March 11, 2006

I've always thought the fact that the Times hired a conservative-beat reporter in the first place was case-closed on any question that the eds there think conservatives are an alien species. Oh look! And some of them eat differently than others! And they disagree with one another!

Here's David Kirkpatrick's review of "Crunchy Cons" in the New York Times. I can't decide if this is a good review or not. It seems mostly descriptive, as if the writer, who covers the conservative movement for the Times, were describing an exotic species of bird. One of the few evaluative comments he made highlights, I think, one of the themes in the book: that traditionalist conservatives aren't a good fit with the mainstream Right -- even as we are part of the broad conservative movement -- not because we are closet liberals, but because of the kind of conservatives we are:

Are his crunchy cons really so conservative? They are conservative on traditional values, but less so on subjects like limited government or a muscular military. He speaks approvingly of government action to protect the environment, restrain big businesses and help out hard-pressed home-schooling parents--all of which sounds suspiciously like liberalism, rewound to before the sexual revolution.

March 10, 2006

...Eww, that's so NPR. Here's Rod on NPR.

Diane from Oklahoma writes to extol the virtues of her local food co-op saying that she started thinking about the politics and morality of how she spent her food dollars after reading articles about a particular chicken processor that made its illegal aliens work in dangerous conditions, and when they would get injured, would ship them back to their country of origin and forget about them. So that’s one thing that got her to go to the Oklahoma Food Co-op. She writes:

It is an all-volunteer food coop, win which we order on-line, the producers bring their orders to a central location, and then volunteers take the food out to pick-up sites. Our family now orders the bulk of our meat, eggs, cheese, coffee, and laundry detergent through the coop.

We were particularly happy with the chicken we order through the coop. Alas, due to new government regulations, we no longer have the convenience of ordering from our favorite and closest producer and having pick-up through our coop. That's because Oklahoma has a law that chickens must be processed through a USDA-inspected facility in order to be sold through a third party. We do not have such a facility in Oklahoma. So, my coop chicken choices are to drive my favorite farmer's farm to pick up my chicken (rather than get same-day delivery through the coop) or to choose the one Oklahoma producer who is fortunate enough to live near a bordering state (and mean that my chicken has a much longer drive to get to me).

Not the end of the world, of course. But I bet my local chicken farmer produces a superior product and under more humane conditions to both bird and human than the cheap chicken that passes USDA approval from Mega Producer.

As to the people who wail about the Food Police at schools ... There are those of us who remember a time when there were no vending machines at school (and even gum was verboten in the classroom) and an overweight child was a rarity. Somehow those of us who grew up before 1970 managed just fine with an occasional candy bar or soft drink and neither at school.

I am not trying to take away anyone's Twinkie. At the same time, I don't want the corporatization/globalization monster to rule that Twinkies and cheap chicken are my only and/or easiest food choices.

Frederica writes: "You have to acknowlege, at least, that illegals are willing to break their backs at bottom-tier jobs like this, which curiously don't get taken by born-here workers. "

Except out of respect for the letter of the law, why would an employer avoid hiring cheap illegal labor and hire more expensive Americans? Are sure we've tested legal American willingness to process chickens?

I haven't done the chicken-leg work, but may call Mark Krikorian over soon...

Reader Cheryl:

I guess the real question is whether using the power of Wal-mart is considered making a deal with the devil or a means to giving at least a little bit of a good choice to consumers who may not have access to organic foods otherwise. Maybe this is more of a teaching moment than would first appear on the surface. While I understand that no one likes to be reduced to a fad, isn't it still a good thing to see more demand for organic foods? I've never thought crunchy-ness is all or nothing, but that's sort of the feeling I get from Bruce Frohnen's latest post.

An interesting distinction! I’d rather see folks buying produce grown conventionally or organically from local farmers rather than organic at Megalo-mart. I’m not convinced that organic vegetables per se are any better than their counterparts. Fresh vegetables, however they’re produced, certainly are, and it’s always a great thing to build a local food economy. I feel differently about livestock farming.

Frederica's review of Failure to Launch elsewhere on NRO today could probably be described as "crunchy" by room standards.

Bruce’s post earlier today got me thinking about Wendell Berry’s rejoinder to the slogan “Think globally, act locally.” Berry says that’s impossible, that “think locally, act locally” is the only sensible thing to do.

Well, what do y’all think of this in light of the following excerpt of a strikingly conservative Prospect essay on Third World development:

One of the things that makes development political is that it is a collective process. Modernisation involves the creation of communities; this requires a sense of a common good. Although the effect of modernisation is to liberate individuals from the binds of family, church and village, it does so by creating a new society and a wider community based on law. For most of the developed world today this collective spirit has taken the form of nationalism. Somewhere in the process of development, the individual is asked to sacrifice his private gain for the public good. The entrepreneurs of 19th-century Japan could have invested their money more safely on Wall Street than in Japan, but the thought hardly occurred to them. Their governing motive was to put behind them the humiliations Japan was suffering at the hands of the west. This was a national feeling that joined the Japanese of the day together as a group; each individual identified with this commitment and felt it personally.

This collective element in development is an economic as well as a political reality. It is no good an individual becoming modern on his own: you can be modern only in a modern society. If you train as an accountant or a lawyer—both core professions in a developed society—you can function only in the context of laws and accounting standards that make your professional skills and ethics meaningful. Development does not happen to individuals; it happens to societies. And the society must will it collectively. What happens when the will is individual rather than collective is visible all around us. Prospect reported recently that there were more Ethiopian doctors practising in Chicago than in Ethiopia. In Sierra Leone, one entire hospital is run by Médecins Sans Frontières, while many excellent Sierra Leonian doctors work in Britain. A UNDP report on the Arab world shows that the main ambition of young men in Arab countries is to live abroad if they can.

The men and women who built modern Japan would never have thought like this nor put personal goals ahead of national goals. For many, development may entail some personal sacrifice. This will not take place unless there is a sense of contributing to the greater good of a national community. This is true for doctors who decide to stay at home and accept lower salaries than they could achieve abroad, and also for state officials whose loyalty to the national project means that they will not accept bribes. If there are enough such people, these commitments to the nation can become the dominant value of the society.

This raises some interesting questions about the difficulty of staying loyal to one’s own place in the modern economy. How many of us reading this (or writing this blog) live in or near the place where we grew up, and where our people live? Caleb, yes. Mitch, yes. Anybody else? I would guess that most of my friends don’t live in the town they grew up. I don’t think most people nowadays expect that they (or their children) will stick around after college to hang out a shingle in the old hometown. It’s possible there won’t be work for the college grad there, but it’s also the case that it will not have seriously occurred to many to think of being loyal to their home and extended family, versus setting out to follow their own destiny. I’m a prime example of this – though my wife is not, because we moved back to her hometown in part because we wanted our kids to grow up closer to family. Anyway, I wanted to raise the question about whether the best educated men and women from smaller towns – the kind that would be expected traditionally to make up the rising leadership class – even think in terms of locality anymore. Or do we all put personal goals ahead of the good of our particular place? I think the more modern slogan would be, “Think personally, act wherever you happen to be at the moment.”

An e-mail:

Hi guys & gals,

I think the organic Wal-Mart story is on its face kinda stupid, but might have long-term benefits. It can become one of the things that helps us in the CC debate separate truly countercultural living from consumerist, faddish living. (And might help Jonah see the point of it all.) OK, so it's easy and cheap to get "organic" stuff at Wal-Mart, just like it's easy and cheap for people to complain about porny elementary school kids. It's when people make fundamentally different choices with their lives that crunchiness has teeth (or should I say "crunch"?). Where to live is a big thing (we should be getting to that next week), like that NJ mom says and Rod pointed out...if you actually get up and move to the country, you've actually done something with a lasting effect.

Buying the organic brand at Wal-Mart is mostly just consumerism or ignorance, and shouldn't count for anything if it's put in the same cart as Great Value brand mass-produced cheapo eats and Chinese-sweatshop cheapo trinkets. There's no real cost to making that choice - Wal-Mart will find a way to make it cheap enough, and it's not a real change in people's lives that derives from deeply-held values. Buying organic at Wal-Mart isn't a movement for which books are and ought to be written.

So I think this sort of development muddies the waters a bit but eventually will be a clarifying thing for sorting out one's values in life. And so it's a good thing in the long run.

Best & God bless,

Christian Mastilak

A friend who knows emails me after reading today’s posts:

In Asia the streets were crowded with chicken vendors who would kill, pluck, cook and sell them right in front of you. Not at all hidden behind closed doors. I do not see any particular virtue in this. It stank, the streets were filthy, and people got sick more often. I am an A&P man all the way.

It had to happen, and sooner rather than later. The danger of "crunchiness"
becoming just another consumer fad is on display, here. Wal-Mart, I would argue, embodies as it spreads just about everything that's wrong with our struggling but still great nation. Everything, and people in particular, is sacrificed to low prices, which often aren't that low in any event. So, now that they've saturated one set of markets, they start moving in to new ones.

Already one pseudo-traditional development in Florida is bragging (?!) about including an "upscale" wal-mart. And now, organics. Well, organic, to me, isn't the point. My wife and I look for organic produce when we have to shop at supermarkets and the like because the other stuff is just inedible. But Rod's point, that the real trick is to buy local, now becomes clear. Any label, including of course "organic" can be reduced to a set of official criteria that can be manipulated and/or operationalized as part of the same mass marketing system that puts out all the other rubbish--much of it quite expensive and some of it capable of appearing "upscale."

With food as with all else, "buy local" really does seem to be the key. I know some reject this as producing a boring diet, but I think there is a clear alternative--go to the local ethnic markets, not the chain.

Let me take a moment to plug the tremendous volume American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia edited by the crunchy blog’s own Bruce Frohnen and Jeremy Beer, and being flatteringly blurbed by Jonah Goldberg on the top-right of this page. I received my copy in the mail this morning, and think it will prove to be a real treasure to conservatives of all stripes.

Many of the entries are directly relevant to the themes being explored here, and I want to just highlight some of the entry on Christopher Lasch:

[A] central theme of [Lasch’s] conservatism runs throughout nearly everything that he wrote: rejection of the liberal doctrine of progress. Other themes relevant to the study of conservatism include an emphasis on human fallibility and the limits of human freedom; a preference for local over centralized authority; a defense of petty-bourgeois virtues, the traditional family, and small proprietary institutions; and the rejection of ethics of personal liberation and the therapeutic state. … Lasch … analyze[d] the political and intellectual bankruptcy of liberal individualism and focused increasingly on the vulnerability of individuals, families, and local institutions to the growth of a paternalistic welfare state and corporate capitalism. … [He] developed a theory of the decline of the bourgeois family that emphasized that the family had gradually succumbed to the pressures of the marketplace and state control through the agencies of bureaucracy, management, and professionalization. … Lasch proceeded to analyze the dependent culture of narcissism that had emerged under the bureaucratic paternalism of the state and business corporations, arguing that with the rise of a therapeutic ethic of leisure and self-fulfillment American progressivism had finally lost all trace of its origins in the nineteenth-century liberalism of self-disciplined economic man. … Lasch … attempt[ed] to recover a longstanding tradition of opposition to progressive ideology grounded in the moral sensibilities of the petty bourgeoisie … [which] included a respect for limits, natural and otherwise; virtuous habits associated with property ownership; a commitment to a calling as opposed to a career; the virtue of loyalty; a preference for hope rather than optimism; and the ability to resist the vices of envy, resentment, and servility. “The central conservative insight,” Lasch wrote in 1990, “is that human freedom is constrained by the natural conditions of human life, by the weight of history, by the fallibility of human judgment, and by the perversity of the human will.”

I’ve gotta say that whoever is doing the Crunchy Con parody blog is really, really funny.

Crunchy heads explode.

Frederica’s point about why people like to buy processed chicken is well taken. Unprocessed food is, to put it bluntly, too close to death for most of us to take; too close to raw nature, red in tooth and claw. As VDH remarked in the bit I cited a few days ago, even the organic food lovers don’t really want real fruit. There is only so much reality modern man can take, and it seems he can take less and less of it as time goes on. But reality won’t be kept at bay forever, which is why we need to keep front and center the economic argument made in (appropriately) The Economist: soggy systems (those that divorce people from reality) lead to poverty.

On another related note, I wrote a short essay soon after I began to raise chickens that has some relevance to the discussion. It is archived in the Christianity Today library but since full access requires payment, I’ll reproduce the whole thing here (warning: Thoreau is cited favorably and please, don’t send me emails telling me that he carted his laundry home to his mother, I know).

About a month ago, my family and I got chickens for the first time. I sheltered them and fed them, and they began to thrive. How elegantly simple, I thought. Dinner (and breakfast) simmering slowly, very slowly, just outside my back door. Of course, it has turned out not to be simple at all. There’s the daily watering and feeding and the intermittent cleaning and moving the pen to fertilize a different patch of ground. And the weather and foxes have taken on new significance, both threatening to end my quest for sustenance in a fit of violence.

It is fascinating to be responsible for—to care for—my food weeks and even months before I will eat it. In doing so I am clumsily taking up the intricate dance steps performed by most of those who have gone before me. And by repeating and renewing the motions my ancestors knew by heart, I begin to rebuild old ways of knowing. These ways of knowing teach me about this place, this patch of ground; and they teach me about my connections to those who went before me and those who will come after. I have begun, ever so slightly, to think differently about the world. There is epistemology in everything we do. If raising chickens can change the way one thinks about the world, other methods of finding food can have a similar effect. Our culture’s dominant way of knowing, when it comes to chickens, is the supermarket. The supermarket sells a highly refined and mediated kind of knowing, just the opposite of what the chicken coop has to offer. The knowledge one gets at the supermarket is sterile, chilled, sliced, and packaged.

The supermarket is the Windows operating system of the family table, user friendly to a fault. The guts of the program are hidden beneath the surface. The seamless web of knowledge from egg to chicken to omelet or pot-pie is processed and reduced to its most consumable parts.

How does the epistemology of the supermarket affect the rest of our lives? I’m beginning to think that its effect is more dramatic than we realize. After all, we will only find things to love from the spectrum of what we know.

Henry David Thoreau wrote of his experience with beans: “It was a singular experience[,] that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them—the last was the hardest of all—and I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans.” Those who buy chicken meat at the supermarket (I among them for the time being) can eat chicken to their hearts’ content (and most do), but they will never know chickens. And because they will never know chickens, they will never be capable of loving the surprising things revealed by such knowledge.

