COMMENTARY

Keep your politics off my food
New Farm reader and restaurateur asks us to get back to farming, food production and our family dinner tables, and leave the issues of social engineering to the academics.

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I offer my point of view in response to Elizabeth Henderson’s article Growing our Roots on NewFarm.org in March 2004. In her article, Ms. Henderson provides us with some challenging questions, a personal version of agricultural history, a healthy dose of criticism directed at our government, some unkindness to both America’s working farmers and consumers, and makes an incorrect assumption that all those who produce or buy organic products want to belong to a movement. She should understand that many of us simply want to buy safe food from local sources we know and trust; we don’t want to join a cause.

I will not attempt to defend the National Organic Program nor the USDA. On these issues, Ms Henderson is right. NOP has become a disappointment. I didn’t think the marriage of these organizations, NOP and USDA, was a good idea from the very beginning because it gave control to the government of something that is not controllable.

Her solutions to the issue of organic labeling are to create more government, or at minimum to get rid of existing mainstream government and replace it with one controlled by her kind of bureaucrats. Most organic advocates from Ms Henderson’s camp did support the NOP. Now that the marriage of the USDA and organic labeling are proving problematic folks like Ms Henderson want organic certification to have even greater restrictions and more complex labeling. Can we not see the folly in this?

I will agree with Ms Henderson’s implication that “organic” as a label and thus a marketing tool has been co-opted, abused and twisted by the NOP and by corporate food giants. It now holds little of the validity or value it once had. Therefore, let’s ignore organic labeling and focus on the economic viability of small-scale local farms that use sustainable production systems.

Personally I feel my food options and quality of life are more threatened by activists like Ms Henderson than by the NOP. I don’t need a government label nor do I need a laundry list of social issues to guide me in my food purchases. Weekly trips to my local farmers market; the purchase of a side of beef, a lamb, a hog and 20 chickens from local farmers; a trip to the country at the end of the season for a couple of bushels of tomatoes and other vegetables will fill my freezer and thus make labeling insignificant for me.

I know my farmers. I buy directly from them. One hundred percent of my food dollar goes back to the farm. This makes the farm economically viable. How the farmer spends that dollar is not part of my business. Ms. Henderson would like to control how the farmer spends his income uses code phrases like social justice, food security, healthy working environment, fair trade, wider social and environmental impact to further her very strong political view of issues that are best left to the free market to decide.

After more than 20 years in the restaurant business, during which time I have created a network of local farmers who are the suppliers of my food, I am fearful when self-appointed experts attempt to usurp control of food and farming in the sustainable community. I deal every day with government bureaucrats who make owning and operating my restaurant much more difficult. More government is never the right answer.

The National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, the group Ms. Henderson champions, seems to me a group that mixes a large dose of politics into their farming activities. I fear that Ms Henderson may very well be shooting the organic movement—as she calls it—in the proverbial foot if she insists that her politics must be cultivated in the garden of local, seasonal food production. Ms. Henderson needs to spend a little more time reading an economics text book and a little less time in the think tank.

My suggestion to the entire sustainable agriculture community is this: Let’s get back to farming, food production and our family dinner table. Leave the issues of social engineering to the academics. And for those planning conferences to discuss the issues of sustainable agriculture let’s have a little balance—equal justice for all as Ms. Henderson would say—and include speakers who can teach farmers about free enterprise, capitalism and marketing.

Like junk science, socialism is junk economics. It isn’t viable and the good guys lose.

Parker Bosley
Restauranteur
Cleveland, Ohio