Nothing green about fake meat

Caring for the environment is the latest and most trendy reason to go vegetarian (or...*gasp*...vegan!), but apparently if you're making up for meat by eating a lot of fake meat, you might be hurting Mother Earth more than if you'd stuck to chicken and fish:

In general, Eshel says, it's true that raw veggies are an excellent nutritional bargain: For every 100 calories of energy put into producing conventional beef, from farm to supermarket shelf, you get only six calories back to eat. Compare that with apples, which yield 110 calories, or raw soy: an amazing 415. In terms of greenhouse gases, switching from a diet that includes red meat to a plants-only one is roughly equivalent to trading in your SUV for a Camry.

But a girl can only eat so much roasted kale before she starts craving protein: tofu, veggie burgers, and the (okay, creepy) occasional piece of fakin' bacon. But coaxing soy into a red-and-white rectangular strip takes work—which is why Eshel believes most veggie burgers are the caloric equivalent of "shooting yourself in the foot." A 2009 study by the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology found that while producing a plate of peas requires a fraction of the energy needed to produce the same number of calories of pork, the energy costs of a pea-burger and a pork chop are about equal.

That's not the only issue with fake meat. Consider the process that keeps your veggie burgers low in fat: The cheapest way to remove fatty soybean oil is with hexane, an EPA-registered air pollutant and suspected neurotoxin. A 2009 study by the Cornucopia Institute, a sustainable-farming nonprofit, found that Boca, Morningstar Farms, and Gardenburger (among others) market products made with hexane. The finding was enough to turn Cornucopia researcher Charlotte Vallaeys off of fake meat. "I can't think of a single meat-alternative product where I could explain how every ingredient is made," she says. "With a grass-fed burger, well, there's one ingredient. And with grass-fed burgers I actually might be doing something good for the environment."

Tea Partiers have farm subsidies principles

Apparently some Tea Partiers are bothered by the fact that their Tea Partying reps are taking farm subsidies:

But for one important detail, Stephen Fincher could be a perfect "tea party" candidate: a gospel-singing cotton farmer from this tiny hamlet in western Tennessee, seeking to right the listing ship of Washington with a commitment to lower taxes and smaller government.

The detail? Fincher accepts roughly $200,000 in farm subsidies each year.

Some tea party activists say Fincher, a Republican candidate in Tennessee's 8th Congressional District, isn't "pure" enough to deserve the backing of a movement built on the idea that government must spend less. But others have pledged their support, highlighting a division over what constitutes orthodoxy in the amorphous cause -- and who gets to decide.

Though some (including Gawker and its commenters) see this as hypocrisy, I'm inclined to see the glass as half full and say that the fact that the Tea Partiers even recognize the problem and are trying to do something about it is a relatively positive step. Few (no?) Democrats or Republicans are principled enough to let something like that get in the way of them supporting a candidate, and the fact that the rep promised (sort of) to vote against them is a good sign.

John McCain – surprisingly enough – is also generally against farm subsidies, although who knows if the rhetoric would have translated into action come the bidecennial farm bill scam.

That having been said, it sure would be nice to have a real mainstream advocate for a free market in agriculture – in either party – but sadly I don't see it coming anytime soon.

34% of all seafood sold in America is counterfeit

The WaPo writes of the apparently common phenomenon of mislabeling food. The anecdotes (and there are many) fall into two categories: fish, and premium foreign foods. Between 1988 and 1997 a study found that 34% of all seafood sold was "mislabeled and sold as a different species." As for the high-priced specialty items, it's things like caviar and honey (like heroin, it's cut with sugar). "Legitimate" manufacturers are, naturally, clamoring for government intervention. The customers and vendors don't seem to notice:

Still, of the hundreds of customers who bought 10 million pounds of mislabeled Vietnamese catfish -- including national chains and top rated restaurants -- only one or two caught the deception, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Johns, who prosecuted the Fairfax fish importer. "It was the rare exception, not the norm," he said.

Can you tell the difference between Vietnamese and domestic catfish? How about the difference between 100% honey and a 90% honey/10% sugar mixture?

Adults eating baby food

From the Guardian:

German firm Hipp says one in four consumers now grown-ups who find baby food easier to swallow and digest

North Korean racism

Christopher Hitchens has a review at Slate of a book about the North Korean regime's racist policies. It isn't surprising that a "black Cuban diplomat was almost lynched when he tried to show his family the sights of Pyongyang," but I guess the racism is so virulent that even their East Asian neighbors are reviled as racially impure:

North Korean women who return pregnant from China—the regime's main ally and protector—are forced to submit to abortions. Wall posters and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters.

