption through disposal, imagining improvements along they way wherever feasible). I’m not implying here that food activists–whether vegan, locavore, or other–don’t understand the moral complexity of their food choices. Many do. I’m just pointing out that the least harm principle gets very confusing very quickly, and the moral high ground can fade frustratingly into the distance.
To combat this risk of paralysis, different people inevitably prioritize different things to care about in there lives, and I think this is one of the reasons that there’s a lot of blowback about the moralization of food choices, at least in Tea Party-era America. For us to take seriously the idea that all of our consumption choices have ecological and ethical as well as economic impacts (broadly, these are the ‘three pillars’ of sustainable development: social, environmental, and economic) is to radically reconfigure what for many is a Lockean vision of property in which all this talk of ‘negative externalities’ is just more unwanted government interference.
For a case in point: the first comment I read on this recent post from The Oil Drum, “Beyond Food Miles”, misses the point entirely by writing “so much for the food miles idea.” Instead of denigrating locally produced food, this article could as easily be seen as a call to reduce at-home food energy costs (also keeping in mind that the study is only focusing on food energy, and not on the Nitrogen, water, or various other footprints). Similarly, one could look at a vegan diet comprised of soy products and vegetables and decry the murder of field mice killed in threshing machines, the deforestation of Amazonian rainforest and the resultant loss of animal habitat, and the human rights abuses of migrant laborers doing stoop labor all day. This would, of course, be an unfair caricature–one could look at the same scenario and see instead a Brazilian economic miracle that’s lifting millions out of extreme poverty. But caricatures are easy to remember, so they persist.
I can see why some reviewers have their reservations, especially when comparing this to Mieville's other work, but I thought this was a brilliantly done deconstruction of the nature of sovereign authority. (This was the first book of his I'...
tagged:
favorites, reviewed, and speculative-fiction
It's hard to review this book without spoilers, and, as with the City and the City, the core "trick" is at the heart of this book. But, as with The City and the City, the trick doesn't feel like a trick, and it's woven seamlessly ...
tagged:
cognition, fantasy, favorites, reviewed, speculative-fiction, and to-r...
The first book was a fun page-turner and the second a passable reboot, but good lord this was a pitiful conclusion. Just read Hunger Games as a stand-alone and skip the rest, because you're not going to be satisfied. Far from it.
This is only listed as 'abandoned' because I made the mistake of seeing the movie before reading the book - the 100 or so pages I read of the book were engrossing, but too fundamentally similar to the film to make me want to keep reading. W...
I started skimming this book after a few chapters, but was engaged at first. My main gripe is that Caplan bows down too far at the altar of economics and public choice, while at the same time bending over to crap on democracy.
tagged:
democracy, economics, rationality, and reviewed
A broad-ranging and informative overview without descending into the muck of Smith-worship or ad hominem Marx-bashing (or worship) that characterizes so much of our political discourse. The supplementary focus on Ricardo and George was also...
tagged:
capitalism, economics, intellectual-history, reviewed, and socialism
This book needs to be understood as what it is, and not warped into something it isn't. (What it is, however, is an oddly secular stepchild of thoroughly Christian tradition.) Walzer's proclamantions about what 'counts' in just war - whethe...
If you're looking for an introduction to Singer's version of anti-speciesist utilitarianism, I would actually recommend some of his shorter work before this classic, which is actually quite dated. (indeed, it would be shocking if it weren't...
tagged:
animals, ethics, moral-philosophy, reviewed, speciesism, and utilitari...
If you can get past the God-speak, this is a really well written book. Scully is a former speechwriter for Dubya and Palin, and it shows (in multiple respects). This book makes odd bedfellows with Singer's Animal Liberation, to put it mildl...
A brilliant but deeply depressing and even wrong-headed book. It's the kind of work I might have loved in an alternate reality where I was an eco-ideologue and/or a near-nihilist pessimist, but as a pragmatist I just can't buy it. A fascina...
