Gone With the Myths

Op-Ed Contributor

By EDWARD BALL

Published: December 18, 2010

ON Dec. 20, 1860, 169 men — politicians and people of property — met in the ballroom of St. Andrew’s Hall in Charleston, S.C. After hours of debate, they issued the 158-word “Ordinance of Secession,” which repealed the consent of South Carolina to the Constitution and declared the state to be an independent country. Four days later, the same group drafted a seven-page “Declaration of the Immediate Causes,” explaining why they had decided to split the Union.

The authors of these papers flattered themselves that they’d conjured up a second American Revolution. Instead, the Secession Convention was the beginning of the Civil War, which killed some 620,000 Americans; an equivalent war today would send home more than six million body bags.

The next five years will include an all-you-can-eat special of national remembrance. Yet even after 150 years full of grief and pride and anger, we greet the sesquicentennial wondering, why did the South secede?

I can testify about the South under oath. I was born and raised there, and 12 men in my family fought for the Confederacy; two of them were killed. And since I was a boy, the answer I’ve heard to this question, from Virginia to Louisiana (from whites, never from blacks), is this: “The War Between the States was about states’ rights. It was not about slavery.”

I’ve heard it from women and from men, from sober people and from people liquored up on anti-Washington talk. The North wouldn’t let us govern ourselves, they say, and Congress laid on tariffs that hurt the South. So we rebelled. Secession and the Civil War, in other words, were about small government, limited federal powers and states’ rights.

But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union — which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy — reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery.

South Carolina: “The non-slaveholding states ... have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery” and “have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes.”

Mississippi: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. ... There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union.”

Georgia: “A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia.”

Several states single out a special culprit, Abraham Lincoln, “an obscure and illiterate man” whose “opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” Lincoln’s election to the White House meant, for South Carolina, that “the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”

In other words, the only state right the Confederate founders were interested in was the rich man’s “right” to own slaves.

It’s peculiar, because “states’ rights” has become a popular refrain in Republican circles lately. Last year Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wondered aloud whether secession was his state’s right in the aftermath of laws out of Congress that he disliked.

In part because of this renewed rhetoric, in the coming remembrances we will likely hear more from folks who cling to the whitewash explanation for secession and the Civil War. But you have only to look at the honest words of the secessionists to see why all those men put on uniforms.

Edward Ball, the author of “Slaves in the Family,” is writing a biography of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 19, 2010, on page WK8 of the New York edition.

Disunion

A series on America’s most perilous period, using contemporary accounts and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.

Tips for Saving Money on Food

Ten Signs You’re Wasting Money on Food

By Nick • 11/30/2010 | 22 Comments

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Welcome to Macheesmo! If this is your first time here, you might want to learn about Macheesmo! Also, I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!

There’s a huge amount of Internet material about how to save money on food costs. So I thought I’d take a bit different approach in this post and list some signs of wasted money on food.

After all, if you know where you’re wasting money, it becomes a whole lot easier to save money!

1) Your Freezer is Empty. Freezers are kitchen savings accounts. Food equals money right? Freezers let you put food (and therefore money) in a place to use it later. So, if you aren’t using your freezer to store soups, meats, and even some baked goods, then you’re probably throwing money away.

The freezer is like an emergency fund. For your stomach.

2) You Never Make Soups or Stocks. Using leftover veggies or even scraps to make a simple stock is one of the best ways to extract more use out of your food (why do you think restaurants do it?).

You can also use spare onions or spices to mix up a nice winter soup for very little cash. I made a double batch of this kidney bean soup last year. It cost me under $10 (I did have most of the spices I needed). The soup fed me and Betsy for 3 dinners and we froze half of it for later.

3) You Buy Things in Boxes. If everything you buy is square then you probably aren’t buying enough bulk ingredients and whole foods. That means that you’re paying other people to process the food for you. Even the box of pre-washed spinach has extra costs over the stuff you have to wash yourself.

There are probably exceptions to this one and some things only come in boxes, but it’s not a good sign if your grocery cart is like a game of Tetris.

4) You Cook Things Quickly. Think about things that cook quickly: Pre-made meals, seafoods, and expensive cuts of meat. Think about things that cook slowly: dried beans, cheaper cuts of meat like roasts, and even cheaper veggies like potatoes. Generally, things that take longer to cook cost less.

Of course, there’s a time and place for a quick meal. Just know that in a lot of cases you are trading time for money (which is maybe what you want to do). Also, turns out that those slow cooked dishes tend to be really delicious.

5) Your Credit Card Statement Looks Like a Yelp Search. There’s been some debate about the fact that eating out is more expensive than cooking, but I think it’s definitely true. Even if you’re eating crazy-cheap fast food, I believe there are hidden health costs which will surface later.

Meanwhile, if you stock your kitchen with reasonably inexpensive bulk ingredients, you can make a number of meals with a fairly low $/meal cost.

6) You Never Eat Beans. For their versatility and nutrition, beans are about as good as it gets. And they cost, well, beans. Even the canned varieties are very reasonable. If you get used to making a batch of beans once a week, it’s a great way to trim inches off your waist and put dollars in your pocket.

Some good bean recipes to get you started:
- Tostado Stacks
- Three Chile Quesadillas
- Spicy Black Bean Patties

7) Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts are Your Standard. Honestly, I don’t get the appeal of this cut of meat. I find it completely flavorless. But I know it’s very popular. Because it takes a lot of time to process (and wastes a lot during processing), it’s one of the most expensive cuts you can buy.

Just buy the breasts with the bone in and skin on and you can cut down your weekly grocery budget.

8) You’re a Picky Eater. If you’re picky, it’s harder to buy seasonal food. It’s harder to buy the stuff on sale. Basically, it makes everything harder. This might be a difficult thing to change, but if you can learn to try new things you might be surprised with what you like. And you might be able to save some money in the process.

9) You Only Shop at One Store. Some stores mark up certain items and discount other items (loss leaders). But there’s not always rhyme or reason to what items stores discount. An example: Spices are one of the most expensive things you can buy in a normal supermarket, but if you go to a bulk store or some ethnic stores, you can get them for a fraction of the cost.

The point is, if you have the time, try to figure out what stores discount what items.

10) List? What List? I have a hard time with this one sometimes. As a food lover, I find myself wandering through aisles like a kid in a candy store. If I don’t start with a list, I spend $10-$15 extra dollars in the store without fail. I can’t be the only one.

Spend ten minutes before you hit the stores planning your menu for the week. I use a Google Calendar for this that way I can go back and look at previous menus.

I’m sure this list is just a start. What do you all think? What are some signs of wasting money on food?

Fascinating look at Harriet Tubman

November 29, 2010, 9:52 pm

Moses’ Last Exodus

By ADAM GOODHEART

Wilmington, Del., Nov. 30, 1860
The knock came after dark. Hastening to answer it, the old Quaker found a familiar figure in the doorway: a tiny, dark-skinned woman, barely five feet tall, with a kerchief wrapped around her head. Someone who didn’t know her might have taken her for an ordinary poor black woman begging alms – were it not for her eyes. Wide-set, deep-socketed and commanding, they were the eyes not of a pauper or slave, but of an Old Testament hero, a nemesis of pharaohs and kings.

 
Library of Congress Harriet Tubman, circa 1860s.

Five others followed her: a man and woman, two little girls and, cradled in a basket, the swaddled form of a tiny infant, uncannily silent and still. They had braved many dangers and hardships together to reach this place of safety, trusting their lives to the woman known as “the Moses of her people.”
As politicians throughout the country debated secession and young men drilled for war, Harriet Tubman had been plotting a mission into the heart of slave territory. She did not know that it would be her last. Over the past 10 years, she had undertaken about a dozen clandestine journeys to the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, the place from which she herself had escaped in 1849. She had managed to bring some six dozen people – most of them family and friends – across the Mason-Dixon Line into freedom, then across the Canadian border to safety. But Tubman had never managed to liberate several of her closest relatives: her younger sister Rachel and Rachel’s two children, Ben and Angerine. In the autumn of 1860, she decided to rescue them.

 
Slave ads from a newspaper on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, 1859. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Although it lay on the border between North and South and had few large plantations, the part of Maryland east of the Chesapeake Bay was an especially hazardous place to be a slave. Soil depletion and economic stagnation had left many local planters with more field hands than they needed – as well as chronically short of cash. By the mid-19th century, the Eastern Shore had become known as one of the nation’s principal “breeder” regions, where slaves were frequently sold to slave traders, speculators who sent them south to the burgeoning cotton and sugar plantations of the Gulf Coast. As a child, Tubman had seen two of her own sisters sold away, and heard her parents’ anguished tales of others taken before her birth. Four of her remaining siblings had escaped, three of them helped by their sister Harriet. Only Rachel had remained.
By this time, Tubman was well connected to the nationwide abolitionist movement, and before departing, she raised money for the trip (and for possible bribes along the way) from Wendell Phillips and other activists. She set out from her home in Auburn, N.Y., and by mid-November she was in Maryland.
Tubman arrived to learn that her sister would never know freedom: Rachel had died a short time earlier. There were still the two children, her niece and nephew, to rescue. Here too, Tubman failed. She set a rendezvous point in the woods near the plantation where the two were held, but they failed to appear at the appointed time. Tubman waited all through that night and the following one, crouching behind a tree for shelter from the wind and driving snow. At last she gave up. Ben and Angerine’s fate is unknown.