And then there's this horrifying statistic:

Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean.

The genetics and linguistics of delicious frankenfruit

Have you ever encountered a pluot, plumcot, aprium, or peacotum? You can figure out their constituent parts based on the linguistic roots, but they don't map perfectly.

A plumcot is genetically 50/50 plum/apricot, although linguistically, it's 4/7 plum, 3/7 apricot (close enough, but plumicot and pluicot would have mapped perfectly).

A pluot is, genetically, 75% plum, 25% apricot. Practically speaking, that means it's 50% plumcot and 50% straight-plum, but linguistically you'd expect it to be the same thing as pluot, just with smaller roots (you loose the m on the plum, but also the c on the cot). To further complicate matters, I know the Glover Park/Georgetown Whole Foods sells pluots as plumcots.

Genetically, an aprium is 75% apricot, 25% plum. However, linguistically you'd expect the aprium to be 2/3 apricot (APRI-um), and 1/3 plum (apri-UM).

Finally, we arrive at the peacotum – a very much more complicated proposition. Botanically speaking, it's supposedly equal parts peach, apricot, and plum, which genetically speaking is impossible. Unless you had some very complex multi-generational system of mating that well approximates a 1:1:1 split – the pluot is a basic example of this, as it takes two levels mating to produce (one which results in a 50/50 split between plum and apricot, and another which mates this frankenfruit with a regular old plum). I'd guess that within four generations you could come very close to achieving a 1:1:1 mix (say, 16 great, great grandparents, each original fruit gets 5 gggparents, except one which gets 6).

To complicate matters further, I've assumed that the linguistic breakdown takes each letter of the hybrid and determines genetics based on the proportion of letters which come from each original fruit. However, an alternative way to do it would be to use the proportion of letters taken from the original fruit to denote its genetic contribution, as opposed to using the percentage of the new word which comes from the original fruit. So, for example, a 1:1 cross between an pear and a grapefruit would be an pearuit (or pearruit, or peauit, or peit) under the system I was using, but it would be pefruit under the alternative system.

Disclaimer: I am neither geneticist, mathematician, linguist, grocer, nor farmer.

Global warming started with farming

I read about this theory somewhere a few months ago, but had no real basis for assessing its validity. And just now, via Megan McArdle, I find that it's been written up in the Economist:

The ice-core record shows that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere made an anomalous upturn about 7,000 years ago, and that methane levels, which were also falling, began to increase about 5,000 years ago (see chart). These numbers correspond well with the rise of farming in Europe and Asia.

I can't find the quote now, but I remember reading that someone hypothesized that this human-driven global warming might have staved off an ice age.

50 reasons why Waxman-Markey is a bad, bad, bad idea

I can't recommend this article enough for those looking for all the arguments against the Waxman-Markey climate change bill.

Bottom line: the law may very well do nothing to reduce carbon emissions, and even make the problem worse, all while adding tons of cruft and handouts to an already-byzantine system of energy/agriculture regulation.

There are literally 50 reasons on that list why Waxman-Markey is a bad idea, and it's really hard to pick just a few to excerpt, but seeing as how I've been working at a lobbying firm this summer and so that's what's on my mind, let's do this one:

3. With its rich menu of corporate subsidies and special set-asides for politically connected industries, Waxman-Markey has inspired a new corporate interest group, USCAP, the United States Climate Action Partnership — the group largely responsible for the fact that carbon permits are being given away like candy at Christmas rather than auctioned. And who is lined up to receive a piece of the massive wealth transfer that Waxman-Markey will mandate? Canada Free Press lists:

Alcoa, American International Group (AIG) which withdrew after accepting government bailout money, Boston Scientific Corporation, BP America Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Chrysler LLC (which continues to lobby with taxpayer dollars), ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, The Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy, DuPont, Environmental Defense, Exelon Corporation, Ford Motor Company, FPL Group, Inc., General Electric, General Motors Corp. (now owned by the Obama administration), Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Inc., National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, NRG Energy, Inc., Pepsico, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, PG&E Corporation, PNM Resources, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens Corporation, World Resources Institute, Xerox Corporation.

Pew, NRDC, and the Environmental Defense Fund are what stood out to me. I guess you can cross those off your list of organizations you can trust on environmental and energy issues.

