Food Police

This past weekend I offered some guests a piece of Trader Joe’s chocolate. They asked if it was “Fair Trade.” It wasn’t and I scurried to the Trader Joe’s web site to research their position on chocolate. They didn’t seem to have a chocolate position. But  on another site I read about child slaves used to harvest the chocolate beans in Cote D'Ivoire and wished I had bought some more of the Fair Trade bars I had been nibbling. Food is such a personal and emotionally charged issue that one needs to be sensitive to other people’s views about what they eat. As a vegetarian for 32 years I’ve been on both sides of obnoxious. Meat eaters have given me a hard time and I’ve dished it out as well. Surprisingly, during my year as a 100% raw foodist, it was often my vegetarian friends who were most offended by my new food views. I suppose they felt they had given up enough. There is tremendous interest, however, in what we eat. There are powerful business forces concerned with protecting their turf and profitability and notable public interest groups lined up to attack. Food issues can be divided roughly into two categories: ethical and health. Ethical issues involve treatment of animals and farm workers; health issues focus on such things as additives in food, marketing unhealthy products to children, etc. A couple big dogs in the fight are   The Center for Consumer Freedom,  “a nonprofit coalition of restaurants, food companies, and consumers working together to promote personal responsibility and protect consumer choices.” They recently published the Ten Dumbest Food Cop Ideas
They battle against “the growing cabal of "food cops," health care enforcers, militant activists, meddling bureaucrats, and violent radicals who think they know "what's best for you" are pushing against our basic freedoms.”
The Center For Consumer Freedom is mainly talking about The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) a self-described “food police” organization that has taken on olestra, palm oil and diet pop. CSPI has 900,000 subscribers to their newsletter which gives them lots of lobbying clout. Jacob Sullum in an article titled, The Anti-Pleasure Principle: The Food Police and the Pseudoscience of Self-denial  provides an interesting recap of the battles between Center For Science in the Public Interest and the Center for Consumer Freedom.
There are, of course, other organized food police forces and defenders of the food supply. It’s difficult to wind one’s way through the claims and counterclaims. I’m generally going to side with the food police as being more credible. The defenders of our food supply sell us tons of  sugar, create cannibal cows, and now genetically modified grains, fruits and vegetables. Maybe I’ll make a citizens arrest.

Comments

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Thanks for a good post. So many of the issues stem from our being separated from the source of our food. I think that's more important than the particulars of what we eat (even though I'm a vegetarian). If eating that Snickers bar meant you had to watch your neighbor beat his 10-year-old nephew with a stick, you wouldn't do it. If eating that lettuce meant your neighbors had to be sprayed with pesticides from a crop duster, you wouldn't do it.

Add the whole notion of highly processed foods, which are an incredibly unhealthy manifestation of our separation from our food, and you can see that the closer to home we eat, the better it is for us.