 
Ad for a runaway slave, in Macon (Georgia) Daily Telegraph, Nov. 30, 1860. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Tubman had, however, found another family that was ready to seek freedom: Stephen and Maria Ennals and their children, six-year-old Harriet, four-year-old Amanda and a three-month-old infant. (One or two other men may have joined them as well.) The fugitives made their way up the peninsula, traveling mostly by night. Once, they were pursued by slave patrollers alerted to their presence. The escapees hid on an island in the middle of a swamp, covering the baby in a basket. Eventually a lone white man appeared, strolling casually along the edge of the marsh, seemingly talking to himself. They realized he was an agent of the Underground Railroad, telling them how to reach a barn where they could take shelter.
As they continued on their journey, Tubman would go out each day in search of food while the Ennalses hid in the woods, their baby drugged with an opiate to keep it from crying. Returning at the end of the day, Tubman would softly sing a hymn until they heard her and reemerged:

Hail, oh hail, ye happy spirits,
Death no more shall make you fear,
Grief nor sorrow, pain nor anguish,
Shall no more distress you dere.

Even as the group approached Wilmington, it was not yet out of danger: Delaware was still officially a slave state. In fact, due to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the escapees could have been recaptured anywhere in the North and returned to bondage. Tubman herself could have been re-enslaved, or – as an abettor of fugitives – sentenced to spend the rest of her life in a Maryland prison. But at last, on the night of Nov. 30, she reached the house of the elderly Quaker, Thomas Garrett, a leading Underground Railroad “conductor” who would smuggle the Ennals family to relative safety in Philadelphia.
Although the Underground Railroad had already become famous – and, for many Americans, infamous – only a tiny percentage of slaves managed to escape to the North: estimates have put the number at just a thousand or so each year out of a total enslaved population of some four million. Still, these fugitives were a major bone of contention for disgruntled Southerners. An adult field hand could cost as much as $2,000, the equivalent of a substantial house. To Southerners, then, anyone who helped a man or woman escape bondage was simply a thief. But more infuriating than the monetary loss it occasioned, the Underground Railroad was an affront to the slaveholders’ pride – and a rebuke to those who insisted that black men and women were comfortable and contented in bondage.

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In an 1860 speech, Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia thundered against Republicans “engaged in stealing our property” and thus “daily committing offences against the people and property of these … States, which, by the laws of nations, are good and sufficient causes of war.” As secession loomed, some Northerners attempted to soothe such fears. A New York Times editorial suggested not only that stronger efforts be made to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, but that the federal government compensate slaveholders for their escaped “property.”
Tubman was back in Auburn by Christmas Day, 1860, having conveyed the Ennals family safely to Canada. (Abolitionists often noted the irony of Americans fleeing the “land of liberty” to seek freedom under Queen Victoria’s sheltering scepter.) Her secret missions ended with the approach of war.
But one night in the midst of the secession crisis, while staying at the house of another black leader, a vision came to Tubman in a dream that all of America’s slaves were soon to be liberated – a vision so powerful that she rose from bed singing. Her host tried in vain to quiet her; perhaps their grandchildren would live to see the day of jubilee, he said, but they themselves surely would not. “I tell you, sir, you’ll see it, and you’ll see it soon,” she retorted, and sang again: “My people are free! My people are free.”

'Fresh' food may be a year old: Choice

November 30, 2010
From the Sydney Morning Herald

It might look fresh, but due to advances in food technology, some produce can be up to a year old before it's sold.

Fresh produce at supermarkets is not always as it seems, with some apples sold up to a year after harvest and lamb sometimes months after slaughter, consumer group Choice says.
Shoppers need to closely scrutinise produce, be wary of supermarkets and even shun some "fresh" produce in favour of frozen varieties, Choice said today.
"Developments in food technology and storage ensure we have a wide range of fruit and vegetables available all year round," Choice spokesman Ingrid Just said.
"But can you call apples that are nine months old truly fresh?"
Many fruit and vegetables are imported from long distances overseas, which often means they are picked well before they are ripe and stored.
The chemical 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) was increasingly being used to "block" the ripening of fruit and vegetables, with apples stored for up to a year, which can lessen flavour.
"When in doubt, reach for frozen or canned options, as these can be more nutritious than 'fresh' produce transported over long distances and stored for extended periods," Ms Just said.
Meanwhile, Choice also said vacuum-packed meat was stored in carbon dioxide and nitrogen to inhibit the growth of micro-organisms.
Lamb cutlets could be stored up to 112 days and chilled beef mince up to 44 days.
Choice recommends shoppers be "wary" and suggests better-quality produce may be found at specialist stores, such as butchers or fruit and vegetable shops.
The consumer group also suggested shoppers buy produce that is in season.
AAP

While not normally my favorite editorialist, this one is definitely interesting...

Op-Ed Columnist

The Big American Leak

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: December 4, 2010

O.K. I admit it. I enjoy reading other people’s mail as much as the next guy, so going through the WikiLeaks cables has made for some fascinating reading. What’s between the lines in those cables, though, is another matter. It is a rather sobering message. America is leaking power.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

Let’s start, though, with what’s in the cables. I think I’ve figured it out: Saudi Arabia and its Arab neighbors want the U.S. to decapitate the Iranian regime and destroy its nuclear facilities so they can celebrate in private this triumph over the hated Persians, while publicly joining with their people in the streets in burning Uncle Sam in effigy, after we carry out such an attack on Iran — which will make the Arab people furious at us. The reason the Arab people will be furious at us, even though many of them don’t like the Persians either, is because they dislike their own unelected leaders even more and protesting against the Americans, who help to keep their leaders in power, is a way of sticking it to both of us.

Are you with me?

While the Saudis are urging us to take out Iran’s nuclear capability, we learn from the cables that private Saudi donors today still constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide — not to mention the fundamentalist mosques, charities and schools that spawn the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. So basically our oil payments are cycled through Saudi Arabia and end up funding the very militants whom our soldiers are fighting. But don’t think we don’t have allies. ... The cables tell us about Ahmed Zia Massoud, an Afghan vice president from 2004 to 2009, who now owns a palatial home in Dubai, where, according to one cable, he was caught by customs officials carrying $52 million in unexplained cash. It seems from these cables that the U.S. often has to pay leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan to be two-faced — otherwise they would just be one-faced and against the U.S. in both public and private.

Are you still with me?

Yes, these are our allies — people whose values we do not and never will share. “O.K.,” our Saudi, Gulf, Afghan and Pakistani allies tell us, “we may not be perfect, but the guys who would replace us would be much worse. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are one-faced. They say what they mean in public and private: They hate America.”

That’s true, but if we are stuck supporting bad regimes because only worse would follow, why can’t we do anything to make them reform? That brings us to the sobering message in so many of these cables: America lacks leverage. America lacks leverage in the Middle East because we are addicted to oil. We are the addicts and they are the pushers, and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.

When we import $28 billion a month in oil, we can’t say to the Saudis: “We know the guys who would come after you would be much worse, but why do we have to choose between your misrule and corruption and their brutality and intolerance?” We’re just stuck supporting a regime that, sure, fights Al Qaeda at home, but uses our money to fund a religious ideology, schools, mosques and books that ensure that Al Qaeda will always have a rich pool of recruits in Saudi Arabia and abroad. We also lack leverage with the Chinese on North Korea, or with regard to the value of China’s currency, because we’re addicted to their credit.

Geopolitics is all about leverage. We cannot make ourselves safer abroad unless we change our behavior at home. But our politics never connects the two.

Think how different our conversations with Saudi Arabia would be if we were in the process of converting to electric cars powered by nuclear, wind, domestic natural gas and solar power? We could tell them that if we detect one more dollar of Saudi money going to the Taliban then they can protect themselves from Iran.

Think how different our conversations with China would be if we had had a different savings rate the past 30 years and China was not holding $900 billion in U.S. Treasury securities — but was still dependent on the U.S. economy and technology. We would not be begging them to revalue their currency, and maybe our request that China prevent North Korea from shipping ballistic missile parts to Iran via Beijing airport (also in the cables) wouldn’t be rebuffed so brusquely.

And think how much more leverage our sanctions would have on Iran if oil were $20 a barrel and not $80 — and Iran’s mullah-dictators were bankrupt?

Fifty years ago, the world was shaped in a certain way, to promote certain values, because America had the leverage to shape it that way. We have been steadily losing that leverage because of our twin addictions to Middle East oil and Chinese credit — and the WikiLeaks show just what crow we have to eat because of that. I know, some problems — like how we deal with a failing state like Pakistan that also has nukes — are innately hard, and ending our oil and credit addictions alone will not solve them. But it sure would give us more leverage to do so — and more insulation from the sheer madness of the Middle East if we can’t.

Very interesting...

Chinese Attitudes on Generosity Are Tested

By MICHAEL WINES

Published: September 23, 2010

BEIJING — Like most everything else in China’s economy, philanthropy here is in a boom period, fueled by phalanxes of newly minted billionaires and foundations, encouraged by an army of professional advisers on charity and, increasingly, sanctioned by the government.

Enlarge This Image

David Goldman/CNBC

Bill Gates, left, and Warren Buffett have invited about 50 of China's superrich to discuss philanthropy, but some may have qualms about attending.

Which makes the case of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who will come to Beijing next week to share their thoughts on philanthropy with some of China’s wealthiest people, all the more curious.

Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates, the Rockefeller and Carnegie of this age, announced plans last month to invite about 50 of China’s superrich to discuss their concept of philanthropy, which includes enlisting the world’s wealthiest people to give away at least half their fortunes.

Things appeared to be going swimmingly until early September, when the Chinese news media quoted a Beijing official of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as saying that “a small number of people” had declined to come, and that others had asked whether they would be pushed for donations.