One thing that I would like to have seen in that article, though, are some more links. For example, can anyone at the National Review explain to me the lack of citation here (number 11 on the list)?

Two peer-reviewed scientific papers suggest that no-till either does nothing to decrease carbon dioxide or actually increases the level of greenhouse-gas emissions by upping emissions of nitrous oxide — a much more powerful greenhouse gas.

How farm subsidies led to swine flu

Though scientists have not found the "smoking pig," as one person put it, Wired reports that at least some scientists seem reasonably sure that its fast mutation was the result of factory farming practices:

Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic.

The new findings challenge recent protests by pork industry leaders and U.S., Mexican and United Nations agriculture officials that industrial farms shouldn’t be implicated in the new swine flu, which has killed 176 people and on Thursday was formally declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

“Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses,” said Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, and a long-time critic of the so-called “contained animal feeding operations.”

It's worth mentioning that factory farming gets a huge boost from US crop subsidies [pdf], since the largest input in raising animals is the food necessary to feed them. Obama has claimed to be against farm subsidies, but in reality his call to end $100 million worth of them is nothing compared to the tens of billions that the federal government spends every year to subsidize big agriculture, the meat industry, and fast food restaurants. When you think about it that way, swine flu is actually one of the more benign outcomes of farm subsidies.

More on the second-generation biofuel scam

Counterpunch has more on what I think ought to be a bigger story: the ongoing failure of subsidized "green" energy sources. This one's about cellulosic ethanol, an "advanced" or "second-generation" biofuel, which promises all the energy independence and environmental cred that the first ethanol (corn ethanol) boasted (of course, it had neither), with the added benefit that it's not produced from food crops so it won't cause food prices to spike across the world (also not entirely true). Anyway, here is the article, and here is an earlier article in Counterpunch about basically the same thing (though I think the more recent one is better).

Here's a pretty long excerpt about the eternal promise that commercially viable non-food biofuels are "just around the corner":

Of all the people on that list, Lovins has been the longest – and the most consistently wrong – cheerleader for cellulosic fuels. His boosterism began with his 1976 article in Foreign Affairs, a piece which arguably made his career in the energy field. In that article, called “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Lovins argued that American energy policy was all wrong. What America needed was “soft” energy resources to replace the “hard” ones (namely fossil fuels and nuclear power plants.) Lovins argued that the U.S. should be working to replace those sources with other, “greener” energy sources that were decentralized, small, and renewable. Regarding biofuels, he wrote that there are “exciting developments in the conversion of agricultural, forestry and urban wastes to methanol and other liquid and gaseous fuels now offer practical, economically interesting technologies sufficient to run an efficient U.S. transport sector.”

Lovins went on “Some bacterial and enzymatic routes under study look even more promising, but presently proved processes already offer sizable contributions without the inevitable climatic constraints of fossil-fuel combustion.” He even claims that given enough efficiency in automobiles, and a large enough bank of cellulosic ethanol distilleries, “the whole of the transport needs could be met by organic conversion.”

In other words, Lovins was making the exact same claim that Midgley made 45 years earlier: Given enough money – that’s always the catch isn’t it? – cellulosic ethanol would provide all of America’s transportation fuel needs.

The funny thing about Lovins is that between 1976 and 2004 -- despite the fact that the U.S. still did not have a single commercial producer of cellulosic ethanol -- he lost none of his skepticism. In his 2004 book Winning the Oil Endgame, Lovins again declared that advances in biotechnology will make cellulosic ethanol viable and that it “will strengthen rural America, boost net farm income by tens of billions of dollars a year, and create more than 750,000 new jobs.”

Lovins continued his unquestioning boosterism in 2006, when during testimony before the U.S. Senate, he claimed that “advanced biofuels (chiefly cellulosic ethanol)” could be produced for an average cost of just $18 per barrel.

Food fact of the day: Goat edition

According to the NYT, goat is the "most widely consumed meat in the world." I can't find any other corroboration (admittedly I didn't look that hard) except another NYT article from two years ago.

Obama wrong on ag policy, Cuba, and drugs

Stephen Walt and those theoretical IR and government types generally annoy the hell out of me, but he nails it on the head in an article for Foreign Policy called "Dumb and Dumber" about three American foreign policy moves. On all three issues – farm subsidies, the Cuba embargo, and the war on drugs – he takes the libertarian viewpoint.

