{"id":28640,"date":"2014-11-12T00:04:31","date_gmt":"2014-11-12T05:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28640"},"modified":"2014-11-11T21:29:07","modified_gmt":"2014-11-12T02:29:07","slug":"decoding-the-phrase-national-food-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/11\/12\/decoding-the-phrase-national-food-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Decoding the phrase “national food policy”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Federalist<\/em>, Daniel Payne<\/a> explains what the food nannies really mean by the term “national food policy”:<\/p>\n

In the past I have used the term \u201cfood system\u201d as shorthand for the industrial paradigm of food production, but for Bittman et al.<\/em> to talk about the \u201cfood system\u201d in such a way exposes it for the ridiculous concept it really is. There is no \u201cfood system,\u201d not in the sense of a truly unified body of fully interdependent constituent parts: the \u201cfood system\u201d is actually composed of millions of individuals acting privately and voluntarily, in different cities, counties, and states, as part of different companies and corporations and individual businesses, in elective concert with each other and with the rest of the world. To speak if it as a single \u201csystem\u201d is deeply misguided, at least insofar as it is not a single entity but an endlessly complex patchwork of fully autonomous beings.<\/p>\n

Thus when the authors write about \u201calign[ing] agricultural policies,\u201d they are not speaking in some ill-defined abstract about government policy; they are talking about forcing actual farmers to grow and do things the authors want. When they write of the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture monitoring \u201cfood production,\u201d they are actually advocating that these federal agencies go after and punish people who are not farming in the way the authors want them to farm \u2014 and all this without Congress having passed a single law.<\/p>\n

The authors are advocating, in other words, for a kind of executive dictatorship over the nation\u2019s farmers, farms, and food supply. While it is unsurprising that they would use this dictatorship to attack the people who grow the food, it is also undeniable that this \u201cnational food policy\u201d would target consumers<\/em> as well. Such a \u201cfood system\u201d cannot exist, after all, without people who are willing to purchase and consume its products.<\/p>\n

The authors are not merely fed up with their big agribusiness boogeymen; they are also fed up with you<\/em> for buying agribusiness products, and they want to use the government to make you stop. That you have broken no laws now, and will have broken no laws even after this \u201cpolicy\u201d goes into effect, is immaterial. They wish for the government to boss you around simply because your shopping purchases displease them. That they are too cowardly to come right out and say so is very telling of who they are\u2014as men, and as advocates of the \u201cpublic health.\u201d Shame on them for being too spineless to tell the truth of their motives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Federalist, Daniel Payne explains what the food nannies really mean by the term “national food policy”: In the past I have used the term \u201cfood system\u201d as shorthand for the industrial paradigm of food production, but for Bittman et al. to talk about the \u201cfood system\u201d in such a way exposes it for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,74,84,66,53,13],"tags":[322,661],"class_list":["post-28640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-food","category-government","category-health-science","category-politics","category-usa","tag-nannystate","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7rW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28641,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28640\/revisions\/28641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}