Last week, Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett issued a letter stating that they were not coming to China “to pressure people to give,” but to listen. “China’s circumstances are unique, and so its approach to philanthropy will be as well,” they wrote.

Except for denying a report from Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that only two tycoons had accepted the invitation, the organizers of the event have largely fallen silent.

But the Chinese are unlikely to stop talking soon. In a nation where explosive growth has opened a yawning gap between rich and poor, reports that Chinese billionaires might stiff-arm the invitation have spawned a sort of national Rorschach test of Chinese generosity, not to mention attitudes toward the rich.

“Are Chinese rich scared to be charitable?” asked The Global Times, the Communist Party’s English-language newspaper. Not at all; “This is the Americans’ conspiracy,” wrote one of 2,000 people who posted comments on the controversy on Sina.com, a major Internet portal. Academics grumbled about efforts to impose Western philanthropic values on Chinese tradition.

Actually, however, Chinese philanthropic tradition was being upended well before the Gates-Buffett dinner was even conceived. In barely a decade, the Chinese economy has created at least 117 billionaires, according to a Forbes magazine ranking, and hundreds of thousands of millionaires by the estimate of Hurun Report, a magazine based in Shanghai whose target audience is the rich. Only the United States has more billionaires.

While China’s reported philanthropic donations are now comparatively tiny — about $8 billion last year, the government says, compared with $308 billion in the United States in 2008 — changes in China’s economic structure and in government policies make that figure almost destined to rise quickly. And, in contrast to the past, riches are starting to flow to social and charitable causes.

“The Chinese have been very generous for a long period of time,” Rupert Hoogewerf, who publishes Hurun Report, said by telephone. “The difference has been that they do it between families, and don’t publicize it. What we’re seeing now is a new era of transparency.”

Translucency might be a better term. More than a few fortunes have been built on corruption, and their owners stay in the shadows. The China Reform Foundation, an economic research group based in Beijing, estimated last month that about $870 billion in corrupt “gray money” was being hidden by the wealthiest 10 percent of China’s population.

Huang Guangyu, who built an appliance shop into a fortune valued at $2.7 billion to $6.3 billion, was singled out by Hurun Report in 2007 as especially miserly. Today he is in prison, convicted of stock fraud and insider trading.

A Global Times article this month stated that in the last decade, 17 members of an annual list of China’s 50 richest people had been convicted of economic crimes.

Ordinary Chinese, steeped in petty government corruption, are often bitterly cynical toward the rich.

“Of course they’ll decline the invitation,” one wrote of the invited billionaires on the Sina.com postings board. “None of their money is clean!”

Yet a growing number of China’s corporate titans are open both about their wealth and about giving it away. The leading example is Yu Pengnian, an 88-year-old real estate baron who gave the last of his $1.3 billion fortune in April to a foundation he created to fund scholarships for poor Chinese students. The latest is Chen Guangbiao, 42, a Jiangsu Province recycling-company owner who has taken the Gates-Buffett pledge to give away his $440 million fortune when he dies.

“Wealth is not something that comes to you when you are born,” he said in an interview last week. “It’s like water. If you have only a cup, you keep it to yourself. If you have a barrel, you share it with your family. And if you have a river, you share it with everyone.”

This is a new phenomenon, and not only because the money is new. China’s Communist Party claims to represent the downtrodden, and has been reluctant to turn to the private sector to address problems of poverty and disease.

But since the outpouring of support for victims of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, the government now seems to be edging toward a more accommodating attitude about private philanthropy. It offers corporations a tax break of up to 12 percent for charitable gifts, rising to 30 percent for individuals.

This year, a reregistration drive has certified more than 1,000 nonprofit groups as able to accept tax-deductible donations. Government officials have also said that they plan to enact the nation’s first charity law, with rules that clearly define what a charity is and how it must operate, by late 2011.

But whether revised rules on charities and nonprofit groups generally will broaden or restrict philanthropic work is unclear, said Jia Xijin, who directs the Nongovernmental Organization Research Center at Tsinghua University in Beijing. While the government has slowly given new leeway to some charitable groups, especially those that provide social services, it keeps a tighter rein on groups that advocate policy changes or raise money on their own.

The government’s concern is that “most public fund-raising organizations need some social cause, and if you organize people,” she said, “that means the organization represents some social force.”

For Mr. Chen, the recycling magnate, the best way to encourage philanthropy by the group invited to dine with Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates is to publicize the names of people who decline to attend.

“I’ll help you bash them in the media,” he said. “We can’t be misers.”

The Day After Tomorrow

Op-Ed Columnist

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 13, 2010

Every political movement has a story. The surging Republican Party has a story, too. It is a story of virtue betrayed and innocence threatened.

Through most of its history, the narrative begins, the United States was a limited government nation, with restrained central power and an independent citizenry. But over the years, forces have arisen that seek to change America’s essential nature. These forces would replace America’s traditional free enterprise system with a European-style cradle-to-grave social democracy.

These statist forces are more powerful than ever in the age of Obama. So it is the duty for those who believe in the traditional American system to stand up and defend the Constitution. There is no middle ground. Every small new government program puts us on the slippery slope toward a smothering nanny state.

As Paul Ryan and Arthur Brooks put it in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, “The road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America’s enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.”

Ryan and Brooks are two of the most important conservative thinkers today. Ryan is the leading Republican policy entrepreneur in the House. Brooks is president of the highly influential American Enterprise Institute and a much-cited author. My admiration for both is unbounded.

Yet the story Republicans are telling each other, which Ryan and Brooks have reinforced, is an oversimplified version of American history, with dangerous implications.

The fact is, the American story is not just the story of limited governments; it is the story of limited but energetic governments that used aggressive federal power to promote growth and social mobility. George Washington used industrial policy, trade policy and federal research dollars to build a manufacturing economy alongside the agricultural one. The Whig Party used federal dollars to promote a development project called the American System.

Abraham Lincoln supported state-sponsored banks to encourage development, lavish infrastructure projects, increased spending on public education. Franklin Roosevelt provided basic security so people were freer to move and dare. The Republican sponsors of welfare reform increased regulations and government spending — demanding work in exchange for dollars.

Throughout American history, in other words, there have been leaders who regarded government like fire — a useful tool when used judiciously and a dangerous menace when it gets out of control. They didn’t build their political philosophy on whether government was big or not. Government is a means, not an end. They built their philosophy on making America virtuous, dynamic and great. They supported government action when it furthered those ends and opposed it when it didn’t.

If the current Republican Party regards every new bit of government action as a step on the road to serfdom, then the party will be taking this long, mainstream American tradition and exiling it from the G.O.P.

That will be a political tragedy. There are millions of voters who, while alarmed by the Democrats’ lavish spending, still look to government to play some positive role. They fled the G.O.P. after the government shutdown of 1995, and they would do so again.

It would be a fiscal tragedy. Over the next decade there will have to be spending cuts and tax increases. If Republicans decide that even the smallest tax increases put us on the road to serfdom, then there will never be a deal, and the country will careen toward bankruptcy.

It would also be a policy tragedy. Republicans are right to oppose the current concentration of power in Washington. But once that is halted, America faces a series of problems that can’t be addressed simply by getting government out of the way.

The social fabric is fraying. Human capital is being squandered. Society is segmenting. The labor markets are ill. Wages are lagging. Inequality is increasing. The nation is overconsuming and underinnovating. China and India are surging. Not all of these challenges can be addressed by the spontaneous healing powers of the market.

Most important, it would be an intellectual tragedy. Conservatism is supposed to be nonideological and context-driven. If all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi socialist, then there is no need to think. A pall of dogmatism will settle over the right.

Republicans are riding a wave of revulsion about what is happening in Washington. But it is also time to start talking about the day after tomorrow, after the centralizing forces are thwarted. I hope that as Arthur Brooks and Paul Ryan lead a resurgent conservatism, they’ll think about the limited-but-energetic government tradition, which stands between Barry Goldwater and François Mitterrand, but at the heart of the American experience.

In Israel, Settling for Less

By GADI TAUB

Published: August 29, 2010

WILL Israel remain a Zionist state? If so, what kind? These are the important questions in Israeli politics today, and will be looming over the direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority scheduled to begin Thursday in Washington.

The secular Zionist dream was fundamentally democratic. Its proponents, from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion, sought to apply the universal right of self-determination to the Jews, to set them free individually and collectively as a nation within a democratic state. (In fact, the Zionist movement had a functioning democratic parliament even before it had a state.)

This dream is now seriously threatened by the religious settlers’ movement, Orthodox Jews whose theological version of Zionism is radically different. Although these religious settlers are relatively few — around 130,000 of the total half-a-million settlers — their actions could spell the end of the Israel we have known.

The roots of the problem have been there from the birth of modern Zionism. The relations between Herzl’s movement and Jewish Orthodoxy were uneasy from the start. After all, the Zionist movement sought to achieve by human means what Jews for two millenniums considered to be God’s work alone: the gathering of the diaspora in the land of Israel. Most rabbis therefore shunned Herzl, but not all. Some joined the movement, even formed a party within it, based on a separation of religion and politics. For them, secular Zionism was primarily a solution to the earthly predicament of the Jews; it was not so theologically laden.

But over the following decades another form of religious Zionism came to precedence, inspired by the quasi-mystical writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, who was the chief rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate in the 1920s and ’30s. Kook saw secular Zionists as the unwitting agents of God’s providence, advancing redemption by returning Jews to their homeland.