A bit more about that letter: I don’t mean to suggest that only crunchy-con parents worry about the pornification of the public square and its effect on their kids. Most conservatives do, and a lot of liberals besides. What I think is particularly crunchy about that woman’s letter was the sense that she and her family need to retreat behind defensible borders, so to speak. Tom Hibbs and I have been e-mailing about a particular weakness he sees in the CC idea, which is a lack of clarity about how much crunchy cons need to separate from the world and how much we have a duty to be a part of it. That’s going to be the focus of the final week of discussion, so I don’t want to jump-start that here. I did want to head off the inevitable e-mails accusing me of saying that only crunchy cons care about the degraded public environment.

"My point is that when I eat that brand of chicken, I am supporting all that. People don’t see that."

I’m afraid he’s right: I don’t see that. The individual purchaser is so remote in the causal chain that I doubt buying this chicken even qualifies as material cooperation in the evils he cites. A similar argument could be made that one supports any number of bad things by paying one’s taxes. (Of course, paying taxes, unlike buying a particular brand of chicken, isn’t voluntary, in the sense that one couldn’t choose not to without suffering a stiff penalty. But isn’t coerced participation in evil even more worthy of resistance?)

It’s true that if no one bought this chicken, the company would go out of business and the exploitation would cease--in its particular case. But that strikes me as trivial. If a company is not willing to act ethically, the responsibility for the exploitation falls first of all on the government, which refuses to enforce standing laws that would prevent these evils, secondly on the distributors and stores that buy the chicken, etc.

I don’t condone these practices or that I think that it is necessarily futile for individual purchasers to try to influence them (I think Bruce’s criteria are sensible, for instance), but in cases like this “doing something” is supererogatory. Citing buying a particular brand of chicken as evidence of a lack of Christian unity is laying too heavy a burden on one’s fellows. An operative phrase in Bruce’s post is “whenever possible”. I would go to the cheapest brain surgeon if I needed brain surgery and he was all I could afford.

If we’re concerned about having a unity of life, there is plenty of material for examination a lot closer to home. I’m certainly not impugning Mr. Salatin, but I think it is a particular temptation of our culture to be more concerned, like Mrs. Jellyby, with what is remote than with what is going on under our own roofs.

Very practical suggestions, Bruce. I especially like this one:

2. Whenever possible, become a regular. What works at your local bar (getting you in on occasion without paying a cover, getting to know what items on the menu are best, when the cook is having an off-night, etc.) also works at the store; and it's just a lot more pleasant to go someplace where you can have a talk with the bartender/clerk/piano player/owner.

I should note that one local merchant, the owner of an independent coffee shop, tried to rally the neighborhood against the new Starbucks that was coming in. Down with corporate giantism! he’d shriek. He failed, and it was deeply satisfying to see him fail. Why’d his campaign bomb? Because he couldn’t stand kids. He hated to have kids in his shop, and he was such an obnoxious leftie that his café was filled with all kinds of p.c. rules, and posters. But mostly he failed because his shop was unfriendly to small children, and as anyone in that neighborhood knew, it’s moms with strollers who retreated from their apartments to coffee shops to socialize. The Starbucks, on the other hand, was as friendly and as welcoming as it possibly could have been to these moms and their kids. The un-neighborly jerk closed up shop, and Starbucks, a good neighbor, still thrives.

Interesting posts this morning! As we await the inevitable charge that crunchiecons want everyone to become, in effect, Amish, I offer the following as a list of "crunchy action items" that might possibly show the practicability of a life led the "crunchy way" without necessitating a return to the farm?

1. Whenever possible, buy from local, independent proprietors--if not the farmer, then a local owner, preferably not just the franchisee.
2. Whenever possible, become a regular. What works at your local bar (getting you in on occasion without paying a cover, getting to know what items on the menu are best, when the cook is having an off-night, etc.) also works at the store; and it's just a lot more pleasant to go someplace where you can have a talk with the bartender/clerk/piano player/owner.
3. Whenever possible, get to know where your local proprietor gets his stuff. He may be a lot more open to your concerns than you think.
4. Don't fool yourself. Just because somebody claims to be a good Christian or member of some other religion, doesn't mean he obeys the law, let alone the moral code of any real faith.
5. Be willing to put your money where you mouth is, leaving even a comfortable "regular" place if you find that they are literally feeding you something bad for your body and/or soul.

This is not, to my mind, the same as the old hippie "think globally, act locally" slogan. It's a matter of knowing and living your values within your local community. As a lifelong conservative, this simply sounds right and natural to me.

Y'know, Rod, when I first read Salatin's comments in the book something about them surprised me--feels like something is incomplete. The question is, why don't legal Americans work (or want to work?) processing these chickens? You have to acknowlege, at least, that illegals are willing to break their backs at bottom-tier jobs like this, which curiously don't get taken by born-here workers. Are we a nation of snobs? Or does this train of thought lead us back to the need for a "family wage"?

A few years ago I visited one of the mega-vast-o-warehouse stores just after Christmas, when the lack of customers made it seem even more immense than it is. I expected a tumbleweed to roll across the concrete floor. It got me thinking about what it does to us to buy food, a daily entity that is so very personal, from something so immense. I found this quote in Vance Packard's 1957 The Hidden Persuaders:

An Indiana supermarket operator nationally recognized for his advanced psychological techniques told me he once sold a half ton of cheese in a few hours, just by getting an enormous half-ton wheel of cheese and inviting customers to nibble slivers and cut off their own chunks for purchase....The mere massiveness of the cheese, he believes, was a powerful influence in making the sales. "People like to see a lot of merchandise," he explained....A test by "The Progressive Grocer" showed that customers buy 22 percent more if the shelves are kept full.

We’re trying to keep the discussion on topic, but every now and then I get a letter that I feel that I have to post, because it offers such a vivid picture of life as we live it in contemporary America. This one came in this morning from a semi-homeschooling mom, born-again Christian and organic-foods eater who lives in suburban New Jersey. She says she has been feeling increasingly alienated from American life:

My latest conflict has to do with the growing number of Christians who are selling out to the pop/porn culture, providing their children with TVs in their bedrooms, and video games to substitute for playmates. I was chagrined at the home schooling co-op we belonged to last year, where, during their spare time, the socialization of 7-12 year old boys consisted of sitting around watching each other playing Gameboys. At this year's co-op, the Gameboys stay home, but the discussions between children almost always center around video games they have or movies they've seen. It's not that my children never do these things, but I had always hoped it wouldn't be a focal point for them. Kids don't know what to talk about any more.

My paradigm shift (the intense desire to get out of here) was really set into motion after several disturbing things occurred recently: my son was exposed to pornography twice in his first grade classroom; the 8 year old neighbor boy showed him a poster of scantily clad women and when I mentioned it to the mom, she responded with, "So?" At our block party, a 13 year old boy, while eating a hot dog with some of the little boys in the neighborhood, opened his pants to display his "equipment" and continued to describe a porn flick to them. I drove up to my house one day and the work truck at my neighbor's house had the back open with pin-ups plastered to the back wall. Thankfully, my kids were safe inside the house. I was outside doing school with the kids one particularly beautiful day last spring and my neighbor, also enjoying the weather, was washing his truck, and had a talk show blasting on the radio with a constant stream of profane drivel spilling forth. I thought, my kids aren't even safe from the porn culture in their own yard. It's like a heavy smog in the air.

I am realizing, little by little, that I don't belong in suburban NJ and that there must be somewhere I would fit in better. It will probably involve a move out to PA since both our families are in the NJ area. I am looking forward to reading your book, and getting encouragement for my chosen path of resistance. As much as I have grown used to taking the road less traveled, it does feel so good when I run into the occasional crunchy con and can relax and freely be myself without excuse.

We’re winding down the food discussion today, and I’d like to start the home and architecture chapter around midday, so we can get into a battle-royal over McMansions and historical preservation before the weekend. On food, I’d like to post the following “Crunchy Cons” quote taken from Joel Salatin, the Evangelical Christian livestock farmer who highlights the hidden cost of cheap chicken:

As far as Joel is concerned, too many religious conservatives separate church from life. That is, they think all that’s required to get to heaven is to hold correct doctrine. Joel says that religious truth should illuminate and inform every aspect of a believer’s life. He brought up a well-known chicken magnate who has a reputation for being a conservative evangelical Christian.

“But his chicken-processing plants are consistently raided by immigration agents who find illegal aliens working there,” Joes said. “The children of those illegals come in and clog the school systems. And so what happens is the taxpayers end up picking up the tab for the additional school buildings that have to be built because suddenly all the classroom space that was used for instruction is now used for English as a second language tutorials.”

Joel listed several other serious social and moral problems resulting from the chicken tycoon’s exploitation of illegal Mexican labor. “My point is that when I eat that brand of chicken, I am supporting all that. People don’t see that. See, that’s the disconnect. We wouldn’t for a minute say, Let’s go to the cheapest church in town; let’s hire the cheapest preacher we can get. We wouldn’t say, Let’s go to the cheapest brain surgeon. But we’re very happy to put on the lowest respect level and honor level the stewards of our food system and the stewards of our landscape.”

Rod, these comments from a story about the Amish and their struggle to maintain an agrarian way of life lends support to Joel Salatin’s view of the inherent value of farm life. The entire article shows how the Amish are dealing with almost every issue you raise in your book--a Crunchy Con microcosm:

[When] Eighty-year-old Emanuel Hershberger … was younger, 90 percent of the Amish there were full-time farmers. Now about 10 percent are, he said. … “The cost of farming got to a place where they couldn’t make a living anymore,” he said. [They have been] forced out of agriculture because of land prices, the large startup investment required and the Amish population growth. “The shift from farm to non-farm employment is the biggest social change in the last century in Amish life…”

The loss of farming deprives the Amish of some of their cultural bonds, including the opportunity to work together. … Outside jobs hamper other traditions, like eating every meal together as a family. “My parents wouldn’t have thought about not having three meals a day (together),” Hershberger said.

....About 90 percent of Amish youth remain with the church, the highest percentage since at least the 1930s. ….With the population doubling every 20 years, in another century the Amish could number more than 5.7 million, which is about half of Ohio’s current population. Kline doubts that they will continue to grow at that clip. “My guess is we’ll be influenced by larger society and have smaller families,” he said. About 20 percent of Amish businesses are owned by women, which also could impact family size, Kraybill said.

Kline is a well-read Amish man with copies of “Fast Food Nation” and other mainstream books in his home. … [He] believes Amish youth will continue to keep the faith even as the outside world changes around them. “As the American family disintegrates ... I think more young people will want to stay for the security and the values that are being taught,” he said.

From a reader:

This place sounds like a candidate for the crunchiest spot on earth...

...Until the European Union ruined it, that is.

March 09, 2006

More from the article cited below:

The politicization of America’s family crisis did not begin during, say, the late 1960s. It goes back at least one hundred years, to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. The scourge of divorce (the Reno divorce mills were up and running by then), the immorality of birth control, the dangers of equity feminism, the peril of shrinking family size and depopulation: all drew Mr. Roosevelt’s frequent and often eloquent commentary between 1900 and 1919.

Roosevelt crafted his own ideology of the hearth, resting on the political and legal equality of women and men and their necessary complementarity in function. Indeed, he equated traditional familism with Americanism: “[I]n all the world there is no better and healthier home life, no finer factory of individual character, nothing more representative of what is best and most characteristic in American life, than that which exists in the higher type of family; and this higher type of family is to be found everywhere among us.”

And yet Roosevelt was nearly unique among early twentieth-century Republican leaders. The dominant spirit in the GOP came from the great bankers, financiers, and manufacturers who made up the corporate-financial wing of the party. Its views on the family were very different. In 1904, the National Association of Manufacturers adopted resolutions designed to subvert the “family wage,” including: “No limitation should be placed upon the opportunities of any person to learn any trade to which he or she may be adapted.”

When equity feminists formed the National Woman’s Party in 1917, they, too, pushed for equal work and equal pay for women outside the home. (There is evidence to suggest that the National Association of Manufacturers secretly funded the party.) When this party drafted its proposed Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, it came as no surprise that the National Association of Manufacturers immediately endorsed it and that Republicans served as its chief sponsors in both the US House and Senate. The Republican party also was the first to endorse the ERA in its Platform.

The common goals of the equity feminists and big business—hostility to the “family wage”; the inclusion of all women, especially young mothers, in the labor market; the commodification of all human activity—made this a strong political alliance. Once the Birth Control League of America cleverly changed its name to Planned Parenthood, it, too, found a compatible home in the GOP; indeed, by the 1950s, Planned Parenthood was a favored charity among Republican women’s clubs.

Read the whole thing to get a glimpse of the much more complex picture of evolving relationships between and among gender equity, sex, family, life issues, corporate interests, and the various political factions in America over the last 100 years. With this background the divisions revealed by Rod’s probing begin to make more sense.

Here’s a recent article by Allan Carlson that every conservative, regardless of prefix, ought to pay attention to. An excerpt:

Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 implied the necessity of a “family wage.” A more forceful articulation came from an American priest, Father John Ryan, in 1916 in a book called Distributive Justice: “The laborer has a right to a family Living Wage because this is the only way in which he can exercise his right to the means of maintaining a family, and he has a right to these means because they are an essential condition of normal life.”

Pope Pius XI directly endorsed the family wage idea in 1931 in Quadragesimo Anno. In a long commentary on this document, the Jesuit author Oswald von Nell-Brenning emphasized the radical consequences of the “family wage”:

“It will be absolutely necessary to see to it that female labor is kept from the labor market, something that will have to be attained by prudent and clear-sighted measures. Everyone knows that this cannot be accomplished by decree but requires a far-reaching reconstruction of the entire economic system.”

In the United States, at least, a somewhat less rigorous version of this “family wage” economy did exist between 1900 and 1965. It rested in part on public policy (more on that later) and in part on a culturally enforced form of conscious, open job discrimination: the phenomena of so-called men’s jobs (marked by higher wages and salaries and long-term tenure) and women’s jobs (oriented to lower pay and short-term tenure).

However, the revolutionary principle of pure sexual equality, embodied in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, shattered this system. The real wages of men fell, and the flow of young mothers into the workforce resumed.

Today, no one in America really talks about the “family wage,” except equity feminist historians who still, with great ritual, regularly dance on its grave. And yet the underlying problems posed by families living in an industrial milieu are still very much with us. There are, for example, muddled campaigns in our day for a “living wage,” although they are marked by intentionally ambiguous normative goals. Does a modern “living wage” assume one or two earners per household? Never a clear answer.

