Let's think about the word conservative for a second. True conservatives are interested in "conserving" things right? The caricature of conservatives is that they try to preserve abstract things like traditional culture, the sanctity of the family, morality, and community but are really only interested in moralizing. But where are the conservatives who want to conserve the environment? Where are the church groups unwilling to participate in a system where factory farming of livestock is a reality? Where are the conservatives who want to preserve traditional agriculture, the kind of small scale, local and family based agriculture that Thomas Jefferson dreamed would be the future of the nation? Talk about an Originalist!
As a political conservative who favors limited-government, the authentic over the mass produced, the local over the federal, and small business over corporate, the sustainable food movement seems a perfect fit for me. And yet when I look out over the various constellations that make up the movement, I don't see very many conservatives.
It may be that many of us, accustomed to decades of caricature and derision, simply choose to keep our heads down and soldier on. But as the movement progresses it will be important for advocates of all political stripes to be transparent about their agendas. Transparency is never a bad thing. I also believe that advocates of a local, sustainable food system should be more welcoming and accepting of conservatives that hold the same goals, even if they have different reasons for doing so. It's not that current stakeholders in local foods activism have excluded conservatives, I do not think they have. But what they also have not done is made it a priority to reach out to community members from across the aisle.
Crunchy Cons
I recently read Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture, by the journalist Rod Dreher. Dreher found that the U.S. food system was a target rich environment for him to criticize using his conservative credentials. His criticisms, while well known to local foods advocates, are enlightening for conservatives.
Conservatives value small businesses over corporations because they keep people empowered. The local and sustainable food movement elevates small farmers, artisans and restaurateurs, almost to a heroic level. Just look at how Alice Waters and Joel Salatin are regarded.
Dreher writes,
The traditional conservative will want to take a stand for the mom-and-pop cheese maker over the pasteurized processed food disgorged by the factory and sold cheaply.
Dreher also recognizes and exposes how big business has purposely manipulated the free market to make it less free and competitive, by shutting out the small producers:
I started looking into how the government regulates the meat industry. It was shocking to see how agribusiness has gamed the system to keep small meat producers marginalized. Our regulatory system is designed to favor industrialized meat production, with its factory farms, its cattle jacked up with antibiotics and growth hormones, and its chickens in cages filled with their own feces. As a conservative, I am angry about this, not only on behalf of the small businesspeople slapped around by the deep-pocketed agribusiness behemoths, but because of how industrialized agriculture has made a traditional agrarian way of life difficult, if not impossible.... To participate in a system and a way of thinking in which the act of eating is merely a commercial transaction is to sell out our spiritual and cultural patrimony. I understand the free-market reasons why Americans do this. But I don't understand why it is called conservative.
Dreher nails this important point home by talking with economist Edward Hudgins. "Hudgins told me that it's often the case that big companies willingly absorb the cost of extra regulation because those rules 'have the effect of killing off the competition.'"
Is Slow Food Conservative?
Rod is fortunate to discover Slow Food and immediately finds parallels between Slow Food and conservative impulses.
As the Slow Food movement grew beyond the bounds of Italy, its proponents realized that they could never succeed by trying to stop McDonald's and its ilk. Rather, they had to show people why the Slow attitude toward life--esteeming tradition, celebrating the particularity in the face of mass culture, and taking time to enjoy life--is more sensible, more fun, more human.
Dreher further establishes Slow Food's conservative credentials by recalling Russell Kirk's Six Canons of Conservative Thought, the second of which is "affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life." Dreher notices how well Kirk's principle fits in with one of Slow Food's primary missions, to educate, save and esteem plant and animal variety with the Ark of Taste.
It's truly notable when Italian Marxists and American Conservatives mirror each others thinking. Politics really does make strange bedfellows.
For decades now, conservatism has been in bed with big business Republican and Democratic interests. This marriage of convenience has proven itself hopelessly corrupt. As the conservative movement reconnects with its principles, something that liberals and democrats should desire, we can expect to see more conservatives opting out of these political arrangements and shifting their gaze in our direction.
It behooves the local sustainable movement to encourage political conservatives to remove themselves from under the yoke of a dominant food culture that disrespects their core beliefs and traditions. When problems in our society become so blatant that factions who normally would have nothing to do with each other begin to cooperate in order to find solutions, we know we are at a turning point. Let's grow the movement from all sides.
Follow Zachary Adam Cohen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ZacharyCohen
Aaron Gross: Jonathan Safran Foer's Controversial New Book, Eating Animals
I do find that voting for fiscally proven programs is often voting for socially progressive ones. Voting for Socially conservative interests seems often seems not so good. Our "War on Drugs" for example, ties up enormous monies in punitive tactics that please the social conservative talking heads. Our stats of drug-related crimes and health issues are most like that of Kazakhstan, an anarchic drug free-for-all. People in prison have careened out of control and trailing behind are whole social sectors that don't know both parents and are on the dole.
Everyone bears the cost, tho some do more than others. I remember when my uncle was ordered to burn his fallow fields, some of which had broken out in wild cannabis. My uncle held out for the Gov't to pay but when he and my aunt hung up their hats for the last time that was the end. My cousins said too much hassle and sold it. Sad that the best per-acre producers are penalized with higher per-acre costs.
But we do have HUGE city, state, federal and even international departments paid to chase it around the clock. My fiscally conservative soul shudders at the size, cost and ineffectuality of it all.
