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June 12, 2011
The Institute of Public Affairs can be a puzzling lot at times.The rationale of the think tank is a defence of capitalism and free market capitalism along the classic liberal lines individual freedom, small government and deregulated markets. In keeping an eye out for the threats to freedom they have ended up becoming climate change sceptics and deniers and an opposition to human rights over and above the right to own and acquire property.
Today, in an article in The Sunday Age we find Chris Berg defending industrial capitalism by attacking the slow food movement as nostalgia (Culinary Luddism) and celebrating processed industrial food.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, junk food, 2011
Berg, in referencing Rachelle Audan's defence of fast, processed food, reduces slow food to natural food. He then says that in an industrial society food been cheap, plentiful and safe.
For the most part, when it comes to food and agriculture, industrial is good. Corporate farming is good. Even processed is good. Natural food is an illusion. We wouldn't want it if we had it. Our ancestors had natural food. It was awful.
Consequently, for Berg, the nostalgia for a lost world of pure food is nostalgia for a world of nutritional poverty and he implies that those who are part of the slow food movement think any sort of processing of food is inherently bad. He ends his article by turning this backlash against the slow food movement into an argument in favour of agri-business (the industrialized food system) as opposed to the family farm.
Berg's slight of hand is that he runs together the industrial processing of canning tomatoes or making yogurt or cheese with processed food that is considered unhealthy , such as refined sugars, white flours, and store-bought foods that contain 20+ ingredients, such as partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, potassium sorbate, BHT.
Berg's sleight of hand enables him to ignore the inferior quality with extra additives in industrial food--eg., pink slime in the fast food industry. He skims over the quality of food: namely, that high-quality industrial foods is expensive, and that food history shows the cheapest food is the crap industrial food, processed to the point of zero or even negative nutritive value.
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Berg just follows Rachel Lauden who says that:
The sunlit past of the culinary Luddites never existed. So their ethos is based not on history but on a fairy tale.
This a straw woman argument since rejecting low quality semi-food products in crinkly packages doesn't equate to a rejection of industrial modernity and nostalgia for sunny meadows and happy peasants.