Food & Freedom

Food & Freedom: the Next Battle for Liberty
By Daniel G. Jennings
The frontlines in the next great battle for personal liberty maybe at the dinner table, the restaurant and the supermarket. That battle will be the fight to buy, cook and eat the food we want in the way we want to eat it.
In his column for the libertarian e-mail newsletter Tech Central Station UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge likens the Chicago City Council’s recent efforts to ban the sell of foie gras to laws against sodomy and homosexual acts. Bainbridge’s argument is this the goose liver ban like the anti-sodomy laws is an effort by a group of people to force their morality upon the rest of us and deprive us all of individual liberty.
Foie gras - a delicacy to gourmets - was banned because animal rights activists believe that the conditions the geese from which the livers are harvested from are cruel. Like those who want the sex police in our bedrooms, the backers of the food police cloak themselves in higher morality. They claim that abandoning meat eating is the next logical step in humanity’s moral evolution and liken meat production to slavery. Others would regulate food because many foods are unhealthy.
Bainbridge is asking an important question here? Why is individual freedom being restricted only to sexual practices? If people have a right to decide who and how they have sex with, shouldn’t they also have a right to eat what they want?
The issue of food freedom goes far beyond bans on particular varieties of meat. In his excellent book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”* author Michael Pollan profiles an interesting rebel “grass farmer” Joel Salatin, Salatin and his son David raise chickens, hogs, cattle and rabbits on their Virginia farm using intensive organic methods. The Salatins slaughter and processes their own chickens and sells them directly to the public. They have a large following among both the general public and gourmet chefs in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and Washington DC.
The interesting thing is Salatin isn’t some hippy dippy granola eater he’s a self described Christian libertarian who attended Bob Jones University and home schooled his kids. Salatin likens his efforts to grow, kill and process his own livestock in an alternative method to home schooling. That is he is trying to “unplug” his family from a system of industrial food production he finds offensive, oppressive, Unchristian and UnAmerican. Many of Salatin’s customers are young mothers who have started homeschooling their children and now want an alternative to industrial food as well as industrial education.
Like the home school movement, Salatin has ran afoul of bureaucrats and the system. Regulators from the Federal Food and Drug Administration prevent Salatin from slaughtering and processing his own cattle and hogs on the farm like farmers (such as my grandfather and great grandfather) used to do. The same regulators prevent entrepreneurs from setting up small slaughterhouses to kill and process livestock regulated by small producers like Salatin.
The issue here isn’t health or safety, Salatin has offered to have his meat tested for disease. No the issue is that Salatin’s local food production just doesn’t square with the large scale industrialized meatpacking system the FDA was set up to regulate. The real issue maybe power, like the educators who hate the idea of parents controlling their own children’s education, the FDA bureaucrats may not want to loose their power over the food chain.
Salatin sees the FDA system of regulation as a threat to basic rights. He believes small producers like him could feed America if it were not for the big government system of regulation that benefits big agribusiness. In other words Salatin is a Jeffersonian fighting for a traditional agricultural America against a big industrialized one. Pollan even likens America’s alternative food producers to the small farmers who grew much of the food in the former Soviet Union outside the system of government production.
The moral of the story is this, both Bainbridge and Salatin equate eating with freedom. They both see government attempts to regulate food as a threat to individual liberty. A threat that Salatin at least intends to fight, a fight that many people will undoubtedly be joining in the years ahead.

* “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan, New York, the Penguin Press, 2006.