An interesting conversation has been happening at the Huffington Post lately, begun with an article by Zachary Adam Cohen, a blogger focusing on sustainable food issues who is also the producer of the show “Farm to Table: The Emerging American Meal,” which profiles people and places in the sustainable food movement.
He also happens to be a conservative, and he was in part calling other conservatives out for their apparent lack of interest in the way food is produced in America today.
Conservatives should care about food
Cohen argues that traditionally conservatives are more interested in supporting small businesses than they are large corporations, and more of them ought to be interested in literally conserving the environment rather than focusing their attention on the conservation of hard-to-define things like morals and the proper definition of a family.
Cohen takes a lot of his argument from Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture, who says traditional conservatives should be standing up for the traditional agrarian way of life, a lifestyle that’s all but impossible to carry out these days, thanks to huge corporations and difficult government regulations and bureaucracy.
“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,” Dreher writes.
Cohen says he brings the issue up in the hope of both getting more conservatives to join slow food/sustainable agriculture movements and to let liberals know that there are, in fact, right-leaning people out there who support small farmers, local food production and other sustainability issues, even if they’re not very visible.
Do liberals “own” good food?
After receiving more than 200 comments on his original post, Cohen added another post taking some readers to task for being mean and stereotypical, calling conservatives stupid and racist, for example.
But that’s not the way it should be, he notes:
What the reaction to my post illustrates is that many progressives simply do not want conservatives in the local food world. There is a reluctance on the part of progressives, to permit conservatives into a space that they feel they “own” politically. This is a serious problem, and one that threatens to staunch the critical levels of growth necessary to grow the movement into a mainstream phenomenon.
It’s also completely irrational, if you are serious about growing the movement beyond its current niche. If I were a progressive activist who had worked long and hard building the foundations of a movement, I would be thrilled when new converts, of any political stripe, decided to join the fight. I would feel so satisfied. Instead, many of the comments to my piece were derisive, hateful and dishonest. To be fair, many comments were supportive, encouraging and gracious, and I appreciate every single one of those. But it is my duty to trust that instinctual groaning that tells me I, as a conservative, am simply not welcome in the local foods movement.
Everyone who cares about food should work together
The truth is that the industrial food production complex is so well integrated into the American food supply that it’s going to take everyone with an interest in food production issues, from every part of the political spectrum (and maybe even more than that) to make changes happen.
The quality of food in America is an issue for people who care about the future of kids’ health, the environment, small businesses, quality food and a host of other issues. And all of these are big enough problems that political labels shouldn’t even come into the discussion. But there will always be people willing to dismiss another’s argument because of ideology, even when they’d otherwise agree on that particular issue.
Until that changes, a big change in the food system (or a host of other issues, really) is unlikely to happen.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)
Are conservatives welcome in sustainable food movement?
No comments:
Post a Comment