His son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, later focused his father’s theological ideas around a single commandment: to settle all the land promised to the ancient Hebrews in the Bible. His disciples, energized by a burning messianic fervor, took Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 as confirmation of this theology and set out to fulfill its commandment. Religious enthusiasm made the movement subversive in a deep sense — adherents believed they had a divine obligation to build settlements and considered the authority of Israel’s democratic government conditional on its acceptance of what they declared to be God’s politics.

Although religious settlers often describe themselves as heirs of the early Zionist pioneers, they are anything but. Herzl’s vision was about liberating people, while theirs is about achieving a mystical reunion between the people of Israel and the land of Israel. Herzl’s view stemmed from the ideals of the Enlightenment and the tradition of democratic national liberation movements, dating back to the American and French Revolutions; religious settlers are steeped in blood-and-soil nationalism. Herzl never doubted that Israeli Arabs should have full and equal rights. For religious settlers, Arabs are an alien element in the organic unity of Jews and their land.

The consequences of these differences are huge. If the settlers achieve their manifest goal — making Israel’s hold on the territories permanent — it will mean the de facto annexation of a huge Arab population and will force a decision about their status. In Israel proper, the Arab minority represents about a fifth of its 7.2 million citizens, and they have full legal equality. But between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, there are roughly equal numbers of Arabs and Jews today.

Even if Israel annexed only the West Bank, it would more than double its Arab population. With birthrates in the territories far exceeding those of Arabs and Jews within Israel, Jews would soon enough be a minority. This would void the very idea of a Jewish democratic state.

Israel would have to choose between remaining democratic but not Jewish, or remaining Jewish by becoming non-democratic. Israel’s enemies have long maintained that Zionism is racism and that Israel is an apartheid state. If the settlers succeed, they will turn this lie into truth.

In fact, the former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, once the great patron of the settlers, was one of the first politicians on the right to accept that the settlers’ dream is hopeless. That is why he led Israel out of Gaza in 2005. But not all have followed him. The secular Israeli right has abandoned the idea of annexation but still favors settlement on short-term (and short-sighted) security grounds.

Preserving military rule over the territories, they believe, is necessary to keep terrorism in check, and the settlements demonstrate Israel’s resolve. Although the occupation and the suspension of Palestinian rights are officially temporary, the right wing aspires to keep Arabs indefinitely in quasi-colonial status. Given the Palestinians’ refusal to sign a peace deal with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s predecessors, many Israelis who oppose the settlements and occupation in principle have thrown up their hands and accepted this situation, too.

But the status quo cannot last — and Israelis and their supporters need to confront this fact. The most pressing problem with the settlements is not that they are obstacles to a final peace accord, which is how settlement critics have often framed the issue. The danger is that they will doom Zionism itself.

If the road to partition is blocked, Israel will be forced to choose between two terrible options: Jewish-dominated apartheid or non-Jewish democracy. If Israel opts for apartheid, as the settlers wish, Israel will betray the beliefs it was founded on, become a pariah state and provoke the Arab population to an understandable rebellion. If a non-Jewish democracy is formally established, it is sure to be dysfunctional. Fatah and Hamas haven’t been able to reconcile their differences peacefully and rule the territories — throwing a large Jewish population into the mix is surely not going to produce a healthy liberal democracy. Think Lebanon, not Switzerland.

In truth, both options — and indeed all “one-state solutions” — lead to the same end: civil war. That is why the settlement problem should be at the top of everyone’s agenda, beginning with Israel’s. The religious settlement movement is not just secular Zionism’s ideological adversary, it is a danger to its very existence. Terrorism is a hazard, but it cannot destroy Herzl’s Zionist vision. More settlements and continued occupation can.

Gadi Taub, an assistant professor of communications and public policy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is the author of “The Settlers.”

Cleaning the Henhouse

Op-Ed Columnist

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: September 1, 2010

The latest salmonella outbreak, underscoring the failures of industrial farming, reminds me of the small chicken flock that I tended while growing up on a family farm.

Our chickens wandered freely, and one dawn we were awakened by frantic squawking. We looked out the window to see a fox rushing off with a hen in its mouth.

My father grabbed his .308 rifle and blasted out the window twice in the general direction of the fox. Frightened, it dropped the hen. Yet the hen, astonishingly, was still alive. She picked herself up, spun around dizzily a couple of times, and staggered back to the barn.

A month later, my aunt visited our farm with her Irish setter, Toby, who was always eager to please but a bit dimwitted. We chatted and forgot about Toby — until he bounded up proudly to show a chicken he had retrieved for us.

It was the very same hen that had survived the fox. We shouted, and Toby sadly dropped the bird. She ruffled her feathers, glared at the dog, and then stalked off while clucking indignantly.

Perhaps that hen might have been ready to choose a cage over the perils of canines on the range, and, obviously, my family’s model of chicken-farming was horrendously inefficient and no model for the future. But the other extreme of jamming chickens into small cages is a nightmare for the animals — and the salmonella outbreak underscores that it can be a health hazard to humans as well.

Inspections of Iowa poultry farms linked to the salmonella outbreak have prompted headlines about infestations with maggots and rodents. But the larger truth is: industrial agriculture is itself unhealthy.

Repeated studies have found that cramming hens into small cages results in more eggs with salmonella than in cage-free operations. As a trade journal, World Poultry, acknowledged in May: “salmonella thrives in cage housing.”

Industrial operations — essentially factories of meat and eggs — excel at manufacturing cheap food for the supermarket. But there is evidence that this model is economically viable only because it passes on health costs to the public — in the form of occasional salmonella, antibiotic-resistant diseases, polluted waters, food poisoning and possibly certain cancers. That’s why the president’s cancer panel this year recommended that consumers turn to organic food if possible — a stunning condemnation of our food system.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study in 2005 suggesting that in 2000 there were about 182,000 cases of egg-caused salmonella in the United States, including 70 deaths. That means that even without an outbreak in the news, eggs with salmonella kill more than one American a week.

“We keep finding excuses to keep this rickety industrial system together when the threat is very clear,” said Robert P. Martin, the executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. “It’s really a matter of when, not if, these serious outbreaks occur.”

About 95 percent of American egg-laying hens are still raised in small battery cages, which are bacterial breeding grounds and notoriously difficult to disinfect. Hens are crammed together, each getting less space than a letter-size sheet of paper. The tips of their beaks are often sheared off so they won’t peck each other to death.

They are sometimes fed bits of “spent hen meal” — ground up chickens. That’s right. We encourage them to be cannibals.

Industrial farms also routinely feed animals low doses of antimicrobials because growers think these help animals gain weight. One study found that 70 percent of antibiotics in the United States are used in this way — even though this can lead to antibiotic-resistant infections in humans.

“Food safety has received very little attention since Upton Sinclair,” notes Ellen Silbergeld, an expert on environmental health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who is deeply concerned about antibiotic overuse. “The massive economic reorganization of agriculture has proceeded with little recognition of its potential impacts on these aspects of food. Cheapness is all.”

But as Professor Silbergeld notes, unsafe foods are cheap only in a shortsighted way. The Pew commission found that industrial production produces hogs that at first sight are cheaper by six cents per pound. Add in pollution and health costs and that industrial pork becomes more expensive by 12 cents per pound.

Largely for humanitarian reasons, Europe already is moving toward a ban on battery cages. In 2008, California approved a similar ban, and other states are expected to follow.

So let’s hope this salmonella outbreak is a wake-up call. Commercial farming can’t return to a time when chickens wandered unfenced and were prey to foxes (and Irish setters). But we can overhaul our agriculture system so that it is both safer and more humane — starting with a move toward cage-free eggs.

Oh boy...

Texas Textbooks: What happened, what it means, and what we can do about it

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The New Social Studies Standards
• How Did this Happen?
• What Does it Mean?
• What Can We Do?
• A Bit of Good News

Introduction

Religious Right leaders in Texas have been waging war against science and history for the past few decades. A primary target and battleground has been the state’s public schools, in particular the statewide approval process for textbooks. People For the American Way Foundation first started working with Texans to resist Religious Right takeovers of textbooks back in the 1980s.

The Religious Right has invested so heavily in Texas textbooks because of the national implications. School districts in Texas have to buy books from a state-approved list, and Texas is such an enormous market that textbook publishers will generally do whatever they can to get on that list. Textbooks written and edited to meet Texas standards end up being used all over the country. So Religious Right leaders in Texas can doom millions of American students to stunted, scientifically dubious science books and ideologically slanted history and social studies books. Advances in printing technology make it easier to prevent that from happening now, but it will take vigilance to keep publishers from following the path of least resistance.

The war heated up in recent years after far-right groups won a working majority on the elected state board of education and Gov. Rick Perry appointed the ringleader of the far-right faction, dentist Don McLeroy, as chair of the board in 2007. Since then, the Religious Right faction focused on standards for the approval and purchase of science textbooks for the next decade. McLeroy and his allies stripped any mention of the age of the universe from the science standards (those millions and billions of years are annoying to young-earth creationists who insist the universe is only 6,000 years old). In addition, the new standards will essentially require the teaching of evolution denialism and climate change denialism.

The most recent battle, over the standards for new social studies textbooks, culminated in May with the adoption of social studies standards that give the far-right faction and its Religious Right advisors far too many victories in their efforts to replace history with ideology and turn public school classrooms into Heritage Foundation seminars.

The New Social Studies Standards

By the time the Religious Right faction of the board of education was done with the standards, they had created a mess. Some of the information is just wrong. Some of it is lifted from Wikipedia. Much of it is brazenly partisan and political. And it just doesn’t add up to anything coherent. In fact, more than 1200 historians and social studies professors recently said that the revised standards are going to make it hard for teachers to teach and for students to get what they’ll need to succeed.