But a true “family wage” would solve, or at least sharply reduce, many of the problems so often complained about today—and so often “solved” by simultaneously accepting the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon family life and asking government to reduce its effects. Contemporary complaints over a lack of quality day care, mounting talk of a “care giving deficit,” the growing “elder care” crisis, so-called work/family conflicts: all derive from the disorders created by the separation of work and home.

Rod, as a Tory I of course favor local food traditions. I grew up with Singin’ Hinnies, Saveloy Sandwiches and Stottie Cakes, none of which are particularly easy to get outside of the North-East of England. My trouble with the Slow Food movement is, as I intimated, that it is too dogmatic. One day I’d love a bowl of Pan Haggerty, but the next I’d like a bowl of Vietnamese Pho. If that pho requires spices and ingredients that are not native to the area, and which have to be imported from far away, then I see nothing wrong with that. Slow food, on the other hand, is an avowedly protectionist body that believes in import tariffs and barriers to make such imports deliberately more expensive. I happen to think New Zealand butter is the best I have tasted and am glad that Commonwealth trade links meant it was freely available when I was growing up. Slow Food wouldn’t approve. The slow food manifesto is a pretty scary document to me, showing its communist roots to the extent that you could delete “food” and replace the word with, say, “steel” in very many cases. And their application of the precautionary principle is deeply wrong, in my opinion. More of that anon, I expect.

So I wouldn’t join Slow Food. I wouldn’t join a Fast Food movement if there were such a thing either. The analogy to CAMRA I made earlier is what I’d like to see. A movement that repudiates the health extremists who are responsible for much of the homogenization of our food and exists to strengthen the demand side for good food, so that the market can provide such food at a reasonable price for everyone, everywhere that they want it. It should be noted that the ales of the Burton area, where the water is particularly conducive to good beer, are now available all over the UK thanks to CAMRA’s work, but regional breweries still thrive--CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival every August is a great showpiece for them (perhaps you’d like to go with me this year or next, Rod?). No beer purity laws were needed--just the pull of the market. It happened with beer. It can happen with food.

Frederica, it probably hasn’t come up here because of a choice I made to put discussion of Matt’s book in the Environmentalism chapter, not the food chapter, because I used his arguments to open up a discussion about the attitude we have toward the natural world. A reader just emailed with a critique of Dominion, but I’ll save it for the Environmentalism discussion.

As Food Week draws to a close, I'm surprised that "factory farming" of meat hasn't been more of a topic. Oh, there have been a couple of questions about it's being regulated, but what about the reality itself? Was anyone else stricken by the descriptions in Rod's book?

And as I went on to read Scully's Dominion, I was horrified at images, for example, of endless rows of pigs in cages too small for them either to stand or lie down; limbs protruding into adjoining cages get wounded and broken. But this damage is ignored, because it won't affect the production of meat. The pig only has to cling to life long enough to be worth slaughtering. When you bring home the bacon, the label says "Brown's Country Farm" and shows a picture of a cozy farmhouse under an old oak tree. The meat inside was never near such a place.

If CC is a "sensibility," this is exactly the kind of thing that troubles our senses. As conservatives, we find it violates principles of conservation. And it demands a personal response, regardless of whether or not this is a matter amenable to public policy; it affects life at home.

Do regular C's just shrug it off, because factory farming maximizes production? Is it a scrap of litmus paper that tells Crunchys from Regulars?

Joel Salatin, an Evangelical livestock farmer from the Shenandoah Valley, tells me in Crunchy Cons that there is a deeper value to the agrarian lifestyle, one that can’t be measured on a balance sheet. He sounds a lot like Ross when he talks about monasteries. Here’s Joel, from p. 84 of the book:

”You know what we’re losing? Common sense,” he says. “There is a wisdom that comes into a culture when many of its people have a direct connection to the land and to life, to the living cycles. I seem any of the political agendas today as a total failure to understand life, seasons, accountatiblity, and the connections of life and people to our community. There’s just no connection, and so there’s no reason, there’s no common sense. You can blame as many people on the right as on the left.”

Iain, a reader points out that you do not approve of Slow Food. My bad--I misread your last post. Can you tell me what it is you dislike about Slow Food as a matter of principle?

Ricardo from Michigan writes:

I wonder if you've thought about what would happen to family farms if the regulatory scheme you talk about really was dismantled and a more free-market system was created. I mean this in the sense that I don't believe it's self-evident that the boutique or family farms would actually survive. I do think in the long run, that these sort of farms would again rise as Jonah says, but in the transition, those farms do presently exist within the same regulatory framework as agribusiness and have far less resources to survive such a transition. I went to law school with a guy whose family owned a small cattle ranch out west, and he was extremely pro-subsidy. And it makes sense- although the vast majority of subsidies certainly go to agribusiness, there is some truth to the family farm talking point; they do get subsidies, after all.

Like I said, I think in the long run the scenario Jonah describes is the likely one. But I think it might be more a function of the levelled playing field encouraging new market entry by smaller participants than the present small farmers sticking around while Monsanto files for bankruptcy. So while it'd encourage smaller farms in the long run, it might come at the cost of the current family farms. A gradual shift away from subsidies might lessen this effect, but I still see the larger companies surviving a shift more easily than small ones.

We seem to have petered out the food discussion, so perhaps we should wrap things up before we start a food fight. Before we do, I would like to draw attention to a movement of which that Iain would (I suspect) heartily approve: Slow Food. Well, you might not approve of their entire philosophy, Iain--they are, for example, against bioengineered crops; I myself don’t understand why bioengineering to create, say, a vastly more nutritional grain of rice to feed the world’s poor is such a bad thing. Still, the general Slow Food concept is something conservatives should have no trouble embracing. It calls for people to value their food culture, especially their local food culture, as an expression of what makes their part of the world unique. It calls on people to eat more meals at home, and when you eat out, to patronize restaurants that specialize in local food prepared in traditional ways. Slow Food believes that we should use our consumer dollars to support small agriculture producers and food artisans, and tries to encourage the development of local agricultural economies.

Here in north Texas, Robert Hutchins at Rehoboth Farms doesn’t want to expand his business beyond the Dallas area, because he is committed to the principle that a healthy society will develop local agricultural economies that favor small producers. His view reminds me of something someone told me not long ago about the Orthodox Church: that the Greeks aside, most Orthodox churches will split before becoming too big, because they believe the spiritual needs of believers are best served by small-scale worship communities. A similar ethic guides what people like Hutchins do when it comes to agriculture.

Now that’s an interesting idea, Jonah. I’ve wondered if changing the regulatory laws to make it easier for small agriculture producers to compete with giant business concerns might actually make it possible to repopulate at least some of the plains towns that are vanishing. Part of this involves convincing American consumers to change their tastes, in the same way that you can now get great beer and great coffee most anywhere now because people demand a higher level of quality. As I’ve said a million times, I am not convinced of the health claims made for organic produce (as distinct from meat raised in a non-factory way), but I am certain of the aesthetic superiority of produce that is locally grown. The apples we bought when we lived in NYC are incomparably better than the apples we get here in Texas, because they were much fresher. This is how aesthetics can shift an economy.

If we find ourselves some years or decades from now in a peak-oil situation, in which it costs an arm and a leg to ship food across the country, the value of local agriculture will be all too apparent.

I don’t know what to make of the perennial problem of the French farmers and the EU. I instinctively sympathize with the protectionism there, and the determination to protect local traditions against the standardization of the Eurocrats in Brussels. People – well, French people, God bless them – feel differently about food than they do about other products. There is something of their national character in their food – and if you’ve ever eaten in France, you can see exactly why they feel this way.

Here's an argument for crunchy agrarianism I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to. Subsidized American agriculture hurts developing nations. Agriculture is one of the few things that poor, semi-literate societies can do pretty well -- especially with some help from NGOs. Our industrialized agriculture makes foreign farms uncompetitive in the world marketplace. If we killed subsidies entirely, some sectors would do just fine -- fruit growers try to keep the government out of their business, for example. Others would probably fizzle out. This would help oursource American agriculture to the global market where it makes economic sense to do so. In the process some American farmland would revert back to its natural state (as has already happened in much of the northeast). Some of it would go to boutiquey vanity agriculture of the sort bobos and crunchies prefer. The added value wouldn't be quantity but quality. American farming would become more like Starbucks, less like Wal-Mart. Our environment would improve, poor countries would get richer faster -- which is the only way to get them to care about their environments and democracy.

Of course, this would require American politicians (particularly Senators) to abandon the often absurd arguments about family farming in the US, which are often simply cover for agribusiness. It would also accelerate the ruralification (assuming that's a word) of much of Red America and destroy many of the communities crunchies revere most. But, there is no free lunch, even when it's organic.

The last thing I want to do is start another endless round of back-and-forth with those determined not to take any of this neotraditionalism seriously, except as an occasion to have a laugh. I’m going to let this e-mail from a reader in Georgia--a guy who is not altogether sold on CC--speak for me. And then I am going to go back to talking about food, culture and tradition:

I've been following the discussion on the Crunchy blog and in The Corner with interest. Haven't had the time to do more than get the tiniest taste of the book itself yet, but shall soon.

Your "frat-boy sneering" remark zeroes in on the worst feature of the anti-crunchy commenters. I don't know what is driving this exactly: the tendency of seculars to be freaked out by the intensely religious, East-coast urbanite myopia, transmogrified hippie-hatred, touchiness about criticism (real or imagined) of one's own lifestyle, or something else entirely. But I have been taken aback by the intense, and sometimes flat-out nasty, reaction. I am a longtime enthusiastic NR/NRO supporter (and donor, to the extent my limited means allow). Last week, for the first time, I had had enough and regretfully sent in an e-letter of complaint.

Now I myself am hardly an uncritical fan of the crunchy movement. I have reacted to the blog with equal parts vigorous nodding and rueful head-shaking, and appreciate much of the thoughtful-yet-tough criticism. At least half of what Jonah had to say in his anti-Crunchy magnum opus the other day seemed right on target to me. It was a valuable contribution, setting out some wise "you don't want to go there" warning signs and highlighting areas where the Crunchy-Con idea is, at least so far, quite frankly a mess.

But there's good in it too. I see in the Crunchy Con idea the makings of a useful corrective to tendencies that need curbing; and plenty of ideas that may not always be new, but are certainly in need of rediscovery, reworking, and where necessary reclaiming from the Left. Yes, there is much that needs further development; and there are some aspects to it, some trappings here and there, that would be best discarded down the road. That some folks would disagree vigorously with this point or that is healthy and expected. That the very raising of those points so gets under their skin is just odd.

I mean, look at the National Review family more generally. It strives to be a broad church; and while it is rarely in the tank for anybody, disagreements with fellow conservatives (and even many centrists) are often carefully and respectfully--even regretfully--expressed. Especially compared to some of the crunchy-baiting I've seen going on around here.

Yes, setting up the blog on NRO was a very good thing, and is much appreciated. But just look at all the snark that's been directed at the blog. *This* is how you demonstrate that all of Rod's good ideas are already warmly accepted within mainstream conservatism, rendering his book and concept unnecessary? Sorry...blog or no blog, I'm not buying it.

Thanks for getting the debate started, giving folks like me plenty to agree with, disagree with, and gnaw on.

Of course, if you print this e-mail, I fully expect a response taunting us for being touchy-feely crypto-Lefties who just have our feelings hurt too easily...sigh...

Another benefit of the simple life: I bet none of those agrarians are listening to 36 Mafia as they hoe.

A reader writes:

I thoroughly enjoyed your book. However, if the Agrarian way of life is not for everyone, as you suggest, perhaps you're missing the forest for the trees. The Agrarian life offers a variety of entrance points without putting a single hoe to the earth. Those of us "Crunchy Cons," or (as I like to call myself) "New Traditionalists" (semantics, yes I know), can "engage" in Agrarian ways of life by living as "supportive" Agrarians. The "supportive" Agrarian is one who stands as a vital and necessary (yes we are) link in the Agrarian embrace.

These Agrarian supporters take part in the practical morality of Agrarian life by buying shares in Community Supported Agriculture, or by acting as environmental patriots and supporting initiatives to preserve the lands that keep us fed, homed and awed, or by creating nooks of these supporting sensibilities in our suburbs and big and midsized cities.

Think of the Agrarian life as a commandment to be lived by all; one comes at it as farmer and another to support the farmer's foundation. Remember, when thinking Agrarian, think continuity, not necessarily triumph.

I’ve argued explicitly in at least two posts (here and here) that CC would thrive if there was less government regulation.

Perhaps it would be better not to assert that “no one” (or everyone, for that matter) on this blog argues something, unless one has read every single post, especially the really erudite ones, like mine.

I suspect, Jonah, that dig was meant for me. Which is kind of flattering, because I attended the University of Chicago, where the frats are, if possible, even nerdier, less cool, and more inclined to a "Love's Labour's Lost" asceticism and sobriety than the rest of the campus. Since you went, if memory serves, to a women's college, I don't see how the frat boy remark could possibly apply to you.

Dreher, on the other hand, went to one of those big state schools with lotsa frats.

… emails me:

This is really risible, the never-ending debates about what does or does not constitute conservatism at NRO. The critique of this is quite obvious-- the fusionist project emerged in the Cold War, whose climate created a sociological buttress for an otherwise utterly incoherent alliance. The Cold War is over and now some "traditionalists" are seeing the light of day. It is indeed unfortunate that so many astute Catholics have been caught up in all this and therefore distracted from working through their tradition, preferring instead to perpetuate discussions that have little or no philosophical and theological substance at their heart.

Here's e-mailer Christian Mastilak again:

Hey all,

The readers who think the "crunchy agenda" would involve lots of newly restrictive regulation apparently haven't read the book. Rod outlines how existing regulation already intrudes on the power of individuals (producers, and thus indirectly consumers) to act, and how existing regulations seriously tilt the playing field in favor of large agribusiness. (I admit I'm no expert in agricultural regs and am taking Rod's word on these things, but nobody has claimed they aren't true.)

So if we take Rod's claims as true, at least for the sake of argument, then we should read Rod's prescriptions as increasing the power of individuals. Rod's prescriptions are largely around eliminating the bias towards large agribusiness and against smaller family farming operations. Individual power is already restricted in a particular way that most of us don't see because we're not farmers; Rod proposes removing those restrictions.

