The enemy of my enemy...

An article in the June 30 issue of The American Conservative asks the question many of us sympathetic to Rod Dreher's crunchy conservatism have been asking, which is why more conservatives don't embrace the healthy food/local agriculture movement. (See also Harrison Scott Key's post on this.)

Author John Schwenkler explains, as has food writer Michael Pollan, how government intervenes on behalf of agribusiness to both subsidize processed foods while simultaneously raising the regulatory cost to organic farmers and non-drug oriented ranchers. The benefit of intensive chemical operations is that a handful of farmers can feed the nation. The downside is that food has less taste and less healthfulness, and Americans have less connection to one another or to Creation.

Many conservatives dispute this, calling Dreher and crew Luddites, and extolling a biochemical revolution that helped increase farm yields worldwide. They have a point, but the fact that extensive pesticide and antibiotic use means more third-world people can afford BLT's is no justification for continuing to buy chemical-laden, second-rate bacon when one doesn't have to.

I get the sense that many conservatives -- especially the free-marketeers -- feel compelled to defend agribusiness and modern industrial farming because, well, these are businesses, and we're supposed to be on the side of business. Thus there is a cottage industry in the free-market movement of writers devoted to talking about how very safe a McDonald's cheeseburger really is, and browbeating anyone who questions how the cow was treated, and whether that orange square on top is really cheese, and why the burger tastes so very unlike how good beef is supposed to taste. The McDonald's cheeseburger has to be good, because the alternative is that the market has, in this case, produced some pretty bad long-term outcomes. Which violates the Gospel of Markets as revealed to St. Friedman.

I wonder, however, if more conservatives might be on the side of healthy food if it had not originally emerged among self-styled liberals. Here we have a story of big government collaborating with big business to substitute corn syrup for sugar, allowing large-scale meat providers to externalize their costs, and engaging in a host of market-rigging schemes to favor some crops over others. Here also is a story of children being preyed upon by multi-million dollar marketing efforts designed to hook them on foods that are terrible for them. And here is a story of patience and effort -- two concepts normally extolled by conservatives -- being replaced by convenience and sloth, and not so families can spend more time together on other activities, unless one counts television-viewing.

"This is a conservative cause," writes Schwenkler, "if there ever was one." If only the liberals hadn't gotten to it first.