PART IV – A NEW RELIGION

All people need a belief system to live and it doesn’t have to be rational. The need to feel good about yourself and your daily life choices gives purpose and meaning to existence. Nowhere is that need more important than the choices we make for the food we eat. We eat every day and the choices we make in selecting foods require, for many people, some confirmation or authentication from outside sources. Proper food choices can extend one’s life and no reward is greater than the blessing of our choices bestowed by a supposedly wise person who pretends the knowledge and wisdom to steer our choices in the right direction. The problem is we never require of the foodie thought leaders the same rational proof that legitimatizes most of our critical decision making in everyday life. Eating is an emotional process.

Food advocacy has become a religion. The foodie leaders have become the Priests and the Gurus. They have created a world in which heartless corporations sacrifice food safety and long term conservation of the land for short term profit and portray the consumer as the fall guy. They idolize the small family farmer and create a myth of small caring operations bestowing on them the winner’s ribbon of purity of essence. They fail to mention the thousands of unfinanced small operations that fail to maintain viable crops or properly feed and care for the animals.

The food products of these mythical family farms may promise to save the world but they won’t feed the world. They will feed the psyche of the rich by providing them the belief system to justify their food choices. The rich have always wanted to differentiate themselves from the rest of us. They do this in the selection of a car [Mercedes Benz] or a watch [Rolex] or a large house or a fancy airplane but always accompanied by a justification for the ownership of the asset they choose to distinguish themselves from us. This elitism of the rich has now spilled over to food where the foodie leaders provide the justification to the rich for paying twice as much for an organic tomato or a “free range” chicken or a quart of organic milk. Yet supporting those choices are no scientific studies or health studies, just words of wisdom from Gurus delivered from the pulpit on high.

The Gurus appeal to the paranoia in all of us. They envision vast conspiracies occurring behind the scenes in all production agriculture. They assume price fixing with no evidence. They assume contaminated food based upon a few isolated instances ignoring that the same percent of contamination occurs in organic foods. They assume grass fed beef is free of eColi when all beef carries the risk however small. They assume food produced using chemicals are harmful to your health. They call genetically modified food products “frankenfoods” in an attempt to scare and frighten. And they ignore the fact that our food safety practices and prolific food supply in this country has been a major factor in increasing the life span from 44 years at the time of the civil war to 78 today.

Who are the Gurus and what do they know of American production agriculture? They form an elite group of educated teachers but, like many academics, they lack understanding or knowledge of practices in the field. Their specialty is an excess of charisma. They are excellent writers and speakers and they know how to motivate and manipulate. The closest they get to agriculture is their ability to create their own cash cow. They stay on message and don’t let facts or science get in the way of a good story or myth. They tend to be located in urban centers and rarely venture into the agricultural areas that feed this country and much of the world. They don’t want to spoil the income stream they have created and certainly don’t want to expose their propositions to public scrutiny or rational analysis. That could be a show stopper.

Unfortunately, the best scientists in the world, able to debunk the false information, are found in this country’s ag schools. If they dare venture out in public, they are either edited out like the Opray “mad cow” show or labeled instruments of agribusiness by the media. This doesn’t eliminate the need or necessity of all participants in production agriculture to chart a steady course of rationality by refuting the misstatements as they occur and advancing their own agenda grounded in fact and science. The conundrum is why intelligent people give a free pass to the foodie leaders. Why have they failed to analyze or question or critique ideas about food production that are so far afield? The only answer must be because the movement has become a religion and everyone knows a person who questions the religion is branded a heretic.