Unfortunately, Obama doesn't seem to have taken a sensible approach to any of them. On farm subsidies he's mouthed platitudes all the while supporting the bulk of the subsidies, and his campaign-era stance on corn ethanol was downright cynical. On Cuba, he's allowed more remittences and visits home, but hasn't fully liberalized either trade or travel. And on the war on drugs, he's budged about two inches in the right direction: appointing a vaguely progressive drug czar, and halting the federal raids on medical marijuana in states where it's legal under state law.

The New Yorker pulls a Naomi Klein

Late last month James Surowiecki of the New Yorker had a downright bizarre article in which he blames recent food crises on the inherent instability of markets. Except, not quite, because he acknowledges that liberalization "did not cause the rising prices of the past couple of years" – but you could be forgiven for not getting that by the tone of the piece, whose argument seems to be, "Markets have become more free, and yet we still have food crises. Liberalization did not cause these crises, but if it did, wouldn't that suck?" After all, what's the point of spending half the article talking about food insecurity and the other half talking about market liberalization if you don't think the latter caused the former?

Incredibly, Surowiecki manages to get through a whole article on liberalization and the latest food riots without once mentioning the decidedly illiberal roots of the crisis: biofuel subsidies. In fact, he goes so far as to implicitly deny what seems to be the general consensus on biofuels being the cause of the recent spike in food prices, saying that it happened "for reasons that now seem not entirely obvious."

He commits another intellectual massacre when he says that an effect of agricultural liberalization has been market concentration, in that "three countries provide ninety per cent of corn exports." Here's some news for Surowiecki: the US exports the vast majority of this vast majority of corn, and this is due largely to its subsidies to corn growers.

Two of his main gripes – volitile commodity prices and concentrated production – are clearly caused or at least exacerbated by illiberal government intervention in food markets, and yet, when he gives his opinion of what world agriculture needs, "doing away with import tariffs" is the only market-oriented step he can come up with. So what we're left with is a short synopsis about how farming has become more liberalized, a short description of the latest food price spike which Surowiecki admits has nothing to do with liberalization, and the inexplicable and unbacked assertion that the answer is less liberalization and more agricultural autarky. It looks like Surowiecki's pulled a Naomi Klein – he's picked an interesting and profound subject, marshaled some compelling evidence, and come to a spectacularly wrong conclusion.

Farm subsidies and ecological destruction, how government conservation can be libertarian, and how Obama's energy plan could make it all much worse

I was reading a pretty sad article in the Washington Post about how federal government subsidies are destroying what would otherwise be more-or-less wild prairie lands, and two things in particular stuck out to me: federal ownership and conservation of land might actually be a more libertarian arrangement on net, and that this sort of creeping ecological destruction could get a lot worse with Obama's plans to subsidize non-food biofuels.

Regarding federal lands: the most obvious libertarian position on federal land ownership is that it's a bad idea, though when you consider the bigger picture, Kevin Carson's distinction between atomistic and dialectic libertarianism comes to mind:

Fighting the trend is an array of hunting and conservation groups. The political circumstances in the West have forced them to try to protect the grassland without making it a national park or a federal preserve. "There is still strong resistance in the West to extending federal ownership of land," said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group.

Scott Stephens, director of conservation planning for Ducks Unlimited, estimates that the Prairie Pothole Region of the Dakotas and Montana could lose an additional 3.3 million acres of native grassland to farming over the next five years if prices stay high and federal policy does not change.

The situation is not ideal – theoretically you'd want to do away with the farm subsidies and the federal ownership, leaving the land's development as an product of its actual productivity – but if federal control will achieve an outcome closer to the free market equilibrium, it's hard to argue that selling the land on the unfree market is a step in the right direction.

Regarding non-food biofuels: this one's a lot scarier. Last month I wrote about an environmental group's warning that non-food biofuels could end up being just as environmentally and economically destructive as corn-based ethanol, and that the definition of "marginal lands" is subjective and prone to exaggeration. And here we have a perfect example of that: this land is land that would not be productive without crop insurance subsidies, because of its inhospitable growing conditions. The WaPo article even uses the same word that the ETC Group told us to look out for: "fragile land that is of marginal use for farming."

These Great Plains climates are exactly the kind that biofuel boosters like Obama intend to use to grow crops like switchgrass. And while switchgrass might be more native to the area than corn and other crops that subsidized farmers are planting now, you can bet that the farming techniques that are eventually used to cultivate the non-food biofuels won't in any way approximate the natural environmental equilibrium or the free market economic equilibrium. The Great Plains might not be the Amazon rainforest, but just because a place looks desolate doesn't mean that it isn't important to the greater ecological balance. I hope that Obama's biofuel investment plan will properly weigh the costs of subsidization of these sorts of non-food fuels against their benefits, though I fear that the chances of this happening are slim to none.