Of course, that’s not how Religious Right leaders see it. Right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly recently praised the standards for kicking “liberal bias” out of the standards. “Texas textbooks will now have to mention ‘the importance of personal responsibility for life choices’ instead of blaming society for everything and expecting government to provide remedies for all social ills,” she crowed. Schlafly didn’t mention that she herself had been added to the list of figures required for study, along with Newt Gingrich, the Moral Majority, and the Heritage Foundation.

One goal of the board’s far-right faction was the whitewashing of Joseph McCarthy, so they required the teaching of historical material that they believe (wrongly) shows he was vindicated. The board dropped labor and civil rights leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta; and took out Ted Kennedy and Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina on the U.S. Supreme Court. References to the slave trade were replaced with “triangular trade.” Right-wing advisors to the board wanted them to drop Thurgood Marshall, the historic civil rights lawyer and Supreme Court justice, but Marshall made the cut.

The board also turned the teaching of religious liberty and the First Amendment on its head. It rejected an amendment about the importance of the founders’ decision to include the First Amendment to prevent the government from favoring one religion over another. Instead, board members included language to require textbooks to “compare and contrast”the language of the First Amendment with the concept of separation of church and state.

The board changed language regarding the study of civil rights movements, like women’s suffrage and the African American civil rights movement. Board members voted to focus not on the decades of strategic thinking and organizing that went into building support for democratic change but on the majority which ultimately bestowed those rights.

Among other problems with the standards, identified by the Texas Freedom Network, which has closely monitored and challenged the Religious Right’s efforts:

• A revised standard that downplays the central role that the issue of slavery played in causing the Civil War
• A new requirement that students contrast the ideas in Confederate President Jefferson Davis's inaugural address (which didn't even mention slavery) with speeches by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln
• Downplaying the significance of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from the 1750s to the present
• Revised standards that exaggerate religious influences on the Founders and the founding documents
• Removing the concept of "responsibility for the common good," which one board member criticized as too communistic

Those pushing the radical charges won't hear anything else. Sean Hannity asked former Clinton advisor Dick Morris, "So is this just another Obama radical being elevated to the highest levels of our government?" But when Morris repeatedly told Hannity that Kagan had been a moderate-to-conservative voice in the Clinton administration, and predicted based on his experience working with her that she would be a moderate voice on the Court, Hannity would hear nothing of it, cutting Morris off to insist "no way."

How Did this Happen?

Earlier this year the Washington Monthly published an excellent article about the history of the disputes with a focus on McLeroy and his exploits on the board. Here’s an excerpt:

The Texas legislature finally intervened in 1995, after a particularly heated skirmish over health textbooks—among other things, the board demanded that publishers pull illustrations of techniques for breast self-examination and swap a photo of a briefcase-toting woman for one of a mother baking a cake. The adoption process was overhauled so that instead of being able to rewrite books willy-nilly, the school board worked with the Texas Education Agency, the state’s department of education, to develop a set of standards. Any book that conformed and got the facts right had to be accepted, which diluted the influence of citizen activists….

After that, Religious Right leaders focused on electing members to the board, and with help from Religious Right groups, Republicans had 10 out of 15 seats on the board; seven held by an ultraconservative and another by an ally who voted with them often enough to give them a working majority. Gov. Perry made McLeroy chair in 2007 just in time for the current round of standard-setting. McLeroy insists that “we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.” He made the most of his chance.

McLeroy has flexed his muscle particularly brazenly in the struggle over social studies standards. When the process began last January, the Texas Education Agency assembled a team to tackle each grade. In the case of eleventh-grade U.S. history, the group was made up of classroom teachers and history professors—that is, until McLeroy added a man named Bill Ames. Ames—a volunteer with the ultra- conservative Eagle Forum and Minuteman militia member who occasionally publishes angry screeds accusing “illegal immigrant aliens” of infesting America with diseases or blasting the “environmentalist agenda to destroy America”—pushed to infuse the standards with his right-wing views and even managed to add a line requiring books to give space to conservative icons, “such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority,” without any liberal counterweight. But for the most part, the teachers on the team refused to go along. So Ames put in a call to McLeroy, who demanded to see draft standards for every grade and then handed them over to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by his benefactor, James Leininger. The group combed through the papers and compiled a list of seemingly damning omissions. Among other things, its analysts claimed that the writing teams had stripped out key historical figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Pat Hardy, a Republican board member who has sat in on some of the writing-team meetings, insists this isn’t true. “No one was trying to remove George Washington!” she says. “That group took very preliminary, unfinished documents and drew all kinds of wrongheaded conclusions.”

So McLeroy and his colleagues invited a team of its own expert advisers to weigh in. Among the “expert” advisers were Texas GOP leader and Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton and evangelical pastor Peter Marshall. Those advisers came up with long lists of requested changes and pushed many of them through in sometimes long and contentious sessions in January, March, and May.

What Does it Mean?

First and foremost, it means that schools and students in Texas and elsewhere may be saddled with highly politicized and sub-par educational standards and textbooks for the next 10 years. But there are also some bigger-picture takeaways.

The Religious Right is not dead; the culture war is alive and well

The Religious Right has been manipulating the content and selection of Texas textbooks for decades, and they used the political process to overcome reforms meant to depoliticize the educational process. They worked hard to elect committed ideologues to the state board of education. There, with help from their close ally Gov. Rick Perry and the enthusiastic support of national Religious Right figures, they were dogged in pursuit of their goal. And they were largely successful. National Religious Right figures weighed in as well with support for the claims that the board members were only trying to inject “balance” into the curriculum by standing up to leftist elites who wanted to indoctrinate students with their America-hating ways.

Film at 11: Fox “News” is propaganda arm for the Religious Right

The extremists on the board of education have had a powerful cheerleading section on Fox News, which has given typically one-sided coverage to the standards process and labeled the Texas Freedom Network and others “troublemakers.” Earlier this year, Fox personalities were repeating false information so often that the Texas Education Agency actually put out a press release criticizing Fox for repeatedly broadcasting “highly inaccurate information” about the standards, including claims that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were being taken out of classrooms.

GOP leaders and Religious Right extremists are in close alliance

David Barton, one of McLeroy’s “expert” advisors, has made a career for himself marketing his bogus “Christian nation” view of American history. A former chair of the Texas Republican Party, Barton is a hired gun for the national GOP, pushing the presidential ticket in evangelical churches and reaching out to African Americans with a “documentary” blaming the Democratic Party for slavery, Jim Crow, and lynchings, and crediting the GOP with passage of civil rights laws. Barton’s history lesson ends there, ignoring the GOP’s admittedly racist southern strategy and 50 years of GOP resistance to civil rights progress.

Barton pushed one of the most ridiculous and ridiculously partisan efforts to amend the standards. Barton argued that because the U.S. is a republic rather than a pure democracy, references to the democratic process or “democratic values” should be replaced with “republican values.”

Not surprisingly, Barton has lavishly praised the new standards as “extremely balanced, extremely fair, and extremely thorough.” Hmm, fair and balanced, where have we heard that before?

By the way, as the Texas Freedom Network has noted, the Texas Republican Party is now chaired by Cathie Adams, formerly head of the Texas Eagle Forum, which will honor Don McLeroy with the Forum’s “Patriot Award” during the state GOP convention in June.

What Can We Do?

Petition Textbook Publishers
The most important thing that can be done now is to limit the damage by preventing the standards from infecting schools and schoolbooks nationwide. As soon as the board of education approved the Religious Right’s deeply flawed standards, People For the American Way Foundation launched a petition campaign aimed at national textbook publishers. On June 2, People For the American Way Foundation, joined by CREDO and Brave New Foundation, delivered over 131,000 petitions to the offices of McGraw-Hill in New York, urging the publisher to reject Texas’ right-wing curriculum standards and publish textbooks free of political ideology or bias. You can add your voice to the campaign here.

Advocate for state policies
In California, a state legislator has introduced a bill that would require state education officials to ensure that textbooks being considered in that state have not been overly influenced by the Texas standards. You can encourage your own state legislators to introduce similar measures.

School Board Membership
Of course, the Religious Right was able to wreak havoc on school standards because they backed candidates who won elections, a reminder to progressive Americans to pay attention to who is running in down-ballot races like school boards, where low turnout especially in primaries can provide an opportunity for extremists to win without much public attention.

A Bit of Good News

The Texas Freedom Network and its allies worked to keep a bright spotlight on shenanigans of the far-right members of the board of education. That spotlight was effective in alerting educators nationwide about the threat and encouraging Texans to pay closer attention. Even some Texas Republicans were disgusted by the spectacle, so much so that McLeroy lost his primary election this spring and will no longer be on the board after the elections this fall. That’s good news, but comes too late to prevent the damage he’s done.

Citizens United my A**

New PFAW Poll Shows Americans Want Action to Correct Citizens United

Results Show Broad Support for Candidates Who Support A Constitutional Amendment to Overturn the Decision

Results of a poll conducted by Hart Research Associates for People For the American Way revealed that Americans across the political spectrum are intensely concerned about corporate influence in our democracy and disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC.
In addition, more than three-quarters of voters said that they support a Constitutional Amendment if one is necessary to limit the amount that corporations can spend in elections. A similar majority are inclined to support a candidate who has spoken out in favor of an amendment. The support cuts across party and ideology, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans and Independents in support of the measure.
The poll reveals:

• 85% of voters say that corporations have too much influence over the political system today while 93% say that average citizens have too little influence.
• 95% agree that “Corporations spend money on politics mainly to buy influence in government and elect people who are favorable to their financial interests.” (74% strongly agree)
• 85% disagree that “Corporations should be able to spend as much as they want to influence the outcome of elections because the Constitution protects freedom of speech.” (63% strongly disagree)
• 93% agree that “There should be clear limits on how much money corporations can spend to influence the outcome of an election.” (74% strongly agree)
• 77% think Congress should support an amendment to limit the amount U.S. corporations can spend to influence elections.
• 74% say that they would be more likely to vote for a candidate for Congress who pledged to support a Constitutional Amendment limiting corporate spending in elections.