How could I not like Zodiac? It's a zany adventure caper about environmental policy set in my backyard. So what if it clearly has the amateurish air of an early novel - it's good, fast thinking fun.
This is one of the few works of speculative fiction that be read as essentially rephrasing one of the core tenets of Burke and Oakeshott's traditional conservatism: that social engineering projects often take you in very different direction...
Wu's book was a real eye-opener for me, as it was my first foray into the field of information theory. His overview of telegraphy, radio, telephone, television, and the internet all flowed seamlessly into his discussion of what he terms the...
This is a review of the whole trilogy, but is really a commentary on the bioethical question at the core of the third book. The idea that we could genetically evolve aggression out of our genome is presented here in the context of a fascina...
PKD was one of my favorite authors throughout high school, and it was fascinating to read this biography almost a decade later and to realize that one of the reasons I may have liked him so much is may latently possess some of the same neur...
Captures the absurdities of war and the morass of partisan infighting, and it does so with the honest and open tone that makes Orwell's work always many steps above the rest. My favorite: the scene where the fascist is running around withou...
Whatever else your views of the man, or this book, you have to admit that Orwell was legit. He worked in a coal mine. He tramped around before it was hipster-grotesque-cool. He fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and got shot in th...
This underlooked Orwell classic documents and equally underlooked phenomenon: the struggles faced by those living not in poverty but on the outskirts of 'respectability': those who cannot give in to living poorly and dirtily, and being cont...
I use this book as the textbook for the animal studies class I teach both at UMass Lowell and at the Tufts Experimental College (wikis: ikesharpless.pbworks.com / animalethics.pbworks.com). There are a couple of other readers in the field, ...
tagged:
animals, ethics, food, language, reviewed, and science
My biggest takeaway when I read Gilgamesh was how universal, even somehow modern, most of its themes were. Pair this with the fact that it's among the oldest - if not the oldest - extant work of written fiction, and, well, that says somethi...
Twain and Orwell top the list of 'authors whose collected works are ignored because they have one or two really famous, now even cliched, books'. (On the case of Orwell, pretty much every book of his other than the Clergyman's Daughter is a...
tagged:
favorites, reviewed, and speculative-fiction
The only reason I can surmise that this work doesn't get more attention is because Joan of Arc is so different from Twain's other books. But it truly is a thing of beauty, his lack of satiric bite and surprisingly pro-French (or maybe just ...
A gorgeous work; rarely have I felt such a sense of reality in the way Banks paints his portraits of individual lives and blends them into a collage depicting how communities respond to senseless tragedies.
Yes, he's pretty much a neocon. And yes, this is a pugnaciously aggressive book. But the basic argument - that it's rational for both Europe and American to behave as if they live in posthistory and history, respective - is an important ins...
As with many such classics, this book requires a substantial background in the social contract tradition to properly engage with its core arguments. (I could write a similar review of various other works - reviews of Leviathan that take no ...
I liked these essays a lot, probably because I agree with Berlin's conception of rights as being often in both internal and external conflict (as Sandel put it, of Berlin, that we live in a 'tragically configured moral universe'). Too bad a...
tagged:
human-rights, moral-philosophy, political-philosophy, and reviewed
Provides an overview of the laws, actors, and strategic challenges surrounding ten different international environmental regimes: whaling, toxics, climate change, ozone, biodiversity, fisheries, forests, and a coupla others.
Dahl argues that the term 'polyarchy' is a more accurate description than 'democracy' when it comes to most countries we tend to call democracies (he also has a very high bar for what it would be required for a country to be a democracy - a...
There's definitely a fine line between historical fiction and utter garbage, but this fun series maintains something like a skein of attempted accuracy while crafting a romping fun yarn.
tagged:
historical-fiction, reviewed, and trashy-fun
It may have helped that I read this book, set partly in the Mediterranean, while on honeymoon in Greece. But I thought it was a masterfully crafted work, and it avoided the trap of being 'a book about a hermaphrodite'. Instead, it was a bea...