Don't blame the trans fats

John Tierney has an interesting article at the NYT about the paradox of supposedly healthier foods inducing people into making unhealthy choices, and how the government can exacerbate this phenomenon. After doing a relatively non-rigorous survey of New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers, researcher Pierre Chandon found that foods with a "trans fat free" label on them were more likely to have their healthiness overestimated by New Yorkers (who were subjected to a recent public debate about trans-fats), whereas those visiting from outside the area were better at guessing the caloric value "of an Applebee’s Oriental Chicken Salad and a 20-ounce cup of regular Pepsi." The results suggest that the NYC government's action against trans fats in restaurants might have done some harm, in that food makers can now exploit the fact that their products don't have trans fats, labeling their food as such and inducing customers into thinking that they're healthier than they really are.

Tierney hints at the inanity of the trans fat ban in the first place, in mentioning that some scientists believe that there are worse ones out there. And whenever I hear debates over particular nutritional elements being good or bad (first it was fats and calories, then carbs, now trans fats, with dozens of fads in between), I think about this NYT Magazine cover story from early 2007 about how little we really know about food, and how it's much more important to follow general guidelines – the kind that you don't need a nutritional analysis for – than to harp on the details.

The political economy of cucumber curvature

A lot of people have heard about the EU's ridiculous restrictions on selling misshapen fruits and vegetables, recently in the news because many of the rules were relaxed. But just today, after years of having read probably a dozen stories on the matter, I finally found the first real analysis of why the rules were enacted in the first place. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Farmers in sun-challenged Britain and other growers across northern Europe have protested for years against the regulations, claiming the standards force them to waste more than 20 percent of their crops. [...]

The decision to relax most of the rules drew strong criticism from farmers in Spain and Italy, who, with help from the Mediterranean sun, pride themselves on the production of the continent's most geometrically perfect fruits and vegetables. The farmers fear the change opens the door to competition from less scrupulous growers outside Europe, namely places where labor is cheap.

That 20% figure seems suspiciously high, though I'm not an agronomist – but if it's true, then that's a serious trade barrier that's just been lifted. It's ironic (but all too predictable) that the EU, an organization designed primarily to foster free trade among members, would foist this protectionist regulation on members whose national legislatures had not adopted it.

Could Obama's energy plan destroy the environment?

Wired has a headline story today about about a biofuel start-up, and while the article is generally pretty disappointing (nothing about whether or not this company is receiving – or looking for – subsidies?), it's got an absolutely horrifying caveat at the end that some environmentalists think that a biofuel-based energy industry could spell environmental disaster. The article (.pdf) cites a report by the ETC Group, an environmental organization, which warns that even if our economy comes to depend on biofuels not made from food, there is still the risk that the land needs of whatever biomass we end up using will become untenable, and the impact on global food prices could be analogous to what happened with ethanol and food prices in 2007-08.

They term this a "sugar economy," and by sugar they mean carbohydrates in general – foods like corn, but also just generally anything that has ever been living (switchgrass, trees, leaves, etc.). These environmentalists worry that the Economist was being naïve when it said "there's plenty of biomass to go around," and that the poor of the global South will be the ones who end up yielding their cropland to the production of biomass to be liquified for use as America's fuel. The parallel with one form of biofuel – ethanol – is striking. The US government recently believed (ridiculously enough) that ethanol would be an effective and environmentally-friendly way of weening the US off of oil. As it turns out, ethanol is both environmentally deleterious and was responsible for the vast majority of the recent spike in global food prices, which hit developing countries especially hard.

Ethanol's rise began when the government started subsidizing it, and the ETC Group's conclusions would suggest that Obama's promise to subsidize biofuel research and production could lead to similar problems, as biofuel production crowds out the marketplace for food and land in general. What's even more jarring, though, is that Obama's energy plans are much more ambitious than America's recent corn ethanol subsidies, which barely made a dent in the market for fuel in the US. The world's big biggest rent-seekers feel the subsidies about to stream in, and have begun partnering with biofuel startups – the list (36-37 of the report) is a who's-who of America's greatest rent-seeking corporations, with ADM, DuPont, GM, and literally every major pharmaceutical and oil company looking to get in on Obama's promised subsidy binge.