“These results make perfectly clear that Americans want bold action to overturn Citizens United,” said Michael B. Keegan, President of People For the American Way. “Voters are strongly supportive of initiatives, including a Constitutional Amendment, to reign in corporate spending in elections. Democratic and Republican politicians alike would do well to catch up with their constituents and lend their support to an Amendment that does just that.”
Leading up to Election Day, People For the American Way, along with Public Citizen, will be asking congressional candidates to pledge to support a Constitutional Amendment, and sharing the information with voters.
You can read more about the poll here (PDF).
To arrange an interview with a People For spokesperson, or with Geoff Garin of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the poll, contact Miranda Blue at 202-467-4999 or media@pfaw.org.

The federal government takes on school food

School food cheat sheet

By Kim O'Donnel

June 21, 2010

School may be out for the summer, but school food is very much in session — and on the front burner for activists, celeb chefs, the First Lady, and members of Congress alike.

If you keep tabs on Michelle Obama, you probably know about Let’s Move!, her multi-faceted campaign against childhood obesity that launched in February.

Several interconnected initiatives have since spawned under the Let’s Move! umbrella, including

• the Childhood Obesity Task Force (which aims to eliminate childhood obesity within a generation)
• the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a $400-million annual allocation for seven years to eliminate “food deserts”
• a foundation called Partnership for a Healthier America
• and, most recently, Chefs Move to Schools, a USDA-led volunteer chef corps (the kick-off for which I attended recently at the White House).

Michelle Obama and a student from Bancroft Elementary, in the White House vegetable garden.

And if none of these developments is on your radar, maybe you caught an episode of “Jamie's Food Revolution,” a reality show starring British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who went on a healthy-eating crusade in Huntington, West Virginia, deemed the “unhealthiest city in America.” In just six weeks, Oliver made enemies and friends alike, but most significantly, he made headlines, bringing the issue of school lunch to prime-time television.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, there’s a big batch of child-nutrition legislation percolating. What follows is an annotated glossary of sorts, to help you navigate the current politics and policy around kids and the state of their collective diet.

Historical background

In 1946, President Harry S. Truman signed into law the National School Lunch Act, inspired in part by widespread malnutrition among WWII draft rejects. Although the federal government provided food assistance during the Great Depression under the WPA and other federal programs, this was the first permanent authorization earmarked for low-cost and free lunches to school-age children, “as a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children.”

The first Child Nutrition Act was signed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966. Federal feeding programs became the purview of the Secretary of Agriculture. The School Breakfast Program was also established.

What’s on the books now

The Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004 (WIC stands for Women, Infants and Children), left over from the George W. Bush administration, is an omnibus piece of legislation that funds feeding and several other nutrition programs, including the aforementioned National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the School Breakfast Program.

Every five years, the Act is up for congressional review, and if no action is taken, it expires, which is what happened on September 30, 2009. At that time, the 2004 law was extended for one year. The current expiration date: September 30, 2010.

Current stats

• NSLP’s piece of the Act’s pie in 2008: $8.8 billion
• Number of kids getting a free or reduced lunch during the 2008-2009 school year: 31.2 million
• Federal reimbursement rate to schools for free lunch: $2.68 per meal per student (higher in Alaska and Hawaii); for reduced lunch: $2.28
• Net amount per student meal, after overhead and labor costs, that cafeteria staff have to work with: about $1

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What’s Barack Obama got to do with it?

In the months leading up to the reauthorization/review of the Child Nutrition Act in 2009, President Obama requested an additional $1 billion per year (putting the annual total just shy of $10 billion) for child-nutrition programs, upholding his presidential campaign pledge to end childhood hunger by 2015. The president reissued the request for child-nutrition funds in the 2011 budget.

Who’s doing what since the Child Nutrition Act expired/got extended?

In the Senate, Blanche Lincoln (D-Arkansas), chair of the Senate committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, sponsored the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (S. 3307).

Key components:

• $4.5 billion in new funding over 10 years for child-nutrition programs
• USDA regulation over nutritional content of what’s sold in vending machines
• Money for school gardens and farm-to-school programs
• Training for cafeteria workers
• Financial impact on school lunch: 6 cent increase per meal

Yay or nay: Unanimously passed out of committee. Waiting to be scheduled for full Senate action.

Will federal funding for school lunches increase for the first time since 1973?

Meanwhile, on June 10 in the House, Representative George Miller (D-California), chair of the House Education and Labor committee, introduced the Improving Nutrition for America’s Children Act of 2010.

Key components:

• $8 billion in new funding over 10 years for child-nutrition programs
• Includes improved access to school meals for eligible children and expanded eligibility requirements
• Improved food-safety requirements
• Nutrition education
• Financial impact on school lunch: 6 cent increase per meal

Yay or nay: Just introduced, the bill awaits scheduling for a committee vote. It has bipartisan support. Celebrity factor: TV cooking personality Rachael Ray held a press conference supporting Miller’s bill.

What Sen. Lincoln has to say about Rep. Miller’s bill: “Chairman Miller’s introduction of reauthorization legislation sends a clear message that both chambers of Congress are working to send a bill to the President’s desk before the end of the fiscal year.” (Complete statement.)

What Rep. Miller has to say about Sen. Lincoln’s bill: “Senator Lincoln’s focus on improving access and nutrition quality rightfully addresses many of the concerns I often hear from parents, stakeholders, and school leaders.” (Complete statement.)

Historic relevance

As reported on the blog Obamafoodorama, if either version (or some variation thereof) is passed, it would be the first time since 1973 that Congress has increased the federal reimbursement rate for school meals.

Additional notes

While the House and Senate weigh in on the respective reauthorization bills, the separate appropriations process will be underway, during which Congress actually approves money for authorized programs. Key players to watch include Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), chair of the appropriations subcommittee for agriculture, and Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisconsin), chair of the respective senate subcommittee. Together, they and their colleagues will write the actual checks for these programs.

What’s the rush?

As mentioned earlier, the Child Nutrition Act presently in effect is an extension of a 2004 law that expires on September 30. Letting the legislation expire once again would likely translate into no new changes, merely a repeat extension.

Meanwhile, back at the Department of Health and Human Services . . .

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are also up for their five-year checkup. An advisory committee has just issued its recommendations, which help set standards for all federal food programs, including the NSLP.

The public is invited to comment and provide oral testimony, which will be submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services for a public hearing on July 8.

Among the recommendations are

• less salt
• less saturated fat
• fewer sugar-sweetened beverages
• more seafood
• more plants
• less meat.

Additional resources

You might want to take a look at a great map from USA Today that sheds light on the number of children who receive free lunches. Also, check out the transcript from my recent Table Talk chat on school lunches, with Eddie Gehman Kohan of Obamafoodorama.

A seasoned chef and journalist, Kim O’Donnel hosts the weekly Table Talk chats on Culinate. Her cookbook, The Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook, will be published in September 2010.

The Food Movement, Rising

by Michael Pollan

The New York Review of Books
June 10, 2010

Getty Images

Michelle Obama at a farmers’ market near the White House, September 17, 2009

Food Made Visible

It might sound odd to say this about something people deal with at least three times a day, but food in America has been more or less invisible, politically speaking, until very recently. At least until the early 1970s, when a bout of food price inflation and the appearance of books critical of industrial agriculture (by Wendell Berry, Francis Moore Lappé, and Barry Commoner, among others) threatened to propel the subject to the top of the national agenda, Americans have not had to think very hard about where their food comes from, or what it is doing to the planet, their bodies, and their society.

Most people count this a blessing. Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any people in history—slightly less than 10 percent—and a smaller amount of their time preparing it: a mere thirty-one minutes a day on average, including clean-up. The supermarkets brim with produce summoned from every corner of the globe, a steady stream of novel food products (17,000 new ones each year) crowds the middle aisles, and in the freezer case you can find “home meal replacements” in every conceivable ethnic stripe, demanding nothing more of the eater than opening the package and waiting for the microwave to chirp. Considered in the long sweep of human history, in which getting food dominated not just daily life but economic and political life as well, having to worry about food as little as we do, or did, seems almost a kind of dream.

The dream that the age-old “food problem” had been largely solved for most Americans was sustained by the tremendous postwar increases in the productivity of American farmers, made possible by cheap fossil fuel (the key ingredient in both chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and changes in agricultural policies. Asked by President Nixon to try to drive down the cost of food after it had spiked in the early 1970s, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz shifted the historical focus of federal farm policy from supporting prices for farmers to boosting yields of a small handful of commodity crops (corn and soy especially) at any cost.

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The administration’s cheap food policy worked almost too well: crop prices fell, forcing farmers to produce still more simply to break even. This led to a deep depression in the farm belt in the 1980s followed by a brutal wave of consolidation. Most importantly, the price of food came down, or at least the price of the kinds of foods that could be made from corn and soy: processed foods and sweetened beverages and feedlot meat. (Prices for fresh produce have increased since the 1980s.) Washington had succeeded in eliminating food as a political issue—an objective dear to most governments at least since the time of the French Revolution.