I'm a huge fan of Bittman's work, both in his minimalist and post-minimalist stages, but I couldn't help but see this as a lesser hybrid of Omnivore's Dilemma (the text part) and Diet for a Small Planet (the recipes part). It was good for w...
tagged:
environment, food, food-ethics, and reviewed
I agree with Keith's review (below): "With its heart in the right place, this book needs an editor--it reads like a rambling, book-length review article." The topic is clearly important, and I'm happy that it has spawned a bunch o...
A wordy and disturbing mess - I only made it through around book five - but Donaldson's stories are powerfully told and deeply polyvalent. Maybe I'll finish the Chronicles one of these days...
tagged:
dark, disturbing, fantasy, reviewed, and wordy
At this point, Feist's just totally lost me - I was a big fan for a while, but every new iteration seems little more than a trite, hackneyed, and predictable serving of more of the same.
This is the closest I have come to that elusive great American novel. If all you want is narration of a story, look elsewhere, but anyone who thinks that the English language lacks exuberance needs to read this book.
tagged:
favorites, great-use-of-language, and reviewed
I read this as background to prepare for a trip to Chile, and it definitely helped add both a personal and political layer to my understanding of the Pinochet years.
A fabulous, multilayered text. I can only begin to appreciate Ariosto's masterpiece, approaching it as I did through the lens of a third language (Italian). An understanding of Ariosto's patronage situation -- and of Dante and the Bible, at...
Peter Singer, one of the most philosophically consistent thinkers out there (for better and for worse, many would say), discussing the inconsistencies of Dubya's ethics. This book is pretty much what you think it's going to be.
These books should *not* be approached as anything even vaguely resembling practical, serious, or useful. They're for play, and do a fantastic job at that.
tagged:
favorites, funny, polemicists-curmudgeons, reviewed, silly, and words
Another one of those works that I think are thrust on people too young - this trilogy really gets at the core of a lot of key aspects of the human condition. I especially like the conflict between state and family laid out in Antigone, as i...
tagged:
civilization, classics, human-nature, reviewed, taboo, and tragedy-con...
Aeschelus' trilogy leaves me with one overpowering message: he demonstrates the need to overcome blood feuding cycles in which everyone is to blame and everyone has cause for retribution (a catch-22, if you will). Although Aeschelus' soluti...
A beautiful book, in many different ways. It's also fun to assign some Leopold to my environmental studies students, because the writing is so different from most of the ethics, policy, and science stuff we look at. 'Thinking Like a Mountai...
tagged:
environment, ethics, great-use-of-language, and reviewed
I added some of Rand's nonfiction to my Political Thought syllabus after soliciting input from my students (I paired her with Milton Friedman for the day). Although I haven't read much other than this and her Introduction to Objectivist Epi...
I browsed rather than read this, and I think it can be summarized thus: 'people used to play in the woods, but now we think it's full of homeless people and pedophiles.'
This book was great. I'll admit, it probably wouldn't speak to a non-Scrabbler, but it showed just how far down the rabbit hole one can go. On the one hand, Fatsis gave me a number of tactical tools for a Scrabble arsenal and painted master...
I loved this book when I read it in high school, but in retrospect I think a lot of that is because it filled a number of niches I was craving at the time: 'secret knowledge' (hence the 'gnosis' in gnostics - a lot of the PKD stuff I was re...
The reviewer who indicates that this is not a good introduction to the thinkers in question is probably right - this book is best read with a fair amount of relevant reading under your belt. Personally, I think Kaufmann's analysis is brilli...
tagged:
intellectual-history, philosophy, and reviewed
Funny how a book called One-Dimensional Man could be so, well, one-dimensional. As in: the critique of homo economicus is well taken, but the caricature is beaten to death.
tagged:
capitalism, critical-theory, obscurantism, and reviewed
If I had to pick between Asterix and Tintin, I'd go with Asterix for sure. Yes, it's sillier and more childish, but they withstand read after read without getting stale. The delicious wordplay helps, too.