As for the veracity of ETC's claims, it all depends on a) the efficiency that biofuel producers can achieve; and b) whether or not they receive the subsidies that Obama promises, and on what basis he chooses to allocate them. I guess we'll see in the coming months and years how serious Obama is about creating a new government-dependent energy industry, and how firms react to the incentives of his policy.

Edit: More on potential ecological destruction caused by non-food biofuels.

Subsidized corn = subsidized fast food

Wired has a front-page article that states something that I've long suspected: one of the main reasons fast food is so cheap is because of subsidized corn:

Chemical analysis from restaurants across the United States shows that nearly every cow or chicken used in fast food is raised on a diet of corn, prompting fresh criticism of the government's role in subsidizing poor eating habits. [...]

Corn is central to agriculture in the United States, where it is grown in greater volumes and receives more government subsidies than any other crop. Between 1995 and 2006 corn growers received $56 billion in federal subsidies, and the annual figure may soon hit $10 billion.

In addition to encouraging unhealthy fast food consumption beyond the free market equilibrium, cheap corn also contributes to fertilizer and antibiotic use, as well as food poisoning:

But in recent years, environmentalists have branded corn as an icon of unsustainable agriculture. It requires large amounts of fertilizer and pesticides, both of which require large amounts of fossil fuel to manufacture.

Most of the resulting corn is fed to livestock who didn't evolve to subsist entirely on corn. In cattle, eating corn increases flatulence emissions of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — and creates an intestinal environment rich in e. coli, a common cause of food poisoning. That necessitates mixing cow feed with antibiotics, in turn producing antibiotic-resistant disease strains.

Though Obama has paid lip service to reform, he still supported the most recent farm bill. His only misgivings about the bill, at least during the campaign season, came in the form of anti-agribusiness populism, though he never acknowledged that it's the fundamental distortionary effects of the farm bill that are the problem. McCain, for all his economic ignorance, agreed with the majority of economists in opposing the farm bill, though he didn't seem to care enough to show up to vote on it this time around (though neither did any of the other presidential candidates).

Unfortunately, the farm bill is only seriously renegotiated every five years, and the most recent one just passed a few months ago. So even if President Obama would have been more intelligent and sincere on agricultural policy than wannabe President Obama, it's really too late now to matter.

Should we treat food more like color TVs?

Bill Clinton addressed the UN a few weeks ago, on the UN's World Food Day, and said that "we blew it" in terms of global food policy. However, this quote confused me a bit:

Former President Clinton told a U.N. gathering Thursday that the global food crisis shows "we all blew it, including me," by treating food crops "like color TVs" instead of as a vital commodity for the world's poor.

How the US treated food crops "like color TVs" is beyond me. It seems like treating food more like color TVs – which aren't subsidized, unlike commodity crops throughout America – would have been a better policy. "Vital commodities" such as food, shelter, and healthcare have a tendency to be subsidized, whereas frivolous luxuries like color TVs don't (some subsidies notwithstanding). Looking at the advances in color TVs and food in the last decades, would you rather the government treated food a little more like color TVs?

The NYT on food

The NYT Magazine's subject this week is food, a topic that's nice to see covered in the Times, since it's an issue around which liberals and libertarians have common cause. The main article is about government food policy as it relates to the environment, health, and energy, and while much of the article recognizes the anti-libertarian policies that exacerbate America's addiction to high-calorie, low-nutrition foods, I can't help but think that the author doesn't spend nearly enough space discussing them. While he mentions some government distortions that I didn't even know about – after WWII, the government "encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer" – his list of remedies is heavy on the feel-good liberal policies that don't seem like they'd really do much, or are kludges to a problem that could be fixed with outright legislative repeal. Included on this list are such symbolic measures as putting more importance on the White House chef and converting parts of the White House lawn to modern-day "victory gardens." Also, the author digs into the dark underbelly of land use policy, and advocates "agricultural enterprise zones" and wants developers to have to write "food-system impact statements." But couldn't his ultimate goal – more farmland – be achieved in a more libertarian way, by say limiting the amount of zoning- and parking regulation-inspired low density sprawl that encroaches on farmland?

It's as if in the first half of the article, the author lays the blame at the feet of government for interfering with energy, transportation, and food policy, but then in the second half of the article, he tries to redeem himself to the liberal NYT crowd with wishy-washy crowd-pleasers like locovorism and giving food stamp recipients half price access to farmers' markets.