To the extent that anyone complains about Rod's ideas, he is likely ignoring the producers' stake in the indiviudal-power issue and is seeing things only from the consumerist standpoint. Which is exactly Rod's point in all of this debate. The consumerist philosophy looks at the world from a Wal-Mart perspective (Always Low Prices!) and ignores the rest of life, including producers, hidden costs, and especially non-economic factors (i.e., the human soul). I'm not sure what those emails add to the debate except to show that there's a lot of educating to do about exactly what Rod (and, more broadly, the crunchy manifesto) supports and why.

By the way: "seriously reform" doesn't necessarily mean the dire things people think it means. New Zealand "seriously reformed" its farming industry by introdcing free-market reforms, ending subsidies and encouraging its farmers to compete on the world market. Now farming there is more efficient -- for example, the same lamb meat output from fewer animals -- and more environmentally sound - more diversity, rotation, etc. All of which the objecting reader ought to support.

And just to follow up on my last, it is “big government” in all its guises that makes most of what Rod complains about possible in the first place. The cult of corporate centralization, universalization, and efficiency depends on big government for its existence. Why do you think our government keeps getting bigger and more intrusive? It ain’t all (or even primarily) the fault of the bleeding heart lefties.

I'm assuming Rod's "frat boy" comment wasn't aimed at me, even though he seemed to be addressing a point nobody but me has made -- "does crunchy conservatism exist?"

But if I'm wrong about that, Rod, please let me know.

However, Rod seems to be falling back once again into the "it's a sensibility" thing. I don't mind that per se, since I agree that whatever crunchy conservatism is, "sensibility" goes a long way toward describing it. But even sensibilities can generate political programs. And the suggestion that crunchy conservatives don't have one is contradicted countless times in the book which has a manifesto and a suggested agenda. Also, Rod announces in the book that he supported a pro-choice liberal Democrat against a pro-life Republican incumbent in his local congressional race. Why? Because Joe Barton doesn't care enough about air pollution. Surely this is evidence of a pretty powerful political agenda for a mere "sensibility." Particularly for someone who is pro-life himself.

The emailer writes:

So far as I can tell, no one on the blog has objected to this idea of government interference, so the crunchies should not be too surprised if others suspect a totalitarian bent to their philosophy

Another e-mail:

To the degree that "crunchy cons" encourage people to choose to become more self-sufficient, they truly do support power being returned to the individual. But if they want to force that lifestyle on others through government interference, it's hard to see how that makes the individual more free.

Despite his assertion that he doesn't want to impose his priorities on others, Rod Dreher did seem to suggest last week that "factory farming" should be heavily regulated, if not abolished outright:

"As regards factory farming of livestock, if one regards it as seriously immoral, then it won’t do to say, 'But poor people will eat less meat if we ban or at least seriously reform it.' If it were a matter of people starving or animals being treated humanely, then of course people must come first. But if it’s a matter of eating less meat for the moral/ethical gain of refusing to participate in a degraded system of meat production, then that’s a cost I think society should absorb. We eat less meat in my family in part because of this. Society makes these kinds of distinctions all the time. It’s what the minimum wage is about. It’s what safety regulations on industry are all about. Only pure libertarians or anarchists would seriously argue that moral considerations shouldn’t govern to some degree our economic life, even if the state has to impose morality on commerce. Crunchy conservatives didn’t come up with this. But one thing I do say in the book is that people who believe!
in the kinds of ideals I extol don’t have to wait for the government to act; they can, and should, put these beliefs into practice themselves, by changing their consumer habits. Eating better (aesthetically and morally) meat, even if it means less of it, is one small way."

(03/02 11:56 AM)

Because he apparently thinks it is seriously immoral, Dreher thinks we ought to "ban or at least seriously reform" factory farming. Society should absorb the cost of doing so, just as we have absorbed the cost of the minimum wage (an act of government) and industrial safety regulations (another act of government). Crunchies "don't have to wait for government to act" in order to eat more "morally," but they apparently do want government to step in at some point.

So far as I can tell, no one on the blog has objected to this idea of government interference, so the crunchies should not be too surprised if others suspect a totalitarian bent to their philosophy.

An e-mail from an American in Baghdad:

You loyal NRO reader wrote: "The Conservative movement in this country, if you had to come up with one line on what it's about, is that it wants the return of power to the individuals and to communities. Crucnhy Cons do not do this."

That is absolutely false. People who can grow and cook their own meals, educate their own children, ride a bike to work, put together home remedies for various ailments, power their own homes with alternative energy, etc., have vastly more individual power than people who depend on corporations to supply every one of their daily needs. I don't expect to be entirely free of dependence upon corporations for things in my lifetime, but in the little steps I have taken (biking to work, gardening, home remedies, etc.), I have found a remarkable increase in my quality of life. As crunchy cons, we are not trying to force these kinds of choices onto other people; we're just making the case that this is a freer, happier, and more empowering way to live.

March 08, 2006

A crunchy e-mailer: "How do Crunchy Cons NOT return power to individuals? We're all about being individuals: not mindlessly going with the herd. It's about getting back to the root of it all: family."

A loyal NRO reader sends this e-mail:

I'm assuming most readers, like myself, don't know the roots of the Conservative movement. Our history goes back 50 years, at most. From what I understand, WFB stated NR to 1. fight and end Communism, 2. end the growth of the Federal govt., 3. show that Conservatives, in the words of Barbara Streisand, are not "dummies" and 4, gain control of the Republican party to make sure number 2 happened.

As far as I can tell, none of WFB's vision is in the Crunchy Con Ten Commandments. If anything, Crucnhy Conservatives run afoul of Conservative princples as most Americans know them. What if Crunchy Cons were to take control of the govt.? What would be the first order of business? Forced organic food in public schools? Tax increases for Wal Mart? An increase in the gas tax to help public transportation?

The Conservative movement in this country, if you had to come up with one line on what it's about, is that it wants the return of power to the individuals and to communities. Crucnhy Cons do not do this.

Rod writes: "I think it says something about where the conservative movement in America is today that some can't bring themselves to mount much more than frat-boy sneering at the kinds of ideas, concerns and questions that used to be front and center for our tribe."

Without defending the tone or substance of every post that’s appeared here or in The Corner, methinks you read too much into the casual nature of the blogosphere. It would seem to me that the presence of a blog dedicated to this idea you've put out there on National Review Online, Rod, suggests that discussions of what conservatism is are important to "the tribe."

Some of the ideas and concerns and questions that you raise in your book are not only in your book--they're concerns about family and tradition and things that come up in "tribal" circles (like, say, on this site) now and again and again. That some don't mount a substantive response to your book doesn't mean they are being rejected. And to read too much into some blog posts seems unfair to the "tribe."

Now despite my disdain for many of the arguments in favor of organic farming, I'm not sanguine about the homogenization of food. This is, I think, where the market has its most magnificent role to play. Thirty years ago British real ale was dead. The devillish sludge calling itself Watney's Red Barrell was dominant. The beer served in British pubs had about as much resemblance to the ale of our forefathers as New Coke. This was too much for a diehard band of ale-suppers. They founded the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) to get proper brews back in the English diet. They succeeded brilliantly. The demand side pulled the beer market back towards ales and the breweries responded. Even big brewers like Whitbread that had been placed under CAMRA interdict started brewing proper ales again. Now the big brewers and pub chains know that ale is the key to their success, and the market is supplied accordingly. Note that I do not consider the slow food movement to be the equivalent of CAMRA; they are much more like the uncompromising Society for the Preservation of Beer from the Wood, for whom any meeting of beer and metal is anathema. CAMRA wanted good, cheap beer, the market supplied it and CAMRA rejoiced.

The real enemy of good food these days is the health establishment, as Mark Steyn says and Rod admits. There are genuine threats to human health from food, and they must be eradicated in a caring world, but for the most part they have gone far too far. A couple of years ago, I wrote about this on my old blog, citing food superstar Tony Bourdain, in particular in his encomium to the fine London restaurant St. John:

(This is all Bourdain) These are dire times to be a chef who specializes in pork and offal. The EU has its eye on unpasteurized cheese, artisanal cheese, artisanal everything, shellfish, meat, anything that carries the slightest, most infinitesimal possibility of risk - or the slightest potential for pleasure. There is talk of banning unaged cheese, stock bones, soft-boiled or raw eggs. In the States, legislation has been suggested, mandating a written warning when a customer requests eggs over easy or a Caesar salad. ('Warning! Fork - if placed in eye - may cause injury!') A woman in the States won a lawsuit, claiming her coffee was too hot, scalding her as she stomped on the accelerator exiting the McDonald's parking lot. ('Warning! Deep-fried Mars bar - if stuffed down pants - may cause genital scarring!') The result of this unrestrained fear mongering, this mad rush to legislate new extremes of shrink-wrapped germ-free safety? Much like it was after Upton Sinclair's The Jungle scared the hell out of early-twentieth-century meat eaters - the absorption of small independents into giant factory farms and slaughter domes. Try and eat an American chicken and you will see what looms: bloodless, flavorless, colorless, and riddled with salmonella - a by-product of letting the little guys go under and the big conglomerates run things their way. [Sounds crunchy, no? But note what Bourdain blames it on - ISM]...

It's war. On one side, a growing army of hugely talented young British, Scottish, Irish, and Australian chefs, rediscovering their own enviable indigenous resources and marrying them with either new or brash concepts or old and neglected classics. On the other? A soul-destroying tsunami of bad, fake reproductions of what was already bad, fake New York 'Mexican' food. Gluey, horrible nachos, microwaved, never-fried 'refried' beans, fabric softener margaritas. Limp, soggy, watery, and thoroughly dickless 'enchiladas' and catsupy salsas. Clueless 'Pan-Asian' watering holes where every callow youth with a can of coconut milk and some curry powder thinks he's Ho Chi Minh. (Forget it. Ho could cook.) Sushi is almost nowhere to be found - in spite of the fact that the seafood in the UK is magnificent. You get more heart, soul, and flavor at an East End pie shop than at any of the rotten, fake, dumbed-down 'Italian,' ;Japanese fusion,' or theme purgatories. Even the cod - the basic ingredient of fish and chips - is disappearing. (I raised that subject with a Portuguese cod importer. 'The damned seals eat them,' was his answer. 'Kill more seals,' he suggested.")

Fortunately, Fergus and other like-minded souls are on the front lines, and they're unlikely to abandon their positions. Sitting at St. John, I ordered what I think is the best thing I have ever put in my mouth: Gergus's roasted bone marrow with parsley and caper salad, croutons, and sea sold.

Oh God, is it good. How something so simple can be so ... so ... absolutely luxurious. A few Flintstone-sized lenghts of veal shank, a lightly dressed salad ... Lord ... to tunnel into those bones, smear that soft gray-pink-and-white marrow onto a slab of toasted bread, sprinkle with some sel de gris ... take a bite ... Angels sing, celestial trumpets ... six generations of one's ancestors smile down from heaven. It's butter from God.

An article in Nature magazine back in 2001 was entitled "Urban Myths of Organic Farming" and makes for a fascinating read. In particular, it demonstrates that organic farming is not necessarily more environmentally friendly than conventional farming. A few of the main points:

*One of the key claims for organic farming is that organic pesticides work with nature and are environmentally "unstable" (ie biodegradable). However, synthetic pesticides are much more unstable than commonly believed--even at full pesticide dosage, insect population declines are temporary. And most synthetic agricultural chemicals are in fact less persistent than organic pesticides--especially with the newest generation of synthetics, developed in the last 20-30 years.

*Approved organic pesticides like copper sulphate, rotenone and b. thuringinensis are all just as potentially dangerous as their conventional equivalents.

*Certain conventional techniques such as mixed farming in smaller plots and the ley system provide benefits for wildlife equal to those claimed for organic farming but at far lower cost to the consumer.

*Many organic farmers also indulge in frequent mechanical weeding, which damages nesting birds, worms and invertebrates, and uses fossil fuels (with consequent nitrogen oxide pollution). Innocuous herbicide use avoids this environmental damage.

*Manure use does indeed increase earthworm populations, but there are downsides. For a start, conventional crop rotation appears just as effective in maintaining soil quality. Manure breakdown leads to nitrate leaching at rates identical to conventional farms and emits significant amounts of nitrous oxide and methane (greenhouse gases, as the environmentally aware will know). Most importantly, the resulting presence of e. coli in hay fed to livestock poses a significant threat to human health.

*Developments in conventional farming have meant that fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide production are much lower than in organic farming. European conventional farms are now setting aside the 30-50% less land they use than organic farms for willow trees, which means they outperform organic farms on any biological measure of environmental diversity, but this practice crucially depends on the most efficient use of land.

*The most environmentally sensitive farming methods in fact combine the best of traditional farming with responsible use of modern technology. Flexibility is essential.

In short, the argument that organic farming is always more environmentally friendly than conventional farming is difficult to substantiate. The search for efficiency has led to modern agricultural methods that are superior to both organic and practices generally derided as "agribusiness," but it is agribusiness that has led the way in the search for those new, environmentally friendly methods.

Ross makes excellent points. I asked in an earlier post whether the first question for the CC should be what God is asking of him.

Yet it seems to me that living in the world doesn’t require us to be “consumerist men”. A conservatism or a religion “attuned to the needs of most people” will show us how to be spiritually independent of the world without rejecting it, so that we won’t worry too much about money, or let our children watch too much television. I take this to be what Rod is really getting at.

Well, I'm about to get on the plane back to Dallas, so I'll be off the blog for the rest of the day. I do want to mention, though, that it's interesting to notice how we on the CC blog get accused of being grim and humorless, but when we engage in levity (I'm thinking of the Homer Simpson/Hank Hill thing), that's cited as evidence that there's really nothing to our ideas. I've been accused of trying to force everybody to live the CC lifestyle, but when I point out that all the book does is propose this kind of traditionalism as a better way to live, I'm then accused of not really believing what I say. Well, which is it?

The fact is that there are lots of conservatives who are traditionalists, and who take the kinds of ideas championed by Russell Kirk and his circle seriously, and who are actually interested in participating in conservative conversations about first principles and the way we live today, versus the usual Republican jibber-jabber about how awful the liberals are. There should always be conservatives asking what it means to live an authentically conservative life, and beyond that, what it means to live an authentically human life in a mass consumer society where it's harder than ever to hold on to tradition. (It's telling too that I'm getting e-mails from a few liberals who say that they've been thinking the same thing, and are disappointed that the Left is ignoring these same basic questions.) I think it says something about where the conservative movement in America is today that some can't bring themselves to mount much more than frat-boy sneering at the kinds of ideas, concerns and questions that used to be front and center for our tribe.