I'm probably biased in favor of this play - I saw a production of it in LA with Ian McKellan as Stockmann. McKellan could play a garbage can and make me think it was the most interesting garbage can in the world.
tagged:
against-the-grain, civilization, and reviewed
This was easily the best book I read for an Anthropology of Development course I took as an undergrad. Lesotho is geographically, historically, and culturally a fascinating case study, and this is a good primer on how the World Bank can mes...
A smorgasbord of mini-biographies, a farrago of informational facts. I was expecting this book to be similar to Wu's The Master Switch, but it's a very different breed. Gleick pastes together a rough chronology of the history of language, g...
This book helped to shape my views on the role of technology in society - it's a fascinating overview of the machine gun's integration into warfare from the Maxim gun in the late 19th century to the brutally asymmetrical colonial wars in Af...
There are some books that I think are unfortunately lost on the high schoolish audience to which they are universally subjected: this is one such book. (Moby Dick and Jekyll/Hyde are others, the former for its girth and the latter for its r...
tagged:
biotech, classics, favorites, reviewed, and science
A serious attempt at addressing a monumentally difficult issue, with mixed success. Some might say he 'sold out' his domestic conception of justice to appease what is clearly a "reasonable" version of political Islam. Either way, ...
tagged:
international, political-philosophy, political-science, and reviewed
I think the issue of branding and the omnipresence of advertising should be taken seriously (hey, I gave Farenheit 451 five stars and I write a food policy blog on these issues...), but I can't help but think that Klein is both a hack and a...
(This is a review of all the Sandman graphic novels...) Gaiman works best in this hybrid form - I loved most of these books, even though the shifting illustrators took some getting used to, and I liked some a lot more than others. The theme...
tagged:
comics-broadly, fantasy, favorites, monsters, myth, reviewed, and spec...
An excellent overview of an important and nuanced figure who sadly gets drowned out in the capitalist-v-socialist poo throwing competition. What I most remember about this book, though, is that I was reading it on an airplane and the person...
tagged:
intellectual-history, political-philosophy, reviewed, and socialism
The English translation of Levi's title, "Survival at Auschwitz", is one of the worst mistranslations in history. A literal translation is "if this is a man", which has literally the opposite meaning, and which more clos...
This book captures both Dawkins greatness and his debilitating hostility to any perspective other than his own. His description of how a primitive eye could and did develop through descent with modification through natural selection - essen...
tagged:
evolution, religion, reviewed, and science
The closest I've found to a kindred philosophy to my pick-and-choose blend of various schools of moral, political, and aesthetic thought. I really loved this book, and I'm surprised I hadn't come across Rorty earlier.
tagged:
empathy, moral-philosophy, pragmatism, and reviewed
Read this as background for my honeymoon in Greece. It is what it says it is, although my level of knowledge about modern Greek politics was precisely zero before reading this. I can know say that it's at least a little better than zero, wh...
It's hard to understate the importance of this work, which should really be thought of as a relic of an oral tradition: reading it, alone, from a page doesn't capture the original intent of its rhythm and rhyme. That said, I agree that tran...
This line still sticks with me, a decade after first reading this fabulous translation: "Down through the moors, in off the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping."
tagged:
classics, great-use-of-language, monsters, reviewed, and the-other
A truly devastating collection - I read these stories almost a decade ago, and some of them stick with me to this day. The core lesson here is a difficult one to swallow: one of the greatest crimes of the Holocaust was that, in many cases, ...
tagged:
empathy, human-rights, really-sad, reviewed, and wwii
A solid introduction to ecofeminism in particular and Shiva's brand of anti-globalization agroecology more generally (although Earth Democracy provides more of an 'entry level' critique). As with most work of this nature, I think this book ...
tagged:
dark-green, development, environment, feminism, reviewed, and science
I've used this book in my Intro to Comparative Politics class to help my students understand electoral reform, but I suspect I enjoyed it a lot more than they did. It's pretty dense and technical, but provides lots of comparative data to di...
