The Food Police Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Jayson Lusk

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN FORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lusk, Jayson.

  The food police : a well-fed manifesto about the politics of your plate / Jayson L. Lusk.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Nutrition—Government policy. I. Title.

  RA784.L87 2013

  363.19’2—dc23 2012025935

  eISBN: 978-0-307-98704-4

  JACKET DESIGN BY NUPOOR GORDON

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRANK LONGHITANO (FOOD) AND SPXCHROME/ISTOCK PHOTO (POLICE REPORT)

  v3.1

  For those who wish to eat without a backseat driver

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. A Skeptical Foodie

  2. The Price of Piety

  3. From Cops to Robbers: A Brief History of Food Progressivism

  4. Are You Smart Enough to Know What to Eat?

  5. The Fashion Food Police: Organic—the Status Food

  6. Franken-Fears

  7. The Follies of Farm Policy

  8. The Thin Logic of Fat Taxes

  9. The Locavore’s Dilemma

  10. The Future of Food

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  A SKEPTICAL FOODIE

  A catastrophe is looming. Farmers are raping the land and torturing animals. Food is riddled with deadly pesticides, hormones, and foreign DNA. Corporate farms are wallowing in government subsidies. Meatpackers and fast-food restaurants are exploiting workers and tainting the food supply. And Paula Deen has diabetes.

  Something must be done.

  Or so you would believe if you listened to the hysterics of an emerging elite who claim to know better what we should eat. I call them the food police to be polite, but a more accurate term might be food fascists or food socialists. They are totalitarians when it comes to food, and they seek control over your refrigerator, by governmental regulation when they can or by moralizing and guilt when they can’t. They play on fears and prejudices while claiming the high mantle of science and impartial journalism. And their dirty little secret is that they embrace an ideological agenda that seeks to control your dinner table and your wallet.

  A chorus of authors, talk show hosts, politicians, and celebrity chefs has emerged as the self-appointed saviors of our food system. They are right about one thing: There is something sinister about our dinner plans. The food police are showing up uninvited.

  Whatever tonight’s plans, you’d better make room for another guest. It isn’t the polite sort who calls ahead and asks what he can bring; it’s the impertinent snob who’s coming over whether you like it or not, demanding his favorite dish to boot. Be careful what you choose to serve—if isn’t made with the finest local ingredients painstakingly bought from small organic farms, expect an evening of condescension and moralizing. And at all costs, avoid the meat from cows fed corn, or you’ll have a riot of political correctness on your hands.

  Like it or not, the food police will be at dinner. It is impossible to turn on the TV, pick up a book about food, or stroll through the grocery store without hearing a sermon on how to eat. We have been pronounced a nation of sinful eaters, and the food police have made it their mission that we seek contrition for every meal. We are guilty of violating the elite’s revelations. Thou shalt not eat at McDonald’s, buy eggs from chickens raised in cages, buy tomatoes from Mexico, or feed your infant nonorganic baby food. There can be no lack of faith in the elite’s dictates. There are no difficult trade-offs and no gray areas. Thou shalt sacrifice taste for nutrition, convenience for sustainability, and low prices for social justice.

  And if we won’t willingly repent, the high priests of politically correct food will regulate us into submission. If you aren’t convinced, consider just a few examples of the food police in action.

  TRANS FAT BANS

  Try a doughnut the next time you’re in New York City or Philadelphia. Not as tasty as it used to be, is it? For this we can thank the food police and their war on trans fats.1 And what a service it has been; we should be grateful to have been taught the shocking truth that too many Oreos and doughnuts are unhealthy!

  OUTLAWED HAPPY MEALS

  Do you have children? Want to reward them for an A+ on their spelling test? Don’t even think about taking them to McDonald’s in San Francisco or you’ll have a backseat of unhappy campers. The city’s board of supervisors tried to ban toys in Happy Meals as a way of “moving forward an agenda of food justice.”2 The hypocrisy is astounding. So now, “in the City by the Bay, if you want to roller skate naked down Castro Street wearing a phallic-symbol hat and snorting an eight-ball off a transgender hooker’s chest while underage kids run behind you handing out free heroin needles, condoms and coupons … that’s your right as a free citizen of the United States. But if you want to put a Buzz Lightyear toy in the same box with a hamburger and fries and sell it, you’re outta line, mister!”3

  TWINKIE TAXES

  Despite the economic research clearly showing that fat taxes will do little to slim our waistlines, food police across the nation are hiking food prices by implementing various forms of taxes on soda, fat, and fast food. In his book The World Is Fat, University of North Carolina professor Barry Popkin says, “Taxing the added sugar in beverages is a favorite strategy of mine.”4 So now you know whom to thank when your grocery bill is 100 percent higher and half as tasty.

  LOCAL FOOD SUBSIDIES AND PURCHASING REQUIREMENTS

  Rather than using our tax dollars to shore up Medicare or Social Security, the food police want to subsidize your neighbor’s purchase of local asparagus. With the help of lawmakers, bestselling author Michael Pollan wants to “require that a certain percentage of that school-lunch fund in every school district has to be spent within 100 miles.”5 Tough luck for citrus-loving children in Minnesota.

  AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR COWS

  The Obama administration tried to implement rules on the “fair” pricing of livestock that would have required ranchers and meatpackers to justify to the government the prices they freely pay and accept for cattle. Cowboys across the nation would have had to tell Uncle Sam why they paid more for a hearty registered Angus than a scrawny half-breed. In a move projected to have cost farmers and consumers more than $1.5 billion annually, and radically altered the structure of the livestock sector, the food police unwittingly married George Orwell’s two greatest works by bringing Big Brother onto Animal Farm.6

  DIRT TAXES

  As if just now realizing that corn grows in the ground, the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to implement rules enabling it to fine farmers if their tractors kick up too much dust. Charlie Brown’s friend Pig-Pen had better watch his back.

  FRUIT AND VEGGIE SUBSIDIES

  Convinced that the food industry is “incapable of marketing healthier foods,” New York Times food writer Mark Bittman wants to expand the welfare state by cajoling farmers and consumers into growing and buying the stuff he prefers that we eat. Bittman wants to enact policies that will “subsidize the purchase of staple foods like seasonal greens, vegetables, whole grains, dried legumes and fruit.”7

  FOIE GRAS BANS

  Only after a groundswell of outrage from chefs and restaurant-goers did the city of Chicago rescind its ban on the duck and goose liver delicacy. Undeterred by
the suffering palates of their Midwestern brethren, the state of California now bars its own citizens from buying what can be found on almost every street in Paris.

  REGULATING HAPPY HENS AND HOGS

  Despite the fact that fewer than 5 percent of consumers buy cage-free eggs or pork, activist efforts have led to ballot initiatives and legislation in at least eight states requiring farmers to use cage-free production systems. The laws force farmers to adopt practices that most consumers aren’t fully willing to pay for.8

  TECHNOPHOBIA

  Wirelessly pontificating on Facebook and Twitter via their 64 GB iPads, the food police welcome new technology—that is, unless it relates to food. Unwilling to accept the scientific evidence on the potential price-reducing and safety-enhancing advantages of new food technologies, the food police promote bans, taxes, restrictions, and propaganda on technologies such as preservatives, irradiation, biotechnology, cloning, and pesticides. They even spread fear about age-old practices such as pasteurization, hybrid plant breeding, and grain-fed livestock.

  SCHOOLROOM INDOCTRINATION

  The food police seek to indoctrinate our children, not by teaching food science and nutrition, but by advancing the cause of fashionable foods. Famed food activist and restaurant owner Alice Waters wants “a total dispensation from the president of the United States who will say, ‘We need a curriculum in the public school system that teaches our kids, from the time they are very little, about food and where it comes from. And we want to buy food from local people in every community to rebuild the agriculture.’ ” She says that we “must get Obama to understand the pleasures of the table.”9 His wife was listening. Michelle Obama’s signature childhood nutrition bill took $4.5 billion away from food stamp recipients to expand the federal government’s role in regulating school lunches and significantly increased food costs to local schools throughout the nation.10

  RESTRICTIONS ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH

  A team of four government agencies—the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—have banded together under the auspices of an Interagency Working Group to recommend prohibitions against certain food advertisements to children. Some like-minded members of the food elite want to invoke a version of the Fairness Doctrine, demanding equal airtime to run government and activist-sponsored ads about food.

  These are but a few examples of the growing intrusions by the food police. Taken in isolation, any one of the regulations might not seem so bad and may even appear helpful. Therein lies the danger. You won’t yet find a single omnibus piece of legislation restricting your food freedoms, but the planks in the road are slowly being replaced without the travelers even realizing construction is under way. And guess who is left to pay the toll at road’s end? With a ban on trans fats here, a fat tax there, here a local foods subsidy, there a pesticide ban, everywhere an organic food—before you know it, Old McDonald has a new farm.

  Michelle Obama’s White House garden was a symbolic nod granted to the growing reality of a movement that seeks more control over what we eat. Even New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg supports the encroaching government hand in food. After congratulating himself on helping New York City ban trans fats, successfully pressuring food companies to reduce salt, and selectively licensing “green” produce vendors, Bloomberg told the UN General Assembly that “Governments at all levels must make healthy solutions the default social option. That is ultimately government’s highest duty.”11 Never mind national defense or the government’s duty to life and liberty or leaving unenumerated powers to the states: healthy food is now apparently the be-all and end-all of good government.

  These are many of the same people who scream, “It’s a woman’s body,” any time the subject of abortion comes up. According to them, a woman has the right to do what she wants with her body. That is, unless she wants to eat something deemed morally defunct. You know, something as reprehensible as a Nestlé Toll House cookie or a Big Mac.