"baseless self-confidence and snarky condescension"

Touché!

Mark Steyn pokes his head in on crunchy conservatism long enough to sniff:

If Crunchy Cons aren't just another self-regarding lifestyle pose, they should be arguing for getting the state out of the barnyard.

I said town, Mitch, not city. Mecosta has no urban core, or the baseless self-confidence and snarky condescension that too often go therewith, but it ain't no farm, neither.

Bruce, you’ve got to be kidding.

An e-mail:

Yeah, this whole Homer Simpson thing has gotten completely out of control.
I don't really have a lot invested in this discussion in general, but my
advice to crunchies is: ditch the Homer Simpson thing. It's absurd.
Homer Simpson, Hank Hill, and Archie Bunker are not in any way crunchy.
The virtues that the're being lauded for aren't crunchy: they're just
plain old conservative. Trying to pull them into the crunchy net voids
crunchiness of all meaning--as though "crunchy" just meant "conservative".
This is ridiculous.

Indeed, Lisa Simpson is the crunchy of her family, and she is a bit
sanctimonious and insufferable. Something the crunchies should take heed
of. However, Lisa is also often the lone moral representative of her
family, and is in general more knowledgeable than they are (though maybe
not wiser.) Yet although she is a liberal, she maybe represents the
position crunchies find themselves in: they might have the moral high
ground, but no one likes being lectured to.

If crunchies want to be taken seriously, it seems they need to stop taking
credit for ideas that aren't theirs, and recognize their place as just one
conservative lifestyle among many. Only then could they begin to persuade
others that their lifestyle is attractive.

Sorry for the radio silence (I have all sorts of thoughts on Homer and crunchiness, but I haven't yet been able to give them coherent shape). I was struck, though, by Rod's correspondent's argument that "this way of life may not be for everyone"--which is a statement I completely agree with, but which gets at the heart of our current dilemma. As Caleb and Bruce have been quick to say, an agrarian way of life isn't for everyone (it's probably not for me!), but the more important point is that it is for someone--Victor Davis Hanson's ten percent, perhaps--and when it disappears that disappearance comes at great cost to society. It's similar, I think, to the traditional Christian attitude toward monasticism, poverty, celibacy, and so on--which wasn't that every rich man needed to sell all he had and enter a monastery, but that some did. Christ told the rich young man to give away all his possessions and follow him, but he didn't tell that to everyone he met--it was a specific mission for a specific person, or kind of person. At the moment, though, that mission seems to be vanishing into the shadows of American Christendom, forced out of the limelight by megachurches, bestselling pop theologians, and preachers for whom a large congregation and a swank auditorium are the only necessary signs of God's grace.

Right now, I'm struggling with an article about Christianity and money in modern America, and this point keeps hitting home for me--that our difficulty is not so much the presence of commercial capitalism as the absence of alternatives. We're a rich, post-industrial country, so of course most people are going to live in cities or amid suburban sprawl, shop at Safeway instead of the farmer's market, let their kids watch too much TV, worry too much about money, and so on. And conservatism, like Christianity, needs to be attuned to the needs, political and spiritual, of most people--the Homer Simpsons of the world, the non-crunchy and consumerist man who can still be virtuous or even heroic. But it also needs to cultivate alternatives. We need farmers and artisans the way we need monks and nuns, as leaven in the loaf, and we don't have enough of either.

You are all are so retro and groovie and psychedelic that I thought you would have experienced Screaming Yellow Zonkers, well known in 1970s, and STILL available today (Bruce, you can order your case here) despite all efforts of the Fat Police. It was a famous pop culture munchie, although maybe Sam Drucker wasn't selling them in Hooterville. Of course, SYZ has sold out, like so many of us who eat processed foods, own microwaves, and bathe daily: they're the corporate sibling of Fiddle Faddle and Poppycock, which are surely other food stuffs verboten in crunchieland. That said, I've got to extract myself from this blog--I grew up in the Bronx, and the closet we ever came to anything "agrarian" was an Armenian family that lived on the corner--and get back to the real world. Maybe I'll sell some luxurious, indulgent NR cruises. Hey, how about a Crunchy Con cruise?! ("Join us as we raft down the Mississippi .")

For the reader who questions the agrarian imperative, one of the most reasonable, common-sense statements I’ve read about what we can all do, whatever our circumstances, to live better, and avoid ideologies that enslave us, comes from Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, a book based on hard, psychological research into the question: Why are people increasingly unhappy even as they experience greater material abundance and freedom of choice?

“If enhanced freedom of choice and increased affluence don't enhance well-being, what does? The most important factor seems to be close social relations. People who are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those who are not. People who participate in religious communities are happier than those who do not. Being connected to others seems to be more important to well-being than being rich or 'keeping your options open.'

In the context of this discussion of choice, it is important to note that, in many ways, social ties actually decrease freedom of choice. Marriage, for example, is a commitment to a particular other person that curtails freedom of choice of sexual or emotional partners. Serious friendship also entails weighty responsibilities and obligations that at times may limit one's own freedom. The same is true, obviously, of family. And most religious institutions call on their members to live their lives in a certain way, and to take responsibility for the well-being of their fellow congregants. So, counterintuitive as it may appear, what seems to contribute most to happiness binds us rather than liberates us.”

One of the more persuasive claims made for local organic farming in Rod's book is that you know where your food is coming from. Sadly, that's not always the case.

I asked my colleague Greg Conko, one of the leading researchers in food policy, about the claim that the "speedy-growing fruits and vegetables so loved by agribusiness" are losing nutrients over time. His reply:

The data do appear to indicate that--though for most of the nutrients studied, the decline is not statistically significant. But this is so for all foods, not just "agribusiness" crops, and there is no basis for claims that organic produce is more nutritious. In any event, higher yielding crops are desired by everyone. It's not that "agribusiness" crops grow faster than others (they don't). Nor is that why nutritional value appears to have declined slightly. It's that conventional plant breeding is necessarily a hit or miss prospect, in which you often have to trade some characteristics for others. Incidentally, the advent of recombinant DNA techniques to improve crops could eliminate that trade-off by making it possible to boost yields AND boost nutrition.

I'm a great fan of VDH--I am a conservative classicist, after all--but I found something about one of his statements quoted below jarring. "If just 10 percent of our population lived on farms, did not move, never divorced, did not change jobs, and set the parameters of their day by dawn and dusk, the current madness could be stopped." Agrarianism has nothing to do with this. If one removed the "lived on farms" part, the rest would accomplish the same thing. Or is the suggestion that "living on farms" actually causes the other characteristics and they cannot be achieved without it? The ancients recognized the cultural distinction between urbs and rus, but such an extreme characterization is, well, Arcadian.

… on agrarianism. Rod, in response to your correspondent, just a few points. First, I am not and have never been advocating on behalf of a “lifestyle.” Second, if I or others praise the virtues (political and otherwise) of the yeoman class I am not saying everyone has to do it, much as one who praises the virtues of the military is usually not saying that everyone must join up. Note Hanson’s figure of a 10% yeoman class. Much like Colonel Jessup argued: someone has to make the sacrifices, take on the hardships, sit on the wall or walk behind the plow, for the rest of us to enjoy the freedoms we have. Actually, I think there are a great number of parallel motivations behind our society’s anti-military turn and its anti-agrarian turn. That might be something worth consideration by conservatives. And finally, if readers don’t like the agrarian argument, it’s not really me they need to reckon with, but stalwart conservatives like Victor Davis Hanson, as excerpted below, for example.

Maybe you guys have discussed this already, but a new planned suburban community for serious Catholics Pretty sounds like the sort of thing you folks might find interesting. I know I do.

The skeptical reader deserves a much deeper response than a blog probably can provide. (Such a long way from Homer Simpson and company!) But I want to take a first crack at it, because he gets to a number of important issues in questioning whether we all (or indeed many of us) are called to a truly agrarian lifestyle. I know one thing for certain: I'm not. Perhaps this is very uncrunchy of me, but if you had told me a few months ago that I would be happily referring to crunchycons as "us" on a blog I would have laughed at you.

What Rod has put his finger on, I think, is really a countercultural conservatism, one that rejects the notion that we all have to pretend to be frat boys (including the women) in order to be "cool" and reject personal morals and sympathy for the less fortunate to be good "ideological" conservatives. That has important implications for how we live. But I honestly don't believe it necessarily leads to the farm. In fact, perhaps I can start a useful argument by saying "I am not an agrarian" and, more than that, I do not, in fact, think that agrarianism in its full sense is at the center of the good life, conservatism, or anything other than agrarianism. In fact, in America the desire to move out to the frontier to farm with one's family and be left alone--the frontier experience--has been very, very damaging.

America was not built on the farm, but in the town. The Puritans didn't go out into the wilderness to be alone with their families; they built their houses next to one another and COMMUTED out to the fields because they were afraid of Indians, afraid the Devil (literally) lived in the forest, and wanted to keep an eye on one another. For a good 150 years the pattern remained one of town life. And it was only after Thomas Jefferson's big land grab (Louisiana purchase) and French Revolution-inspired system for laying out land on a grid that left no room for towns that we started losing the habit of living in towns.

Sell back the land? Hardly, but I DO think we should see agrarianism as one choice among several (I don't know about "many") that are moral, and that we should recognize that the separatism that is a part of crunchiness needs to be tempered with community. Home schooling, for example, works (in my limited experience) because most of the people who do it seek out communities of home schoolers to share duties, get together to socialize, etc.

And by the way, Russell Kirk lived in a place with the romantic name "piety hill." But, like most things Kirkian, the reality was less romantic and rural. His house was on the edge of downtown Mecosta.

A very thoughtful letter from a skeptical reader:

I've been trying to do a real examination of conscience of late, as I've noticed the visceral reaction of myself, and others like Mr. Podhoretz and Mr. Goldberg, to the discussions of your book on the CrunchyCon blog. More so then other debates on NRO, this seems to hit home in a powerful way. Perhaps it's because the life advocated by you and your fellow Crunchies is so wholly different from the life I have chosen, as a single, twenty-something graduate student living and working in Washington DC, far from my family in Upstate New York. In almost everyway, my lifestyle is as un-crunchy as you can get. I'd say I'm reasonably comfortable with my choices, but of course, the temptation for moral and spiritual laziness abounds in my life (as it does in any life, I imagine).

I've found that I'm both annoyed by some of the commentary on the blog (particularly the distrust and misunderstanding of economic liberty and the free market that seems to be so pervasive) and still somehow attracted to ? and to be honest, frightened by ? the ideas presented by your commentators. The arguments for the connection of the agrarian tradition, the simple life, community, and virtue are quite compelling. But, on the other hand, I'm a city boy, with little desire to go Green Acres. Perhaps that's what's causing me some distress.

For example, would you argue that the lifestyle advocated by, say, Mr. Stegall, represents a vocation that all are called to? I guess I've always found arguments for such a lifestyle interesting on an intellectual level, but frustrating at the same time. Mr. Stegall rails against higher education, processed food, technology, and, essentially anyone ever leaving the family farm, even as an adult. So should I drop out of school, move back home, and buy a couple of dairy cows? Find a willing girl and start reproducing children as fast as possible, whom I will never let leave and make their own way in the world? Even if such a life doesn't make the best use of my talents or have much appeal to me?
I'm not trying to be antagonistic or impertinent; I've really done some soul searching the last few weeks on these questions. Some of Mr. Stegall's and the rest of your bloggers' criticisms are no doubt justified, and things that most conservatives would agree with on some level.

But at the same time, it's hard to see how freeing the majority of humanity from the drudgery of 8 hours a day behind an ox-pulled plow or back-breaking labor in the fields should be universally condemned. The luxury we all enjoy to write and read books and blog entries about philosophical matters is in direct proportion to the God-given creativity and innovativeness employed by others to ease some of life's burdens. Again, there is always temptation in leisure, and if we use our free time for ill or in ways detrimental to our souls, perhaps we would be better off behind the plow. But I can't help but wonder what other actions against modern life some of you and your colleagues would have us take, and what we might have to sacrifice in pursuit of this agrarian ideal.

Should we pour out our antibiotics and smash our x-ray machines in some neo-Luddite rage, no matter how many lives they've saved? Or, like the totalitarian government in Atlas Shrugged, perhaps we should set annual limits on consumption and production, not just of material goods, but of books and ideas as well. And what of our scientific explorations, say of the solar system, which are no doubt a waste of resources that could be better spent in distributing garden hoes to every American, no matter if curiosity and a hunger to explore are hardwired into the human spirit (and, I suspect, were put there by a knowing God to lead us back to Him).

I'm afraid this letter is turning far longer and more vehement than I meant it to, which I suppose is testament to the fact that your book has hit a nerve. And the protestations of Mr. Goldberg aside, I think you have documented a real phenomenon--perhaps not a new conservative subgroup, but the re-emergence of some very old but very important ideals.

I guess basically my long-winded point is that this way of life may not be for everyone. Perhaps those of us not so interested in taking it up (while still attracted to its aims and objectives) are like the rich young man in the Gospels, and we will face divine justice for our obstinacy. Or perhaps, as I suspect, giving up the things of this world is an intensely personal struggle, one which each individual must go through on his own. For some, like you CrunchyCons or Thomas Merton, it may be going straight back to the farm or monastery (again, though, I wonder how far back some people think we should go). For others it may be a more circuitous path. Regardless, thanks for provoking some serious thought on these questions.

I am away from the Crunchy Cons for one day, and I return to find it consumed with a discussion of the crunchiness (or not) of Homer Simpson, and Hank Hill. I went to sleep in my NYC hotel room happy last night. If you saw me on Fox & Friends this morning looking blissful, that's why. Well, or it was me spaced out on Sudafed.

Okay, so now I know that Screaming Yellow Zonkers WERE a yellow candy that
made people act in an insane manner. So. . . why did they die out? Some
sort of crunchy con plot? Did the diet imams stamp them out? Are Twinkies
(my own lunchtime mainstay as a child) next? And where do you stand in the
whole Ding Dong/Ho-ho debate?

