Stayton Bonner

I enjoy shopping at Central Market or Whole Foods as much as the next guy. The sepia tones, the hip music, (much better than the Cheap Trick muzak playing at HEB,) and the free samples. Yes, definitely the free samples. How many mango salsas have been bought on a spur-of-the-moment whim?

The food tastes great. But those trips are more for the experience. If you put me to a blind taste test between organic and non-organic vegetables, I'd be guessing.

In his recent Time magazine article Getting Real about the High Price of Cheap Food, Bryan Walsh writes that cheap, (i.e. mass-produced,) food is "increasingly bad for us" and the "principal cause of America's obesity epidemic".

I don't argue with Mr. Walsh that there's an obesity epidemic. Read Elizabeth Kolbert's well-written New Yorker piece XXXL. But I do find fault with his logic. Cheap food doesn't make people fat. Nobody's making you eat that Quarter-Pounder, (although Ronald McDonald does have a creepily hypnotic hold on worldwide youth. Maybe it's the red fro.) Saying that cheap food causes obesity is like attributing paranoia to 24-hour news channels. If you watch shootings and celebrity reality shows all day, then you might never leave the house. Or you might get Botox. But you don't have to watch TV in the first place. (Except for The Simpsons reruns.)

Walsh then goes on to describe the practices necessary to produce large amounts of cheap food. It ain't pretty. Pigs are crammed into feedlots. Antibiotics are administered like warm beers at a frat party. This is a far cry from the Jeffersonian pastoral vision. Pumping animals with antibiotics may result in bugs that eventually resist those antibiotics. This is done in the name of efficiency. It's how you pay less for that saran-wrapped pork at the supermarket. 

Walsh compares the large-scale food production industry with a utopian vision of organics. Bill Niman's cattle eat "all natural, non-corn diet" on green fields overlooking the Pacific Ocean one hour north of San Francisco. Walsh believes that this method "gets it right". Uh-huh. How many farmers can afford property overlooking the Pacific Ocean one hour north of San Francisco? The costs involved with maintaining that level of organic food production is not "sustainable" for a country of this size.

There is a place for organics within this country as there is a place for non-organic food. Walsh should have focused on a more realistic organic farm situation than the million dollar Pacific Ocean view. I like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. These were necessary whistle-blowers for corrupt systems. But commercial food production is not corrupt. It's necessary for keeping this country supplied with reliable cheap food. Have you ever tried gardening? It's hard work. I sure don't want to come home and fool with it.

In a radio interview with "Agritalk", Walsh states that the Time article was an "opinion" piece. But nowhere was it stated that this was a writer's opinion. Most people will, (a) never listen to the "Agritalk" interview and (b) think that the article was objective truth.

This is more scary than Ronald McDonald's pied-piper routine, (well, almost.) As our society becomes increasingly more urban, we are farther removed from the realities of agriculture.