But although cheap food is good politics, it turns out there are significant costs—to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the culture—and as these became impossible to ignore in recent years, food has come back into view. Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of food safety scandals opened people’s eyes to the way their food was being produced, each one drawing the curtain back a little further on a food system that had changed beyond recognition. When BSE, or mad cow disease, surfaced in England in 1986, Americans learned that cattle, which are herbivores, were routinely being fed the flesh of other cattle; the practice helped keep meat cheap but at the risk of a hideous brain-wasting disease.

The 1993 deaths of four children in Washington State who had eaten hamburgers from Jack in the Box were traced to meat contaminated with E.coli 0157:H7, a mutant strain of the common intestinal bacteria first identified in feedlot cattle in 1982. Since then, repeated outbreaks of food-borne illness linked to new antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria (campylobacter, salmonella, MRSA) have turned a bright light on the shortsighted practice of routinely administering antibiotics to food animals, not to treat disease but simply to speed their growth and allow them to withstand the filthy and stressful conditions in which they live.

In the wake of these food safety scandals, the conversation about food politics that briefly flourished in the 1970s was picked up again in a series of books, articles, and movies about the consequences of industrial food production.Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of family income beginning in the 1970s.

Besides drawing women into the work force, falling wages made fast food both cheap to produce and a welcome, if not indispensible, option for pinched and harried families. The picture of the food economy Schlosser painted resembles an upside-down version of the social compact sometimes referred to as “Fordism”: instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. The advent of fast food (and cheap food in general) has, in effect, subsidized the decline of family incomes in America.

Food Politics

Cheap food has become an indispensable pillar of the modern economy. But it is no longer an invisible or uncontested one. One of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years is the “food movement,” or perhaps I should say “movements,” since it is unified as yet by little more than the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform because its social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high.

As that list suggests, the critics are coming at the issue from a great many different directions. Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids.

It’s a big, lumpy tent, and sometimes the various factions beneath it work at cross-purposes. For example, activists working to strengthen federal food safety regulations have recently run afoul of local food advocates, who fear that the burden of new regulation will cripple the current revival of small-farm agriculture. Joel Salatin, the Virginia meat producer and writer who has become a hero to the food movement, fulminates against food safety regulation on libertarian grounds in his Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front. Hunger activists like Joel Berg, in All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?, criticize supporters of “sustainable” agriculture—i.e., producing food in ways that do not harm the environment—for advocating reforms that threaten to raise the cost of food to the poor. Animal rights advocates occasionally pick fights with sustainable meat producers (such as Joel Salatin), as Jonathan Safran Foer does in his recent vegetarian polemic, Eating Animals.

But there are indications that these various voices may be coming together in something that looks more and more like a coherent movement. Many in the animal welfare movement, from PETA to Peter Singer, have come to see that a smaller-scale, more humane animal agriculture is a goal worth fighting for, and surely more attainable than the abolition of meat eating. Stung by charges of elitism, activists for sustainable farming are starting to take seriously the problem of hunger and poverty. They’re promoting schemes and policies to make fresh local food more accessible to the poor, through programs that give vouchers redeemable at farmers’ markets to participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and food stamp recipients. Yet a few underlying tensions remain: the “hunger lobby” has traditionally supported farm subsidies in exchange for the farm lobby’s support of nutrition programs, a marriage of convenience dating to the 1960s that vastly complicates reform of the farm bill—a top priority for the food movement.

The sociologist Troy Duster reminds us of an all-important axiom about social movements: “No movement is as coherent and integrated as it seems from afar,” he says, “and no movement is as incoherent and fractured as it seems from up close.” Viewed from a middle distance, then, the food movement coalesces around the recognition that today’s food and farming economy is “unsustainable”—that it can’t go on in its current form much longer without courting a breakdown of some kind, whether environmental, economic, or both.

For some in the movement, the more urgent problem is environmental: the food system consumes more fossil fuel energy than we can count on in the future (about a fifth of the total American use of such energy) and emits more greenhouse gas than we can afford to emit, particularly since agriculture is the one human system that should be able to substantially rely on photosynthesis: solar energy. It will be difficult if not impossible to address the issue of climate change without reforming the food system. This is a conclusion that has only recently been embraced by the environmental movement, which historically has disdained all agriculture as a lapse from wilderness and a source of pollution.¹ But in the last few years, several of the major environmental groups have come to appreciate that a diversified, sustainable agriculture—which can sequester large amounts of carbon in the soil—holds the potential not just to mitigate but actually to help solve environmental problems, including climate change. Today, environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group are taking up the cause of food system reform, lending their expertise and clout to the movement.

But perhaps the food movement’s strongest claim on public attention today is the fact that the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that fully three quarters of US health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which are preventable and linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and at least a third of all cancers. The health care crisis probably cannot be addressed without addressing the catastrophe of the American diet, and that diet is the direct (even if unintended) result of the way that our agriculture and food industries have been organized.

1. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth made scant mention of food or agriculture, but in his recent follow-up book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (2009), he devotes a long chapter to the subject of our food choices and their bearing on climate. ↩

Michelle Obama’s recent foray into food politics, beginning with the organic garden she planted on the White House lawn last spring, suggests that the administration has made these connections. Her new “Let’s Move” campaign to combat childhood obesity might at first blush seem fairly anodyne, but in announcing the initiative in February, and in a surprisingly tough speech to the Grocery Manufacturers Association in March,² the First Lady has effectively shifted the conversation about diet from the industry’s preferred ground of “personal responsibility” and exercise to a frank discussion of the way food is produced and marketed. “We need you not just to tweak around the edges,” she told the assembled food makers, “but to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children.”

Mrs. Obama explicitly rejected the conventional argument that the food industry is merely giving people the sugary, fatty, and salty foods they want, contending that the industry “doesn’t just respond to people’s natural inclinations—it also actually helps to shape them,” through the ways it creates products and markets them.

So far at least, Michelle Obama is the food movement’s most important ally in the administration, but there are signs of interest elsewhere. Under Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, the FDA has cracked down on deceptive food marketing and is said to be weighing a ban on the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in factory farming. Attorney General Eric Holder recently avowed the Justice Department’s intention to pursue antitrust enforcement in agribusiness, one of the most highly concentrated sectors in the economy.³ At his side was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, who has planted his own organic vegetable garden at the department and launched a new “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative aimed at promoting local food systems as a way to both rebuild rural economies and improve access to healthy food.

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Though Vilsack has so far left mostly undisturbed his department’s traditional deference to industrial agriculture, the new tone in Washington and the appointment of a handful of respected reformers (such as Tufts professor Kathleen Merrigan as deputy secretary of agriculture) has elicited a somewhat defensive, if not panicky, reaction from agribusiness. The Farm Bureau recently urged its members to go on the offensive against “food activists,” and a trade association representing pesticide makers called CropLife America wrote to Michelle Obama suggesting that her organic garden had unfairly maligned chemical agriculture and encouraging her to use “crop protection technologies”—i.e., pesticides.

The First Lady’s response is not known; however, the President subsequently rewarded CropLife by appointing one of its executives to a high-level trade post. This and other industry-friendly appointments suggest that while the administration may be sympathetic to elements of the food movement’s agenda, it isn’t about to take on agribusiness, at least not directly, at least until it senses at its back a much larger constituency for reform.

One way to interpret Michelle Obama’s deepening involvement in food issues is as an effort to build such a constituency, and in this she may well succeed. It’s a mistake to underestimate what a determined First Lady can accomplish. Lady Bird Johnson’s “highway beautification” campaign also seemed benign, but in the end it helped raise public consciousness about “the environment” (as it would soon come to be known) and put an end to the public’s tolerance for littering. And while Michelle Obama has explicitly limited her efforts to exhortation (“we can’t solve this problem by passing a bunch of laws in Washington,” she told the Grocery Manufacturers, no doubt much to their relief), her work is already creating a climate in which just such a “bunch of laws” might flourish: a handful of state legislatures, including California’s, are seriously considering levying new taxes on sugar in soft drinks, proposals considered hopelessly extreme less than a year ago.

The political ground is shifting, and the passage of health care reform may accelerate that movement. The bill itself contains a few provisions long promoted by the food movement (like calorie labeling on fast food menus), but more important could be the new political tendencies it sets in motion. If health insurers can no longer keep people with chronic diseases out of their patient pools, it stands to reason that the companies will develop a keener interest in preventing those diseases. They will then discover that they have a large stake in things like soda taxes and in precisely which kinds of calories the farm bill is subsidizing. As the insurance industry and the government take on more responsibility for the cost of treating expensive and largely preventable problems like obesity and type 2 diabetes, pressure for reform of the food system, and the American diet, can be expected to increase.

Beyond the Barcode

It would be a mistake to conclude that the food movement’s agenda can be reduced to a set of laws, policies, and regulations, important as these may be. What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. As the Diggers used to say during their San Francisco be-ins during the 1960s, food can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself.

One can get a taste of this social space simply by hanging around a farmers’ market, an activity that a great many people enjoy today regardless of whether they’re in the market for a bunch of carrots or a head of lettuce. Farmers’ markets are thriving, more than five thousand strong, and there is a lot more going on in them than the exchange of money for food. Someone is collecting signatures on a petition. Someone else is playing music. Children are everywhere, sampling fresh produce, talking to farmers. Friends and acquaintances stop to chat. One sociologist calculated that people have ten times as many conversations at the farmers’ market than they do in the supermarket. Socially as well as sensually, the farmers’ market offers a remarkably rich and appealing environment. Someone buying food here may be acting not just as a consumer but also as a neighbor, a citizen, a parent, a cook. In many cities and towns, farmers’ markets have taken on (and not for the first time) the function of a lively new public square.