I think the old labels may not work anymore, for the same reason that more people are becoming independent rather than Republican or Democrat.
I consider myself a conservative on economic matters (hence the sign in), but socially liberal. I think many people don't think the government should be dictating as much as they are....they think abortion should be available, that the death penalty is fair, that a social safety net is important, that you shouldn't expect others to pay for your fifth child....etc...
I think that as government, business, unions etc. get bigger, they obtain powers that allow them to do things the majority of the individuals involved would not support. It eventually will cause them to fail but they won't give up easily and it will only be after a long a painful decline. Witness the banks, GM, Chrysler, UAW, and the huge subsidies of big American agriculture (to get back on point).
Again, Thank you.
http://csdngo.igc.org/agriculture/agr_rosset.htm
Small farms are also far more flexible in facing inclement conditions; http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2115
These same things are also true of kitchen and truck gardeners.
What small farms DON'T do is maximize profits for the smallest # of people. In the well-regulated western countries they also contribute very little to disease vectors. Most of the recent disease waves from all over the world and food poisonings in the US that have caused our alarums are borne of livestock very closely confined in their own fecal matter. That is not typical of grass-fed animals on smallholdings and these are the people that produce the most interesting and sustainable varieties of foods.
Cause really, like Black Uhuru, the amazing reggae group sings Everybody wants the same things:
Solidarity
Everybody wants the same thing, don't they?
Everybody wants a happy end
They wanna see the game on Saturday
They wanna be somebody's friend
Everybody wanna work for a living
Everybody wants their children warm
Everybody wants to be forgiven
They want a shelter from the storm
Look at me, I ain't your enemy
We walk on common ground
We don't need to fight each other
What we need, what we need
-healthy, local food that respects the farmer and the eater (really, nobody wants to eat processed crap that's been grown by miserable people who are being cheated)
-concern for both the inherent value of the environment and natural resources which feed, water and sustain us (in Repubs it tends to be through the prism of Christianity- I've known a quite a few Conservatives who are just as in awe over an amazing sunset or a dolphin's jump as I am- but for completely different reasons. Mine are personally spiritual, theirs is through an organized religion- likely it feels the same from the inside.)
-wanting to leave behind a healthy and sustainable world for your kids
Here's a few more: National Animal Identification System.
Care to comment??
Totally typical as it is one of the Big Business/ Regulatory schemes to increase costs of doing business to protect against legit competition. They cant stop us though, they can only throw chairs in our path...
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_DeLauro
Hardly a conservative and hardly a supporter of small family farms from reading the bill she has sponsored.
National ID System... while great in concept if a producer is able to track forward the animal performance through the system. Thus, giving data that a producer is able to use to tweak his breeding and management programs. The technology for the current proposed system is faulty in the fact that the tags don't stay in and the info is only used for tracking backwards, if there happens to be a problem. There is no advantage to the farmer other than signing his name to his livestock and adding to his cost of production.
It should be noted that the only cases of BSE in this country were in dairy cattle imported from Canada, I do not know of any cases that originated in the US. Also, this disease is contract by feeding animal byproducts to cattle... This practice has been illegal in the US for many years.
In the interest of full disclosure: I am a conservative (Reagan style). I do support sustainalbe, local agriculture and I subscribe to MOFGA.
Now celebrate my diversity.
I am not a farmer, or a small business owner at present. My father was raised on the family farm, and his older brother still owns that land (but leases it to a neihbor to farm now).
If I could 'retire tomorrow' instead of the 15+ years I figure I plan to work before that day and do anything other than what I do for a living today, I would try my hand at cheesemaking - perhaps open a local storefront or focus on supplying a few local resturants or shops. I have made a few cheeses for my own consumption to date, and I would love to try and scale up production using milk from local sources.
Would I be able to make a living at it? Who knows. But in an environment favoring big factory-farm production and squashing the little guy, the likelyhood of being able to do so drops a lot. I already buy local as much as possible and judging by the number of people I see at the grocery co-op each weekend, the trend is increasing.
Then there are those pesky details like figuring out a business plan,... getting start-up financing and a line of credit (good luck with this right now),... lining up buyers,... but that will all keep for a bit.
Keep up the good work Mr. Cohen.
In other words, you can't grow food with your hands in the dirt without industrial chemicals unless you learn how the soil works. Once you understand the complexities of how it works, it's hard to accept the blind dogma of conservatives. (And trust me, farming is a social job which involves talking to each other. It is damned difficult to listen to that conservative drivel for 12 hours a day while a coworker listens to Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh barking for crap nobody needs.) Follow your own political conservatism to it's end and you'll see that limiting government has to come with limiting other systems as well, or the government becomes a moot point in a dog-eat-sausage world of humans using all of their mental tools to "expand or die".
You might enjoy this:
Rob Hopkins - On Transition Towns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQF09NG00V8
The people who loudly call themselves "conservative" nowadays are either wealthy corporatists or poor whites who allow themselves to be continually manipulated by the corporatists via the usual hot-button issues.
It's okay. You are ready to come into the light now. You can do it. Just say " I'm a liberal." You'll feel better--really.
We conservatives are here in the local foods corner, we are just too busy actually doing it (and have been for several years before the liberals decided it was cool) to make a big public scene about it. Perhaps that's why you haven't seen us.
Come to our farms, our markets, our roadside stands, or businesses...you will see us actually working and acting, rather than talking and "advocating".
We are in this together, KyFarmers Matter!