A reader sent the following poem:

The Song Against Grocers
G.K. Chesterton

(From "The Flying Inn", 1914)

God made the wicked Grocer
For a mystery and a sign,
That men might shun the awful shops
And go to inns to dine;
Where the bacon's on the rafter
And the wine is in the wood,
And God that made good laughter
Has seen that they are good.

The evil-hearted Grocer
Would call his mother "Ma'am,"
And bow at her and bob at her,
Her aged soul to damn,
And rub his horrid hands and ask
What article was next
Though MORTIS IN ARTICULO
Should be her proper text.

His props are not his children,
But pert lads underpaid,
Who call out "Cash!" and bang about
To work his wicked trade;
He keeps a lady in a cage
Most cruelly all day,
And makes her count and calls her "Miss"
Until she fades away.

The righteous minds of innkeepers
Induce them now and then
To crack a bottle with a friend
Or treat unmoneyed men,
But who hath seen the Grocer
Treat housemaids to his teas
Or crack a bottle of fish sauce
Or stand a man a cheese?

He sells us sands of Araby
As sugar for cash down;
He sweeps his shop and sells the dust
The purest salt in town,
He crams with cans of poisoned meat
Poor subjects of the King,
And when they die by thousands
Why, he laughs like anything.

The wicked Grocer groces
In spirits and in wine,
Not frankly and in fellowship
As men in inns do dine;
But packed with soap and sardines
And carried off by grooms,
For to be snatched by Duchesses
And drunk in dressing-rooms.

The hell-instructed Grocer
Has a temple made of tin,
And the ruin of good innkeepers
Is loudly urged therein;
But now the sands are running out
From sugar of a sort,
The Grocer trembles; for his time,
Just like his weight, is short.

March 07, 2006

goes Crunchy

Caleb, I agree with you, but I think Chesterton‘s observation also applies here:
“The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

Angelo, thanks for the Lasch. We could certainly do worse than to give his insights some wider play here. And as I have maintained from the very start, I am in favor of a more natural, unarticulated traditionalism over and against a highly stylized and over-articulated version.

I send him here.

Caleb, the Homer Simpson debate well-illustrates the slipperiness of the Crunchy label, and the difference between the un-self-conscious “vernacular” conservatism championed by Christopher Lasch in “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics”:

“Lower middle-class culture, now as in the past, is organized around the family, church and neighborhood. It values the community’s continuity more highly than individual advancement, solidarity more highly than social mobility. Conventional ideals of success play a less important part in lower middle-class life than the maintenance of existing ways. Parents want their children to get ahead, but they also want them to respect their elders, resist the temptation to lie and cheat, willingly shoulder the responsibilities that fall to them, and bear adversity with fortitude.”

While many of the latter probably protested the Vietnam war, many of the former were probably bashing their heads in. From what I remember, Lasch blamed ‘working class authoritarianism” on the demise of the old left and the rise of sixties radicalism. But still, the “wisdom of ordinary people” would probably include a deep-seated skepticism towards Whole Foods, free-range chickens, the anti-vaccine movement, and other countercultural stances.

No one who has ever seen me, let alone seen me in front of a plate of pasta, would call me a diet imam. But I'm not certain I get Jack's point. That it is bad for schools to decide what food and drink the kids should have at school? Sorry, can't go along with you on that. Rather, I would say that the problem is we DON'T make any of those kind of decisions, leaving them to the state education department or other faceless bureaucrats. Since most crunchy cons don't even send their kids to public schools, this really isn't an issue on their horizon, I wouldn't think. My daughter's school doesn't even serve lunch--kids have to bring their own.

I agree, however, that it is a very bad thing for our public institutions to go along with every fad that comes along--from John Dewey's educational theories to health nazi views on food. The crunchy thing? Well, I actually might send my kids to a public school if it were a small one based in our neighborhood and run by the locals. And "running it" would include control over the food served.

I too got several emailers saying that while they agreed with my “Homer is Crunchy/Not-crunchy” statement, Hank Hill was the character I really wanted. Sounds like they’re right, and I can only plead ignorance. The Simpsons happened to have their heyday during the same years I was at my TV watching most.

First they came for the peanut butter, and I said nothing. Then they came for the cupcakes, and I looked away. Now they have come for the Coke. I am no longer silent. Here I will make my stand. Touch my M&Ms and you will perish! You want my Klondike Bar?!--you will have to pry it from my cold, dead, clenched hand. My motto: "Let them eat cake!"

Pardon the breakdown, but I am tiring mightily of the Diet Imams and their jihads. The latest is against soda in schools. Their message: drinking Mountain Dew is like smoking a pack a day. Their latest commissar-ish effort: to mandate warning labels on cans and to ban the vending machines from schools. Carbonation = death!

A big story today in my home town of Milford (CT) is that some soda machines in one of the local high schools were accessible during the day (the machines aren't supposed to dispense their poison until after 2PM). And teenagers were buying soda during normal school hours! Somebody call Social Services! Can we get a team of crisis counselors in here?! What's the number for the Hazmat unit?! LOCKDOWN!!

Here's the front page story about this scandal in the New Haven Register (you have to sign in) which ends with this blathering from Yours Truly:

Jack Fowler, who has five children in public schools, said he thinks high school students should be able to drink soda.

"When did Coke the soda become equivalent to coke the drug?" Fowler said. "I am just flabbergasted at what a nanny-state we've become."

From the inbox:

Hi gang,

I guess this is food-and-cartoons week. I nominate Hank Hill for crunchy-con-toon. He hates the Mega-Lo-Mart, is a practicing trad-religionist (Methodist) and prohibited his son from doing the "cool Christianity" stuff because he didn't want the Lord being a phase in his life, prizes his vocation (perhaps a bit too much) and loves his wife and his small town the way it is.

He's a bit iffy on his son, but let's face it, Bobby's just not right sometimes. And Hank gets hung up on manly possessions (yard, tractor, etc.). And he struggles mightily as he guides his family through the morass of modern life. But he's the best-written conservative character on TV, and not a parody -- he's like the anti-Archie Bunker. He's a good-hearted guy and so, obviously, are the writers - Hank usually wins in the end.

I find it disappointing that I see so few King of the Hill references and so much Simpsons. I guess I'm just too counter-crunchy-con-toon-cultural for the rest of you consumerists!

I am coming late, very late, to this discussion, having been in Brussels and London after which I had a virtual mountain of work to plough through on my return. Nevertheless, I hope to be able to contribute a small amount to the discussion.

One of my central concerns with Rod's thesis is that the market isn't what he says it is. It is a reflection of society, a manifestation of information, not something "designed" or manipulating society as he seems to think. The area of food is just one example of this. Check out Theodore Dalrymple's essay on "The Starving Criminal" from Autumn 2002. About half-way through he comes to the phenomenon of "food deserts," and the supposed inability of the urban British working class to get affordable fresh food, which the Blairite government had blamed on evil supermarkets foregoing their social duty. Not so, as Dalrymple explains, with reference to the plenitude of good food available to Indian immigrants. The market has merely reflected, not caused, the turning-away from traditional meals and cooking embraced by the British. He concludes:

The liberal intelligentsia has several reasons for failing to see or admit the cultural dimension of malnutrition in the midst of plenty-in failing to see its connection with an entire way of life-and in throwing the blame instead onto the supermarket chains. One reason is to avoid confronting the human consequences of the changes in morals, manners, and social policy that it has consistently advocated. The second is to avoid all appearance of blaming people whose lives are poor and unenviable. That this approach leads it to view those same people as helpless automata, in the grip of forces that they cannot influence, let alone control-and therefore as not full members of the human race-does not worry the intelligentsia in the least. On the contrary, it increases the importance of the elite's own providential role in society. To blame the supermarket chains is implicitly to demand that the liberal and bureaucratic elite should have yet more control over society.

This is how the British government's current Food Poverty Eradication Bill should be interpreted. By attempting to tackle the sources of supply rather than those of demand, it will sidestep the question of an entire way of life-a problem that it would take genuine moral courage to tackle-and aim at an easy target instead. The government will increase bureaucracy and regulation without reducing malnutrition.

In his rush to mock, JPod is missing the point I’m making which is actually in a great deal of sympathy with his Merle Haggardism. And it is that traditional conservatism must retain a deep respect for what Illich called the vernacular--the ways that ordinary people try through all the difficulties to preserve what is good and permanent in life. To the extent things get in the way of that, those things ought to be resisted by conservatives.

Well, this has shaken some things loose, eh? Note that I did say that Homer wasn’t crunchy (after I said that he was--does this qualify me for some kind of John Kerry award?). The larger point I wanted to make is that Rod’s crunchy thesis does not draw fine enough distinctions. The point is that despite Homer’s many faults (and he has many that are effectively lampooned), he can still do the right thing; he sticks; he’s not a placeless aimless wanderer through life. That is far more important than not buying Duff beer or otherwise being a “consumer.” I think some of the things Rod is talking about apply very well to the professionalized classes (which ironically may have the same tastes in wine, shoes, etc. a la Brooks’ bobos as does Rod), but can fall flat in blue collar small town America due to excessive Lisa-izing (something many bedrock conservatives are inherently allergic to). The problem as I see it is that the centralizing bureaucratic professional classes are taking over even blue collar small towns and rural life. It’s getting tougher and tougher--due to hyper-consumerism and all the other things we’ve been talking about here--to be Homer Simpson in America.

Homer, ridiculed? You’re kidding. Homer is the hero of the show! It’s Lisa who is being made fun of in every episode. And yes, Ned Flanders is a comic figure of ridicule, but even his “okily-dokily” conservatism is given a grudging respect by Homer. I admit, I haven’t seen the show since around the 7th or 8th season, but unless it has changed a lot, I think you’re missing its point.

I've stayed out of here for a bunch of reasons, though primarily because I had my say last week (and heard no rebuttals, so far). But oh-man-oh-man-oshevitz is Caleb off his rocker on this one. Bruce is right in so many ways. Homer is a consumerist qua consumerist. Did you ever see the dream car he designed for Detroit? He has about much use for organic food as he does for traditional religion (when he's in trouble he prays to Superman and can sometimes be heard saying things like "if only God were still alive). Sure, he loves his family and he sticks to his job, but let us not slide further into slandering of normal conservatives. They aren't all deadbeat dads, are they?

Yes, at last a topic on which I can claim to be somewhat of an expert, and about which we can, perhaps, have a real, knock-down, drag-out fight on this blog. Here goes: Homer Simpson is NOT crunchy. He is the writers' stand-in for a crunchy, existing solely to be used to ridicule anyone with even the slightest conservatism in his life and values! Haven't you noticed, Caleb, that almost every episode in a very ham-fisted fashion tells us that we should like, side with, and sympathize with Lisa? That obnoxious little pseudo-intellectual with the sandals and weird haircut is the writers' version of what someone who is crunchy really ought to be. Homer does a crumby job at work, sent his father off to the home after stealing his house, and in general has no clue how lucky he is that his wife, infinitely his better in every way, is trapped by (supposedly misplaced) emotional attachment into staying with him. His son gives Homer what he deserves, trouble and no respect. And his daughter, the vegetarian feminist who knows so much more than anyone else on the show, pities him, at best.

Want to find a good crunchy con? It's much more likely to be Ned Flanders--that's right, Ned, "okely-dokely" Flanders. A truly devout religious man, devoted to (deceased) wife, and family, running his own business. Of course, he's mocked as well, but then the only character I can't recall ever being truly mocked is. . . Lisa!

Get your role models straight, dude.

Ok, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say since Rod brought up Duff beer, but haven’t figured out exactly the right way to put it. And it is this: Homer Simpson is crunchy. Well, actually, he’s not. “Crunchy” as an appellation can really get in the way. What I mean is that I agree, to a point, with many of those who critique crunchiness as elitist and anti-regular-guy America. Or even anti regular-guy conservative. Homer Simpson is emblematic of a large swath of America that still practices the conservative virtues Kirk touted as best they can in the midst of a culture and system that inherently handicaps those virtues. He loves his wife and kids; Marge stays home with the baby; Homer sticks to his dull blue-collar job; he has lived in the same house for ages; no way is he going to move from Springfield; he goes to church (even if he sneaks in the football play-by-play); he frequents the local hang-outs; and so on. There is sacrifice and difficulty and real beauty and joy in his life. He successfully resists the many many temptations that promise something better (even though he can’t resist vegging out in front of the boob-tube).

So I’ll take Homer swigging Duff beer and playing for the Burns Nuclear Powerplant softball team in Springfield any day over the allegedly American dream of upward mobility and salad-bar traditionalism that The Simpsons rightly stands against.

Actually, Mitch, when you consider a lot of the work of the president's Bioethics Council, there is something very simpactico with what you're all talking about.

I think that some of Rod's argument--which is a general back-to-basics kinda one--gets way to easily caricatured by the packaging of "crunchy conservatism." It's a lot of what the journal New Atlantis takes up--how much technology is too much? What is it doing to us? A little something about the dignity of human life...and considering the need to rewind a little before we keep racing "forward."

This is not breaking news to a Caleb, but it may be a way for folks who are turned off by the Birkenstocked packaging to consider Dreherian thinking. For people who think it's all chicken coops and wagon trains and another world.

No, not one of mine.

Leon Kass’ The Hungry Soul is a profound meditation on eating and food. Kass believes, as Rod does, that eating raises the most important questions of nature and ethics. He also explains why we give so little attention to it and similar subjects:

“Modern thought has come to teach the uselessness of natural knowledge for ethics. . . . Yes, we still quite naturally wonder what it means to be a human being, but our science is not interested in either being or meaning. Many of us still argue about whether something is good or beautiful; but the sophisticated ones, following the direction taken by science, know that such arguments are pointless because these ‘values’, being of purely human construction, have only subjective and relative meaning.”

Another e-mail:

This is a question for Caleb based on his 11:14 post-

Why specifically agrarians? The amount of change that happened with modernization is far more vast than just how we produce food, no? So couldn't you argue that the cornerstone of American life isn't the farmers, but the preachers and their place in society, which has also radically changed? Whatever his merits, and they are many, I think you'd agree that Rick Warren is no Jonathan Edwards; so why isn't the lack of an intellectually rigorous and influential Christian pastorate the key?

I think you're right on the agrarian thing, really; I just want to hear some more about why it specifically is the important part when compared to other aspects of the past we've lost. Is it just because it's possibly attainable? Or just because it's part of Rod's book and it's food week (in which case, you can ignore this)? Be interested to hear what you think.

Sidenote on The Corner
[Lopez  03/07 11:23 AM]

It's out of love...