  Susan Dentzer, former PBS news correspondent and current editor in chief of Health Affairs, wants to change our eating habits by creating a “broadbased set of interventions comparable in scope to the four-decade assault on smoking.”12 Others are “turning to multilevel interventions, which … target … the individual, the social network, the community, and policy.”13

  What exactly are these interventions? Consider the proposal mentioned in Harvard Magazine: “There was once a very successful U.S. government program aimed at changing eating habits … It happened during World War II, and it was called ‘food rationing.’ They made it a patriotic thing to change the way you ate. The government hired the best people on Madison Avenue to come to Washington and work for the War Department. It worked splendidly.”14

  Food rationing! Really? I suspect that many of the millions of people who actually lived through food rationing during World War II would recall the policy as being anything but splendid. But apparently if the food police are to have their way, we must be prepared to stand in line and register for a coupon booklet to buy sugar, bread, and flour. It’s as if we have already forgotten the dreaded food lines of the USSR.

  While these obsessions about food have captivated a modern generation of consumers far removed from the farm, I must admit to being befuddled. The sirens of paranoia and pronouncements of cataclysmic catastrophes ring hollow. Although many of the food police are truly concerned about our diets and health, and not all are avowed ideologues, the real trouble comes when we take a closer look at the consequences of the proposed solutions offered by those with a romanticized vision of agriculture. If the food elite are disenchanted with the way food is now produced, many in the agricultural community are mystified that city-dwelling journalists presume to know so much about how to run a farm. It might be fun to play farmer for a few days, but a lifetime of such work is not only difficult for most to imagine, but something that few truly desire. The truth is that for the past one hundred years, people have been leaving the countryside in droves seeking a better life in town. I know, because I’m one of them.

  I know the people who run the farms and factories that are demonized by the food police. You’ve been shown but one small part of the picture. Bestselling authors and journalists tell the stories of the folks selling a few chickens at the local farmers’ market, but where are the people who actually feed America?

  My love of food began as a child, when I entered my mother’s beef Stroganoff recipe in a local 4-H cooking competition. Although the judges weren’t particularly impressed with my efforts, I became fascinated with the way disparate food ingredients could be combined to produce an entirely new and wonderful taste. Perhaps it was my parents’ insistence that we children eat at least three bites of everything put on our plates that led me to see food as a medium of experimentation and learning. And learn I did. In high school, I became one of the best dairy food judges in the state of Texas. (Yes, there is such a thing as dairy food judging, and yes, Future Farmers of America [FFA] students all over America still do it today.) As strange as it may seem, being able to discriminate among thirty different milks and cheeses was apparently sufficient qualification for receiving a scholarship to study food technology in college. Not only did I develop a palate, I learned where food comes from.

  There weren’t many options for out-of-work teenagers in rural West Texas, so every summer from 1987 to 1994, I donned boots and a baseball cap to rid the earth of the weeds that were the bane of the local farmers’ existence. Those years spent working cotton and soybean fields and waking up mornings to feed sheep and hogs taught me an important lesson: farming is not the romanticized profession it is often made out to be. It is a lot of hot, sweaty, backbreaking work. Real pigs that live on farms aren’t anything like Wilbur or Babe; they bite, they poop, they break fences, they stink, and they can’t go a day without food or water, no matter what the outside temperature is or what vacation plans have been made.

/>   Food journalists like to talk about being one with the land and of “nature’s logic,”15 but make no mistake about it, agriculture, by its very definition, is a struggle against nature. After all, there’s nothing more natural than death. Nature isn’t our friend. It’s trying to outcompete us.

  Those summers working in the fields were all the motivation I needed to finish college. If farming wasn’t for me, I thought my place in life might be one step up the food chain. I decided to study food science and technology at college. There I learned more valuable lessons. Eating is inherently risky, and it is the development of food technologies (some very old and some very new) that make eating safe. But perhaps the best lessons I learned in college were during the summers working in a food processing plant near Dallas.

  There I discovered that the people working in agribusinesses—both the owners in the corner offices and the factory-line workers screwing caps onto salsa jars—were regular people just like you and me. Neither was exploiting or being exploited, despite what I’d been taught in my history classes or read in books from ivory tower academics (of which, ironically, I am now one). Even though it was hard work, almost everyone I encountered in that processing plant was committed to putting out high-quality, safe food, probably because they knew that if they didn’t, their competitors would. At my first day on the job, I received a tongue-lashing when I unwittingly cleaned the inside of a stainless-steel mixing tank with a brush designated for floor sweeping. The corrective came not from a manager but from a minimum-wage-earning high school dropout, who simply said, “How’d you like to stick your mouth on the ground? ’Cause that’s what you’re doing.” After all, the food that came out of that tank was the same food he fed his own family.

  My mistakes didn’t end there. Once, while working a late-night shift, I was responsible for measuring the thousands of pounds of ingredients to make a fettuccini sauce for a major restaurant chain. The next day, much to my horror, I learned that I had included twice the amount of butter required for the sauce. (Despite three semesters of engineering calculus, I had mistaken kilograms for pounds!) Having lost the company thousands of dollars, I could easily have been fired, but I wasn’t. This experience, and others like it, helped me realize that it was the interaction between food and people that was most interesting, and there was no better way to look into the matter than through the lens of economics. My passion became learning why people ate the things they did and figuring out how people dealt with the difficult trade-offs between health, safety, and taste when their paychecks wouldn’t let them have it all. I became a food economist.