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Organically Conservative?
On the surface, it sure seems like the local, sustainable food revolution is a progressive idea: good for the environment, anticorporate. But in the Boston Globe, John Schwenkler, a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley, maintains that Alice Waters and her ilk are actually espousing a profoundly conservative idea of food.
After all, modern food gurus emphasize values like tradition, community, and family, which are all big planks in the Republican platform. So, despite preparing a fund-raising dinner for Bill Clinton, it appears as though Alice Waters is at heart a conservative. Schwenkler rejects the notion put forth by Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism that there are “affinities between the organic food movement and Nazi totalitarianism.” As Schwenkler notes:
Renewing the culinary culture, and restoring the kinds of values required for the health of our Republic, is not the sort of thing that can be left to activists, environmentalists, and government bureaucrats. This is a conservative cause if ever there was one, and it is going to have to begin at home.
The conservative blogosphere did not take kindly to this upstart Berkeleyite and his newfangled ideas. At conservative media criticism site NewsBusters, P. J. Gladnick rips Schwenkler a new one, inferring that he is part of a recent trend of liberals trying to “rebrand themselves as conservatives.” Schwenkler admitted in the Globe article to cooking such delicacies from Waters’s Art of Simple Food as summer squash gratin, marinated beet salad, and wilted chard with onions, and Gladnick can’t hold back a snort of derision:
Yeah, real ‘Republican’ food there, John. Try as you might into making people think you favor traditional American meals, you just can’t make the leap to actually eating it yourself. Instead, your inner Berkeley liberal forces you to remain wedded to your diet of marinated beet salad and wilted chard. Please don’t grimace too much while the rest of us continue to enjoy our pizzas and spare ribs slathered in distinctly non-Berkeley barbeque sauce.
Posted by | Friday, July 25, 2008 at 11:22am | 5 comments
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I think the main problem with this argument is that the Republican party in its current incarnation is no longer conservative. While they may give lip service in their platform to "conservative values" (and we can argue whether those values are specific to conservatives) when it comes to making policy, their policies favor corporate interests over the interests of families and communities. Protecting the environment should be a profoundly conservative issue -- after all at its heart is "conservation" -- and in other countries it's a less-partisan ideal, but in the U.S. anything that gets in the way of corporate America's need to maximize profits regardless of the costs to families, communities and future generations, is anti-Rebulican, and since the Republicans have defined themselves as conservative, therefore anti-conservative.
The rest of the argument is just bizarre -- eating beets is "liberal"? Eating ribs is "conservative"? That's really just another way of trying to paint liberals as elitist intellectuals, unlike, for example,Yale-educated Connecticut blue-bloods like the Bushes.
It makes perfect sense for Republicans to promote & embrace local sustainable farms and markets--everyone should, and who wouldn't anyway? After all, isn't this what being conservative is all about--actually conserving?! More important is for us not to just make the gift of local produce merely hip and trendy--that's certainly not what most farmers would want! It's important for local CSAs and other great organizations to tone down their own liberal bias to attract every possible buyer to a really good cause.
The whole idea that people, in all our complexity, and thought, political or otherwise, can and should be divided into two cleanly divided groups is as offensive and false as it is widespread.
Sigh, I guess this means that as a Democrat I'll have to take up molecular gastronomy.
I was very excited to see this article in the Boston Globe and believe that the arguement goes quite far. There is a distinctly Burkian conservative moment in the organic food movement. The term Republican takes it much too far, but conservative is dead on. Additionally, this moment can be carried through much of the conservationist and environmental movement. Building these philosophical arguments helps bridge partisan divides and show that there is common ground. The bashing of the article shows the political threat it poses. I am curious to see what John Schwenkler will come up with next.