Why People Eat Out
[Lopez  03/07 11:21 AM]

An e-mail:

I eat out a lot. I also have a garden service pick up the yard.

Why? Simple -- cost-effectiveness.

My time is worth more if spent on my profession; so is that of my spouse. It makes no sense for either of us to waste time doing minimum-wage work.

Economics trumps sentimentality.

Re: Kathryn's Point
[Stegall  03/07 11:14 AM]

I agree with Bruce’s answer to Kathryn, and would also add that there is a pretty clear political argument being made by agrarians from Jefferson to Hanson to Berry (in the realm of political philosophy, not policy). It goes like this: a yeoman class of independent, hard working, self-sufficient, freemen is necessary to the flourishing of the American constitutional republic. The death of this class is directly traceable to a number of factors--political, cultural, spiritual--which are all, in the end, rooted in the collective choices Americans have made concerning food: how they get it, when they get it, what it looks like, who inspects it, how they eat it, what it tastes like, what it costs, etc. etc.

You can disagree with the argument at any point along the way, and we might have a good discussion on that point, but it seems pretty clear that the argument cannot be dismissed as merely about “taste” or “lifestyle choices.”

RE: Doing
[Stegall  03/07 10:30 AM]

Rod asked about the virtues of agrarianism. In response, let me reiterate that this nation was founded and built on a bedrock agrarian class, and the political argument in its favor (I linked to Jeremy Beer’s excellent piece on agrarianism somewhere down there) is that western culture and the democracy it supports cannot long suffer the death of that class. Here again is VDH in a stirring passage we all ought to pay careful attention to:

If just 10 percent of our population lived on farms, did not move, never divorced, did not change jobs, and set the parameters of their day by dawn and dusk, the current madness could be stopped. Yet we lack that prerequisite reservoir of agrarians who might still arrest the itinerary of our present culture, of growing shiftlessness, criminality, and material banality.

Oddly, we sheep who follow only fashion and fad still admire the oddball and nonconformist but with legitimate reservations and precautions. The independent trucker is the stuff of pop ballad, yet we still wince at his oil and grease and the petty criminality of the industry. We are nostalgic over religious dropouts like the Amish but learn their iron-willed agrarianism is powered by the sanction of an authoritarian and unforgiving God. The cowboy on the screen and nineteenth-century military hero lead only to silly buckskin fringe and cowboy hats or peculiar reenactments where grown folk don uniforms and reenact the battle of Gettysburg. We are searching, we Americans of modern material and urban culture, for the epic individual among us who says he has an identity that cannot be bought, rented, or leased, for a man the sociologists label “able to resist being drawn into the orbit of industrial and bureaucratic organization.”

Where, we ask ourselves, will be these counterpoints to a national ethos that has left us parched and wanting? Where will be the often unpleasant individual, the cratered veteran of a continual, a personal struggle with nature, the cultural dissident who will choose still to go it alone in order to protect his old notion of a community, who will have innate distrust for authoritarianism, large bureaucracy, and urban consensus? Where will be the man prerequisite to, the exemplar for, democratic and egalitarian government? The ugly agrarian alone is the now increasingly rare voice that says no to popular tastes, no to the culture of the suburb, no to the gated estate. The noncorporate man can always explain to us of a different brand, an aggressive and materialistic urban stripe, how far adrift we have gone from that ideal. His was the grating voice that might have said finance, insurance, advertising, and law—the great sought-after tetrad of the last decade—were not the real work, the true production, the noble professions of our nation.

What other profession is there now in this country where the individual fights alone against nature, lives where he works, invests hourly for the future, never for the mere present, succeeds or fails on the degree of his own intellect, physical strength, bodily endurance, and sheer nerve? In what other vocation now does an American care so little about his own appearance, about the type of car his is to drive, about the title of the job he is to enjoy, about the status of his associates, but so much more instead about the promptness of his action, the unambiguity of his intent, and the power of his promised word? In what other proffesion is excellence and character certified by the growth and renewal of impartial plants, not concocted by the alphabet soup of B.A.’s, Ed.D.’s, Ph.D.’s, J.D.,’s, A.A.’s, M.A.’s, B.S.’s, M.S.’s, LL.B.’s, D.D.S.’s, M.D.’s, M.S.W.’s, M.F.A.’s, M.T.A.’s, M.P.A.’s, M.P.H.’s, or M.P.T.’s?

Is not the vanishing agrarian the true heir of Western culture?

So as Rod asked, if we see the problem, what is it that prevents a more substantial recovery? Staying home, working for the future, land and small business ownership, reconstruction of local economies, it’s just not on the map for people. Even if you point them to the opportunities in urban areas to forestall the charges of small town agrarian romanticism, they still don’t get it. People keep moving to the ‘burbs and going into consumer debt madness.

The sacred precincts of what we now imagine as the “American Way of Life” (divorced in reality from the urban, small town, and agrarian lives of most true Americans over the past 200 odd years) are so thoroughly ensconced in our collective imagination that I fear even crunchiness is not enough. There are too many fundamental constraints keeping even people who know better from going beyond crunchy consumption to seize the means of crunchy production. For example, even crunchies will by and large succumb to the pressure to sacrifice their kids to the opportunity swindle of higher-ed that takes their generational wealth far from home promising Gay Par-ee! but mostly only delivering a life of servitude, the shackles of early debt, skills suited only to doing what one is told, an aversion to physical labor, and a death-of-education one-way ticket to the soulless cubicles of Dilbert-ville.

Kathryn's point
[Frohnen  03/07 09:24 AM]

I just posted, but I have to respond to Kathryn's excellent question. Why does the way we approach food have to be labelled in an ideological fashion? In important ways it shouldn't. But then, in important ways conservatism isn't about ideology in any event. As I understand it, conservatism is about preserving and enriching the western tradition of thought and action. Our civilization, with its roots in Jewish and Christian religions, with its emphasis on a very particular and important set of practices (e.g. constitutional government and a very particular view of the nature and meaning of human dignity) is not one political philosophy or another, but a set of institutions, beliefs, and practices that make up a way of life. To reduce all that to an ideology is destructive. But then again, to go against it, to reduce everything that makes life beautiful to a matter of utility and efficiency ("power down that burger so we can get out of here") is deeply destructive of the fabric of our life and culture.

Hobbies and Hobbyhorses
[Frohnen  03/07 09:23 AM]

The emailer who wrote about all kinds of hobbies being important sources of friendship ("Don't Permanently Park the Car") makes an excellent point.
These days we need to take community where we can find it. I'd like to add a rather large "BUT" to that, however. I've written several articles and part of a book on the problem of fake community. Much of this is aimed at people like the socialist/sociologist Robert Bellah who turns Alexis de Tocqueville's wonderful concern with our "habits of the heart" into an insipid call for all of us to live through political activism. But he did have his finger on something when he criticized "lifestyle enclaves." He pointed out what I think we all know, that some bonds are more important than others, and some are actually harmful. I don't mean that hot rod clubs are bad, but gangs certainly are, right? And a hot rod club, or any kind of hobby, is going to be less clearly and deeply good for us than common activities that are central to our lives. I'm not saying everything we do has to be somehow of cosmic importance--eating isn't, after all, all that intrinsically important, save as a way of staying alive and an opportunity for people to come together. But an awful lot of leisure activities ("just for fun") can be, well, shallow. There is a place for the pick-up basketball or baseball game where you don't necessarily know everyone with whom you play, or the concert where you may know no one in the audience with you. But just going to concerts, etc. makes for a superficial life. More important are activities that bring people together to actually talk and, as much as possible, share important aspects of their lives.

Much of this, I think, goes to the point Caleb has been making about how our lives need to be centered in terms of both geography (close to home) and kinship (family, family, family); Caleb would no doubt add the land itself, I'd add local associations (church, local civic group).

Why, then, a chapter on food? If I understand Rod aright, he'd say because food is a necessary part of our lives and should be both welcomed as a good, and that, because we have to do it we should do it right, which means respecting what goes into it and making it an occasion for friendship.

Plus my wife makes a tamale pie that is to die for.

Why Is This About Politics?
[Lopez  03/07 09:04 AM]

So everyone is not agreeing in here today....

Rod writes: "To participate in a system and a way of thinking in which the act of eating is merely a commercial transaction is to sell out our spiritual and cultural patrimony. I understand the free-market reasons why Americans do this. But I don't understand why it is called conservative."

But does such a thing need to be ideologically labelled at all?

Cooking
[Dreher  03/07 08:45 AM]

In this chapter, I write about how Julie and I learned how to cook at home when we got married, and how discovering the joy of creating good food in our own kitchen, especially to serve to friends, taught us a lot about the good life. What do y'all think we as a society lose when we see food merely as instrumental, as mere ballast to fill our bellies between activities? What do we stand to gain through a more considered approach to food?

Doing
[Dreher  03/07 08:39 AM]

I'm about to be mostly out of pocket doing book-promotional things for a couple of days, but I wanted to post a few things before I left for the airport. Yesterday's mail brought a 1994 copy of the Intercollegiate Review that was given over to a tribute to Russell Kirk. One of the wonderful essays therein is by George H. Nash, who wrote:

I wonder whether conservatives, even now, are doing enough. Who among the conservatives is attempting to mold and purify -- and not simply criticize -- the social mores which ultimately determine the limits of political possibility? Are we conservatives paying enough attention to value-formation in our society as opposed to values-application in the legislatures and courts? I wonder.

That's an excellent point, and a good answer for those who say that conservatives are talking about values all the time, so whence this crunchy-con preoccupation with the Right ignoring virtue? So many of us--I'm especially bad about this--have a reasonably accurate diagnosis of what's wrong with society, and we vote conservative in hopes of stemming the tide of social decay. But it's easy to vote correctly and to hold the correct opinions; it's a lot harder to do what Nash suggests, and create new ways of forming the conservative values of the next generation and beyond. This, I think, is what the woman in Crunchy Cons meant when she said she was living in the most Christian and Republican town she'd ever lived in, but couldn't see much evidence that the faith and conservative political convictions of the people there made much of a bedrock difference in how they raised their kids.

Anyway, I bring this up in light of the Food chapter to draw attention to the example of the Hutchins and Hale families of Greenville, Texas. Both are large Evangelical Christian families living in rural east Texas, and raising livestock organically, because they deeply believe that's how God intends us to husband animals. They're both featured in the Food chapter. Robert Hutchins and Mike Hale, the patriarchs of their families, both talk about getting fed up with their normal jobs in the world (Robert was a defense contracting executive, Mike a schoolteacher) and "dropping out" to start farming, and build their families from within. They are not people who wring their hands over the collapse of standards in the broader culture; they're doing something about it.

Comments? And tell me, what do y'all think about the agrarian life in terms of how it can form character? Is there something that those of us who live in urban or suburban areas can learn from agrarians?

March 06, 2006

Don't Permanently Park the Car
[Lopez  03/06 05:30 PM]

An e-mail:

It sounds to me like you're saying that food gets special treatment because there's inherently something special about food and how we use it, treat it, and share it. (Or, at least, there CAN BE something special about food; Mickey D's and Manwich ain't it.)

...And that even if I committed myself to giving as many family members and poor kids as possible a white-knuckle, power-drifting ride around the local twisty roads in my Beemer, it wouldn't be the same as a lovingly home-cooked meal shared around a table.

I can buy that. But I wouldn't be so quick to assume, as Bruce does, that cars (and other things not specific to the crunchy-con lifestyle) can't also bring people together. Check out a local hot-rod cruise-in and see if there isn't a community bubbling all around you. People have all sorts of communal hobbies, and I'd think we ought to be happy about all of them. (Though we can certainly argue about the environmental friendliness of some of them.) Granted, me buying a Beemer isn't exactly it, but there are all sorts of ways to find and build communites: I became friends with a neighbor up the street because he saw my wearing a Cleveland Browns t-shirt.

CC in the news
[Dreher  03/06 04:16 PM]

Suzanne Fields of the Washington Times generously takes note of Crunchy Cons in her column today. And Amy Sullivan at the Washington Monthly notes the book in a long article about restlessness among Evangelical Christians, some of whom are feeling played like chumps by the Republican Party. Sullivan writes about running into Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, who had just been stiff-armed over global warming:

But when I suggested to him that this was an example of the way that business seemed to win out most of the time when religious and business interests came into conflict in GOP politics, he stopped me. “Not most of the time,” he corrected. “Every time. Every single time.” And he's no longer sure that can change. “Maybe not with this administration.... We need to stop putting all of our eggs in one basket—that's just not good politics.”

"The Relationship Between Food, Life, and God"
[Mathewes-Green  03/06 02:36 PM]

"Satan came to Adam in Paradise; he came to Christ in the desert. He came to two hungry men and said: eat, for your hunger is proof that you depend entirely on food, that your life is in food. And Adam believed and ate; but Christ rejected that temptation and said: man shall not live by bread alone but by God. By doing this, Christ restored that relationship between food, life, and God which Adam broke, and which we still break every day."

--Fr. Alexander Schmemann, "On Fasting at Great Lent," 1969

Food
[Mathewes-Green  03/06 02:27 PM]

Turns out that the speedy-growing fruits and vegetables so loved by agribusiness grow too fast to develop a normal range of nutrients. They're as beautiful as wax fruit, and taste just as good, and are just as good for you.

The food chapter is the one that had the most direct impact on domestic life 'round these parts. After reading it I purchased Matthew Scully's Dominion, which we passed around the family. It was electrifying. My husband kept saying, "How could I not have known about this?"--about the shocking and, ultimately, dehumanizing reality of factory livestock farming. One daughter-in-law has permanently sworn off factory meat. We all have made it a priority to search out family-farm meats and dairy. My daughter wants us to chip in together and buy a dairy cow, and board her at a local farm. (Crazy as it sounds, we hear that such "cow-sharing" is illegal in Maryland; could there be a dairy lobby behind that?)

But I've got to admit, some packaged organic foods are very disappointing--lower in quality, higher in price. A local farmer can beat the competition when it comes to fresh homegrown produce, but when he attempts to take that fine produce and turn it into something packaged for wide distribution, he's going to fall behind the curve. Compared to what a mega corporation working at extremely high volume can do, he'll always be coping with higher prices for processing, packaging, and distribution prices, and comparatively lower results. The only excellent thing he has is the vegetable as it came out of the ground, and by the time its been on the grocer's shelf for a few months, not much of that excellence remains.