Though seldom articulated as such, the attempt to redefine, or escape, the traditional role of consumer has become an important aspiration of the food movement. In various ways it seeks to put the relationship between consumers and producers on a new, more neighborly footing, enriching the kinds of information exchanged in the transaction, and encouraging us to regard our food dollars as “votes” for a different kind of agriculture and, by implication, economy. The modern marketplace would have us decide what to buy strictly on the basis of price and self-interest; the food movement implicitly proposes that we enlarge our understanding of both those terms, suggesting that not just “good value” but ethical and political values should inform our buying decisions, and that we’ll get more satisfaction from our eating when they do.

That satisfaction helps to explain why many in the movement don’t greet the spectacle of large corporations adopting its goals, as some of them have begun to do, with unalloyed enthusiasm. Already Wal-Mart sells organic and local food, but this doesn’t greatly warm the hearts of food movement activists. One important impetus for the movement, or at least its locavore wing—those who are committed to eating as much locally produced food as possible—is the desire to get “beyond the barcode”—to create new economic and social structures outside of the mainstream consumer economy. Though not always articulated in these terms, the local food movement wants to decentralize the global economy, if not secede from it altogether, which is why in some communities, such as Great Barrington, Massachusetts, local currencies (the “BerkShare”) have popped up.

In fact it’s hard to say which comes first: the desire to promote local agriculture or the desire to promote local economies more generally by cutting ties, to whatever degree possible, to the national economic grid.⁴ This is at bottom a communitarian impulse, and it is one that is drawing support from the right as well as the left. Though the food movement has deep roots in the counterculture of the 1960s, its critique of corporate food and federal farm subsidies, as well as its emphasis on building community around food, has won it friends on the right. In his 2006 book Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher identifies a strain of libertarian conservatism, often evangelical, that regards fast food as anathema to family values, and has seized on local food as a kind of culinary counterpart to home schooling.

It makes sense that food and farming should become a locus of attention for Americans disenchanted with consumer capitalism. Food is the place in daily life where corporatization can be most vividly felt: think about the homogenization of taste and experience represented by fast food. By the same token, food offers us one of the shortest, most appealing paths out of the corporate labyrinth, and into the sheer diversity of local flavors, varieties, and characters on offer at the farmers’ market.

Put another way, the food movement has set out to foster new forms of civil society. But instead of proposing that space as a counterweight to an overbearing state, as is usually the case, the food movement poses it against the dominance of corporations and their tendency to insinuate themselves into any aspect of our lives from which they can profit. As Wendell Berry writes, the corporations

will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.

The Italian-born organization Slow Food, founded in 1986 as a protest against the arrival of McDonald’s in Rome, represents perhaps the purest expression of these politics. The organization, which now has 100,000 members in 132 countries, began by dedicating itself to “a firm defense of quiet material pleasure” but has lately waded into deeper political and economic waters. Slow Food’s founder and president, Carlo Petrini, a former leftist journalist, has much to say about how people’s daily food choices can rehabilitate the act of consumption, making it something more creative and progressive. In his new book Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities, Petrini urges eaters and food producers to join together in “food communities” outside of the usual distribution channels, which typically communicate little information beyond price and often exploit food producers. A farmers’ market is one manifestation of such a community, but Petrini is no mere locavore. Rather, he would have us practice on a global scale something like “local” economics, with its stress on neighborliness, as when, to cite one of his examples, eaters in the affluent West support nomad fisher folk in Mauritania by creating a market for their bottarga, or dried mullet roe. In helping to keep alive such a food tradition and way of life, the eater becomes something more than a consumer; she becomes what Petrini likes to call a “coproducer.”

2. Ms. Obama's speech can be read at www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-first-lady-a-grocery-manufacturers-association-conference. ↩

3. Speaking in March at an Iowa "listening session" about agribusiness concentration, Holder said, "long periods of reckless deregulation have restricted competition" in agriculture. Indeed: four companies (JBS/Swift, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef Packers) slaughter 85 percent of US beef cattle; two companies (Monsanto and DuPont) sell more than 50 percent of US corn seed; one company (Dean Foods) controls 40 percent of the US milk supply. ↩

4. For an interesting case study about a depressed Vermont mining town that turned to local food and agriculture to revitalize itself, see Ben Hewitt, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food (Rodale, 2009). ↩

Ever the Italian, Petrini puts pleasure at the center of his politics, which might explain why Slow Food is not always taken as seriously as it deserves to be. For why shouldn’t pleasure figure in the politics of the food movement? Good food is potentially one of the most democratic pleasures a society can offer, and is one of those subjects, like sports, that people can talk about across lines of class, ethnicity, and race.

The fact that the most humane and most environmentally sustainable choices frequently turn out to be the most delicious choices (as chefs such as Alice Waters and Dan Barber have pointed out) is fortuitous to say the least; it is also a welcome challenge to the more dismal choices typically posed by environmentalism, which most of the time is asking us to give up things we like. As Alice Waters has often said, it was not politics or ecology that brought her to organic agriculture, but rather the desire to recover a certain taste—one she had experienced as an exchange student in France. Of course democratizing such tastes, which under current policies tend to be more expensive, is the hard part, and must eventually lead the movement back to more conventional politics lest it be tagged as elitist.

But the movement’s interest in such seemingly mundane matters as taste and the other textures of everyday life is also one of its great strengths. Part of the movement’s critique of industrial food is that, with the rise of fast food and the collapse of everyday cooking, it has damaged family life and community by undermining the institution of the shared meal. Sad as it may be to bowl alone, eating alone can be sadder still, not least because it is eroding the civility on which our political culture depends.

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That is the argument made by Janet Flammang, a political scientist, in a provocative new book called The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society. “Significant social and political costs have resulted from fast food and convenience foods,” she writes, “grazing and snacking instead of sitting down for leisurely meals, watching television during mealtimes instead of conversing”—40 percent of Americans watch television during meals—”viewing food as fuel rather than sustenance, discarding family recipes and foodways, and denying that eating has social and political dimensions.” The cultural contradictions of capitalism—its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on—are on vivid display at the modern American dinner table.

In a challenge to second-wave feminists who urged women to get out of the kitchen, Flammang suggests that by denigrating “foodwork”—everything involved in putting meals on the family table—we have unthinkingly wrecked one of the nurseries of democracy: the family meal. It is at “the temporary democracy of the table” that children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civility—sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending—and it is these habits that are lost when we eat alone and on the run. “Civility is not needed when one is by oneself.”⁵

These arguments resonated during the Senate debate over health care reform, when The New York Times reported that the private Senate dining room, where senators of both parties used to break bread together, stood empty. Flammang attributes some of the loss of civility in Washington to the aftermatch of the 1994 Republican Revolution, when Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, urged his freshman legislators not to move their families to Washington. Members now returned to their districts every weekend, sacrificing opportunities for socializing across party lines and, in the process, the “reservoirs of good will replenished at dinner parties.” It is much harder to vilify someone with whom you have shared a meal.

Flammang makes a convincing case for the centrality of food work and shared meals, much along the lines laid down by Carlo Petrini and Alice Waters, but with more historical perspective and theoretical rigor. A scholar of the women’s movement, she suggests that “American women are having second thoughts” about having left the kitchen.⁶ However, the answer is not for them simply to return to it, at least not alone, but rather “for everyone—men, women, and children—to go back to the kitchen, as in preindustrial days, and for the workplace to lessen its time demands on people.” Flammang points out that the historical priority of the American labor movement has been to fight for money, while the European labor movement has fought for time, which she suggests may have been the wiser choice.

At the very least this is a debate worth having, and it begins by taking food issues much more seriously than we have taken them. Flammang suggests that the invisibility of these issues until recently owes to the identification of food work with women and the (related) fact that eating, by its very nature, falls on the wrong side of the mind–body dualism. “Food is apprehended through the senses of touch, smell and taste,” she points out,

which rank lower on the hierarchy of senses than sight and hearing, which are typically thought to give rise to knowledge. In most of philosophy, religion, and literature, food is associated with body, animal, female, and appetite—things civilized men have sought to overcome with reason and knowledge.

Much to our loss. But food is invisible no longer and, in light of the mounting costs we’ve incurred by ignoring it, it is likely to demand much more of our attention in the future, as eaters, parents, and citizens. It is only a matter of time before politicians seize on the power of the food issue, which besides being increasingly urgent is also almost primal, indeed is in some deep sense proto- political. For where do all politics begin if not in the high chair?—at that fateful moment when mother, or father, raises a spoonful of food to the lips of the baby who clamps shut her mouth, shakes her head no, and for the very first time in life awakens to and asserts her sovereign power.

5. See David M. Herszenhorn, "In Senate Health Care Vote, New Partisan Vitriol," The New York Times, December 23, 2009: "Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, said the political—and often personal—divisions that now characterize the Senate were epitomized by the empty tables in the senators' private dining room, a place where members of both parties used to break bread. 'Nobody goes there anymore,' Mr. Baucus said. 'When I was here 10, 15, 30 years ago, that the place you would go to talk to senators, let your hair down, just kind of compare notes, no spouses allowed, no staff, nobody. It is now empty.'"↩

6. The stirrings of a new "radical homemakers" movement lends some support to the assertion. See Shannon Hayes's Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture (Left to Write Press, 2010).↩