MentalPolyphonics
Where have all the plumbers gone?
One thing that was sad was people emphasizing...October 17, 2009 at 7:57 am
Tagged: environmentalism, ethics, Food
I haven’t read In Defense of Food, which I’m told has excellent arguments against organic.
The rich looked inside their food and didn’t like it, so they voted with their wallets to set up a parallel agriculture system: organic food. They could have lobbied the government to restrict pesticide use. Instead they said, “let the poor eat pesticide-contaminated, low-nutrition cake”.
The decision to check out of organic food is to choose consumption over collective action. Partially it’s just easier to set up another agriculture; partially it’s fun that buying expensive food can define your identity (literally, you are what you eat). It’s not just in a Rawlsian sense: it doesn’t make the poor better off.
If you had two companies selling food, they’d attempt to differentiate themselves in the market. One might start making higher quality food and the other might make lower cost food. That is precisely what has happened to the two whole markets in this case: 100-mile heritage biodynamic fair-trade vegetables vs This is Why You’re Fat. Buying organic food might actually cause non-organic food to get worse.
It’s also not just in a Kantian sense: The categorical imperative says that you should act as you wish everyone acted. If everyone tried to live off organic food, 2 billion people would die. (Kyla shared that article, which I’ve used twice, with me on Earth Day – yay!)
Jack
You can have my organic food when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Kyla
I do so love Southern Fried Science
Don
I’m watching an episode of The Agenda with Steve Paikin called Wired 24/7?. After a mention of the Amish as an example a non-technological society, Neal Stephenson said “we are all Amish“. The Amish are not non-technological (they have metallurgy, etc), they just define some technologies as “good” and some as “bad” or “impure”. And we all do that. He mentioned the examples of people refusing to have a television or an answering machine / voice mail. But the example I thought of right away was genetically modified foods.