As Orthodox Christians, our family follows a vegan diet during Fast periods (for example, the Nativity Fast from Nov 15-Dec 25, and the current Great Lent which lasts till Pascha.) During this past Nativity Fast I bought a package of frozen Organic Vegetarian Burritos. I ate one. It was a piece of cardboard, wrapped around chopped cardboard. The remaining burritos are apt to live in my freezer a long, long time.

Re: Food
[Dreher  03/06 12:24 PM]

Perhaps it's the food chapter that really begins to illuminate crunchy conservatism as more of a sensibility than a political agenda. (I noticed over the weekend that some blogger is steamed because I don't put forward a foreign policy theory in a book about the way we live domestically). Of course politics does come up--and we'll get to that--but it's worth spending a moment or two on how practicing my Catholic faith helped me see more deeply into the connections among food, morality and spirituality.

Because Julie and I are tradition-minded Catholics, we obey the Church's teaching and don't use contraception. Never have. If you use Natural Family Planning, the Church-approved method of regulating your fertility, you have to pay close attention to the woman's body. If you're doing it right, the wife should be eating healthier food (and if you're doing it right, the husband should be too, if only out of solidarity). For the first time, Julie and I began to think about the quality of the food we ate, and how it was prepared. Later, after we conceived Matthew, nutrition became an even greater concern of ours.

Slowly we began to integrate our lives in the supermarket and the kitchen with what we believed to be true as religious conservatives. I've written before about why Julie and I joined the CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) co-op in Brooklyn, which delivered a shipment of organic vegetables to the neighborhood once a week. Here's an excerpt from the food chapter about how this changed our thinking:

At first, we got hooked into the CSA co-op in our Brooklyn neighborhood because the vegetables tasted so much better than what we could buy at the supermarket, but once we learned more about thow these vegetables were produced, we had the good feeling of knowing that we were supporting small farmers trying to make a go of it on their own, not big, impersonal agribusiness. Sometimes, when we'd buy vegetables at the Manhattan or Brooklyn farmer's markets on Saturday, we'd to to talk to the men and women whose hand had picked the fruits and vegetables we were purchasing. We knew our money was going to support what these people were creating, and that includes agrarian families trying to hold their own in an economy that says, in the name of efficiency, that they shouldn't exist.

...At first I thought of this small-scale organic farming as a sort of boutique thing -- pleasant to have, liek artisanal microbrewed beers, but only that. Then I started looking into how the government regulates the meat industry. It was shocking to see how agribusiness had gamed the system to keep small meat producers marginalized. Our regulatory system is designed to favor industrialized meat production, with its factory farms, its cattle jacked up with antibiotics and growth hormones, and its chickens raised in cages filled with their own feces. As a conservative, I am angry about this, not only on behalf of the small businesspeople slapped around by the deep-pocketed agribusiness behemoths, but because of how industrialized agriculture has made a traditional agrarian way of life difficult if not impossible.

We are told that small-scale farming is inefficient--this is true--and that because our factory farms feed the masses, and do so cheaply, we should be satisfied. And that's a deal that makes sense to nearly all of us: just keep the stuff showing up in produce bins and under plastic in the supermarket cooler, and keep it relatively cheap, and we'll ask no questions. But in striking that devil's bargain, we sign away our responsibility for what's in that food, how it got there, and what was done to human communities to cleose the deal. To participate in a system and a way of thinking in which the act of eating is merely a commercial transaction is to sell out our spiritual and cultural patrimony. I understand the free-market reasons why Americans do this. But I don't understand why it is called conservative.

Re: Food and Enjoyment
[Dreher  03/06 11:26 AM]

What Bruce said. Additionally, it helps to remember that almost nobody experiences food as just a thing. We all have deep associations with food that go beyond mere sensation. I read a recipe in the paper yesterday that mentioned a simple cake frosting made of lemon juice and confectioner's sugar. Just seeing those words instantly returned me to my Great-Great-Great (yes, three greats) Aunt Lois's kitchen. She was a Red Cross nurse in World War I, and very old when I knew her as a small boy. Before I started kindergarten, I spent a lot of time with her in the postage-stamp kitchen in her old cabin. She baked constantly. I remember her giving me a spoonful of that kind of frosting once, and how sharp and delicious it tasted. In fact, Lois was such a good baker that everyone associated her kindness with the delicious things that came out of her kitchen. Everyone has memories of food, friends, family and encounters with the sublime -- and in this way, food becomes sacramental. In fact, one of my favorite films is about the sacramentality of food: "Babette's Feast." The film, based on an Isak Dinesen short story, explores the way the moral and the sensual are combined in a glorious meal, a supreme outpouring of love and devotion from the title character, that serves as a religious experience.

Dandelion Wine
[Stegall  03/06 11:24 AM]

For good wine, unpolluted by expense, that permits full convivial family participation and is rooted, literally, in your backyard (even in the suburbs!), you can’t beat dandelion wine.

Food
[Muncy  03/06 10:51 AM]

I don’t know how much I’ll have to say about food. My wife claims that I consider the need to eat and sleep as a sign of weakness.

Perhaps at some point I’ll send in my mother’s account of her grade-school field trip to a slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant in Ft. Worth, Texas, ca. 1950. After a full tour, they served the kids hot dogs for lunch. Yummy!

Kitchens
[Dreher  03/06 10:50 AM]

Christine Rosen asks: Are we worthy of our kitchens? She finds it fascinating that Americans are spending more and more on high-end kitchen appliances at the same time that we spend less and less time cooking and eating at home as families. She suspects that people are trying to buy the good feeling you get when you cook and eat at home--but this, of course, is impossible.

Food and Enjoyment
[Frohnen  03/06 10:48 AM]

In response to the emailer who wonders whether "luxury foods" are not morally hazardous: perhaps at a certain point they can become so. But at what point? I, too, drive an old Honda, because I consider the pleasures to be had from a luxury car less important than, well most things. But life is a good thing, a gift to be treasured. And food and drink are a big part of that. Natural, earthy pleasures that connect us with other people (cars certainly don't do that, and neither do i-pods) are a good. Obviously, sins like gluttony are dangers, here. But pleasure certainly isn't a bad thing and, to address the emailers central concern, while we of course have a duty to help and serve the poor, most of us would lose our sense that life is good, our connection with the dignity of ourselves and others, perhaps our very sanity, if we did not take the goods of this life and enjoy them. The key, I think, remains in the sharing. Eating a good meal with friends and family, enjoying the food, drink, and conversation, is a good, it seems to me. Eating caviar to show how sophisticated you are is not.

A Bedrock Conservative
[Stegall  03/06 08:36 AM]

I realize that for some, perhaps many, readers the alleged leftist/Marxist quotes from Illich, Berry, et al. may cause them to tune out. So thinking both about Rod’s food chapter, and that we had had enough of Berry for the moment, I turned to my bookshelf and pulled NR stalwart Victor Davis Hanson’s masterful agrarian lament Fields Without Dreams. It is even better than I remembered.

So in order to keep this crunchy commune from getting too weird, let me post a few snippets from NR’s favorite military historian. First:

It is my simple contention, supported solely by instinct and supposition, that the entire cargo of our current unhappiness—materialism, crime, spiritual emptiness—is in inverse proportion to the number of people who are both rural and agrarian.

… I offer this alternative view of our culture because I worry that when the agrarian yardstick has vanished completely, there will be no bridle on the present absurdity of random violence, growing illiteracy, and spiritual desolation, no one left to tell us how silly it is all becoming.

… So it is increasingly difficult anymore to find a natural bedrock conservative, someone whose unease with present fashion and trend—whether it be multiculturalism or leveraged buyouts—is rooted in a lifetime’s observance of the growth and decay of plants; in the idea that a house, like a barn or shed that protects from the elements, need not be torn down; in the notion that men, like trees and vines, wear, age, and die and so have no need of cosmetic restoration.

… The eighties were to conservatives what the sixties had been to liberals. Be careful, the Greeks warned, to wish for what you should not have.

On the conspiracy between right and left to generate cheap industrial labor, Hanson says this, talking about the second great wave of cheap labor (the first was the entrance of women into the industrial wage machine):

… the bizarre political coalescence of left and right who, cheek by jowl, conspired in the 1980s to open the floodgates of immigration and inundate California with millions of cheap laborers from Mexico. To the reactionary businessman of the 1980s, this wave of imported workers was the natural expression of laissez-faire capitalism: the market alone would adjudicate … Such conservatives, such patriots, these captains of industry and agribusiness!

Here he is on American eating habits:

The grocery cart is full of manufactured food, bread, cakes, candies, frozen dinners, and breakfast preparations. Most of those ingredients are processed sugar, corn, cereals, soy, and assorted other staples, whose plenitude is underwritten by the government, whose steep profits lie in the processing and merchandising rather than in the growing of the components of those bizarre creations. The true lethal narcotic in this country, the real killer, is not crack cocaine, not tobacco or even alcohol. It is cheap, subsidized, processed sugar and enriched starch that layer with folds of blubber the rear, the belly, and the thighs of the American eater.

Here’s VDH praising Europe. Someone call JPod and Merle Haggard!

Europe prizes family farming, believing the true price of agrarianism is cheap. In their eyes an ancestral vineyard creates community stability. It inculcates in youth subversive ideas like reverence for the elderly, repairing rather than buying things, physical labor, and staying home in the evening. For some reason they believe an agrarian patchwork in the countryside two millennia old, not a boom-and-bust urban sprawl, lends an aesthetic and sturdy fabric to the nation’s character.

But as I was trying to get at below, there is a warning to crunchies in that real aesthetic beauty isn’t found in Whole Foods:

Shame on the American consumer who boasts of his organic preferences, his purported uneasiness with chemicals and genetics. At the store he ignores the natural smaller bunch with its bird peck, dull color, and irregular-sized berries, a gnat or two circling in the produce section, like a miner’s canary attesting to the safety of the fruit. No, he really wants the colossal, hard, resplendent bunch, with huge, shiny, and perfectly uniform grapes, whatever the costs, whatever the effort, whatever the poison. He lies when he says he wants good fruit, ripe fruit, natural fruit.

And in lying to ourselves about what we want, we have become very unhappy indeed:

Who would not trade check, pension, and health care to leave his neon abode for a nighttime ride on the tractor behind the garage, rabbit, fox, and great-horned owl paying their due as they race you for a furlong or two? Office man can get allergies from plaster, carpet, and perfume. Put that same invalid in the middle of a blooming apricot orchard, his arms in constant motion with the shovel, his brain full of calibrations of water and fertilizer, his eyes following pollen-carrying life-giving bees, and he revives. A great weight has been lifted. His sinuses will inhale dust and pollen—and then clear as the throbbing over the eye disappears. For he will be growing food by himself, not devising an ad campaign for Korean tennis shoes, not typing out the student evaluations of mediocre teachers … Corporate man has brought himself riches and leisure but not happiness.

As I said, the book is mostly a lament, and VDH lays most of the blame, and lost hope for recovery, on the American people and their habits, characters, and choices. But he does offer some policy proposals too, among them, ceasing all agricultural subsidies of any kind, which favor agribusiness almost exclusively; prohibit any entity engaged in food processing and shipping from having any interest in the land where the food is grown; and introduce tax and other measures designed to limit absentee ownership and reduce the size of farms.

RE: Food
[Lopez  03/06 08:10 AM]

An e-mail:

Hi Rod & gang,

I just read the book today. Very compelling case. I'll bring this up because we're starting on "food week": the one place where you seem to allow yourself the most luxury as part of the crunchy-con sensibility is in food. You talk about microbrews and wine, for example. Through my Christian eyes, I read these things as luxuries. Yet you talk about sacramental living as though you experience holiness through the way you live.

My question is: how is it holy that you spend money on beer and wine (and other luxurious foods) that could be spent helping the poor? Aren't we to store up our treasures in heaven, where for eternity we'll feast with the Father? It's something I'm starting to agonize over as I try to live my own life more in line with how I read Christ's teachings. I don't buy beer and wine, but I do buy satellite TV, for example. And that's forty-two bucks a month that don't feed anyone. So how is buying better food than is necessary "experiencing the holy"?

And why is "the good life" limited to food? I can assure you, I can make a case that making my next car a BMW rather than a used Honda will contribute mightily to my experiencing beauty - the leather, the sound of the straight-6, the flick of the shifter - but I'll choose to stamp out my coveting because it costs so danged much. So why can I safely, morally buy luxury food?

I understand that you pay more in part for purely moral reasons - factory farming, etc. I'm talking here about foods you don't even need to buy at all, let alone organically. And I'm not advocating pleasureless, boring lives of misery. I'm just wondering why food seems to get special treatment.

Thanks for the book - I enjoyed it and while it was mostly confirmatory, there's value in that. (Encouragement is a spritual gift, after all.)

God bless,

Christian Mastilak

Food
[Dreher  03/06 08:06 AM]

So, on to Chapter 3, which is about Food. "What does food have to do with crunchy conservatism?" you ask. "Surely Rod Dreher isn't going to elevate a matter of taste to a moral or political principle." Well, no, not really--at least not like you might think.

Let me explain.

We have been talking about how for crunchy cons--that is, traditionalist conservatives--metaphysics is the basis of politics. As Russell Kirk has
Written, "The material order rests upon the spiritual order." Kirk, quoting historian Christopher Dawson, writes: "The recovery of moral control and the return to spiritual order have become the indispensable conditions of human survival. But they can be achieved only by a profound change in the spirit of modern civilization. This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture which has existed at every age and on every level of human development."

What does this have to do with food? I was reading the other day an essay by the late, great Rabbi A.J. Heschel, who was peerlessly eloquent in explaining Biblical religion to the layman. He was talking about the view of reality--metaphysics--of the men of the Bible. For them, he said, material things cannot be understood except as in relation to God. Biblical man was deeply aware of the radical giftedness of Creation, which filled him both a sense of grandeur and of moral responsibility for its use. This wasn't because Biblical man thought it would be nice to be grateful to God for the world; it was because he was convinced that this was the proper stance in the face of reality.

Now, if we are the kind of conservative who affirms that the material order rests upon the spiritual order, then it becomes necessary to cultural recovery to re-integrate the material and the spiritual order.

This imperative demands that we reconsider the way we relate to food--how we grow it, how we raise it, how we eat it and prepare it--in light of our conservative convictions. This week, we're going to be talking about the implications of this idea for the way most of us live today. I hope there will be recipes also!