Race relations is a specious concept, and a self-perpetuating problem. What does it mean? It means some arbitrary number of some arbitrary racial group feel arbitrarily better or worse about some other arbitrary number of another arbitrary racial group. Nobody on the planet can measure that. And 'the election of the US' first African-American president' may mean the world to some people and nothing at all to other people. Who says that's a valid benchmark anyway?
The only thing you can measure is how tightly people hold on to racial stereotypes and racial thinking. In other words, you can determine, individual by individual how race affects their thinking. But what does that mean at an aggregate level? It can't mean anything unless it means the same thing to everyone, like 'a touchdown is 6 points'. What is 6 points of racism? What is 6 points of race relations? You can't define it.
Every time somebody says 'racism still exists, but we have a long way to go', I ask what do you mean we? A black man graduated from Yale in Physics in 1876 Phi Beta Kappa. Did racism exist? Did he have a long way to go? John Brown pledged the lives of himself and his sons to militantly intervene against racial prejudice. Did he have a long way to go? What about the free people of color in New Orleans who defied the law of Louisiana against freeing slaves, by buying them and then making them do nothing? Did they have a long way to go?
I say anybody who says 'we have a long way to go' actually means, 'I personally need X people in Y race to do Z before I shutup and enjoy my own life'. That's race relations for you, a self-perpetuating problem.
We have a choice bit of memes and soundbites for problems for which we seek, as citizens in an activist democracy and policy wonkery laboratory, all manner of solutions. Date rape. Drunk driving. Police brutality. Political corruption.
It occurred to me this morning that I don't see these things as a problem because when I think about them, I do so in the context of what is trying to be accomplished and what can go wrong. So I think in terms of the number of ways things can go wrong and the likelihood of each outcome. Is it a problem? Well, that is determined by expectations. What do I expect? I expect things to go wrong. How many times? As many times as they do go wrong, consistently. That's the stoic approach. It's not interesting to me that things go wrong, but how often they go wrong and why. 'Why' meaning under what circumstances. Determining the circumstances and the corresponding likelihood that something goes wrong is what's interesting to me, not the very existence of a problem. How those circumstances change over time is really interesting to me. That's how I study things, whether or not you start with calling them a problem.
These days, since I hang out at Quora, I get asked all sorts of questions about police brutality. People are drawing conclusions about all of America because the idea of police brutality is now viral. Very few people know if there is any more or less 'police brutality' in America, it is merely presented as a problem for which outrage is an appropriate sentiment, and therefore something needs to be done. Like a lot of our popular politics we are in the "Don't just stand there, do something" mode. Screaming is involved.
Since I think the way I do, I find the screaming to be stupid, but it may not always be helpful to screamers and those who proxy their sentiments to the screaming end of the political spectrum to just do the math. Nevertheless, I still say that people who don't count, don't count. Nevertheless, there is a way to approach this whole collection of 'problems' with an understanding towards the dynamism involved. So yes I say that if you look at the problem of police brutality and try to find the cause of the problem, the most honest and factual way is to see it as something going wrong.
What is the something? An arrest.
What makes all of these problems complicated is that citizens focus on negative outcome and think there is a single most important factor that can be restricted by political action. What we have seen is that particular political hammer is prohibition. Over simplistic. Always.
Look this way. What is the cause of traffic accidents? Traffic, and then something goes wrong. What is the cause of violent arrests? Arrests, and then something goes wrong. What is the cause of corrupt elections. Elections, and then something goes wrong. What is the cause of date rape? Sex, and then something goes wrong.
The more traffic, the more arrests, the more elections, the more sex people are determined to have, the more things are going to go wrong, for a million reasons under every possible circumstance these phenomena will generate. The more people involved in causing the thing that can go wrong, the more dynamic and unpredictable each and every circumstance will be. When we talk about 100 fatal arrests in a year, we do so in the context of 3.5 million arrests. How do you categorize 3.5 million things? How do you describe 3.5 million human beings interacting? Of all the things that can happen between human beings, traffic, arrests, sex how many things can go wrong? What are your expectations?
In so many things, I find zero tolerance for negative outcomes to be an attractive, but utterly impractical 'solution'. This is why we should instinctively know that zero tolerance for any particular behavior between human beings is not ever going to make good policy in our democracy. Why should we know that? Because the very action of making policy is something that human beings have been doing for hundreds of years, and those policies that have survived we call 'taboo'. We pretty much already know what they are. My point here is that common sense and common law are pretty evolved already, and we're probably not going to speed up their evolution to get us closer to perfection. Arrests are going to happen and go badly. Traffic is going to continue, and people will wreck. People will choose leaders in contests and there will be cheating. What do you expect?
When it comes to police brutality, the expectations of the officer and the suspect seem pretty straightforward. As part of that, they are certainly expecting their side of the story to be backed by the public. So there's an interesting dynamic. Imagine an arrest is imminent and both parties are thinking "No matter what I do, the public is on my side, I don't have to give a crap about what the other guy does." That seems to be a recipe for a bad arrest. But that's just me thinking about the state of mind of two other human beings engaged in their business. I might as well project my thoughts on two lovers when sex is imminent. Who knows what they're thinking?
More importantly as citizens we are particularly hamstrung in trying to compel policy from our perspective when we come at it like a problem waiting for a clever solutions we can enact, especially when they are prohibitions. This morning I am thinking that bad elections, bad sex, bad arrests, bad driving can all be attributed, among other things, to anger. But let's be generous and say rage. How are you going to outlaw rage? It's an outrage!
(from the archives & previously unpublished Nov 2007)
Last August I reported to you from the Lower Upper Middle Class. Since then I've gotten a promotion and I'm essentially living at the level of risk that was involved with the China Deal. All I can tell you is that given what I've been dealing with over the past 12 weeks, I'm hella glad I didn't pack up the house and head to Beijing. There's more than enough drama here at home. Which is an interesting revelation that opens up other doors as well.
What I've got now, that I didn't have but always wanted, is my own company with some bank in the bank. It's not my bank, but I have about as much control as I need. I'm running my piece of the business on a relatively smooth track (finally) but there are all kinds of huge challenges ahead. I have basically made the transition from a software professional to a software executive, and I see why a lot of people don't make it.
It gives you a different kind of headache, executivity does. It's rather like... it's like tending a garden inside of a batting cage. As you are nursing your plants, and flowers and vegetables, out of nowhere comes a 90 mph fastball. You quickly learn that you now have to keep on a catcher's mitt. So with one tender hand, you feed your garden, with the other you dodge and catch rockets. The more you tend to one thing, the more the other gets away from you. You have to develop a completely new rhythm. That's what I'm doing, getting used to the new rhythm while keeping the bottom line in the back of my mind. Tracy Chapman was right. All that you have is your soul.
I understand why phony people become ruthless.
I'm almost at the point where money is not a thing. I'm about one or two bonuses away from never having to deal with another class of problems. From that point, all I have to worry about is an exit strategy (if that's what we decide) and the odd calamity. Outside of that, I have a good deal of confidence that I'm not going to have to worry about a lot of things I've been worried about too long. That is, if it is actually true that the rich get richer. I know it's not, and I'm not buying any Krystal any time soon.
But there remains the matter of subduing the self, and coming up with the boundless energy required to keep up people's confidence in your ability to lead. This is very difficult work, work I couldn't imagine doing with anything but a
"Never trust a man whose shoes cost more than you make in one day." -- Cobb's Rule #7
I have been puzzling for some time over the matter I call the 'Logarithmic Shadow'. It is the observed phenomenon that people an order of magnitude more capable than you, generally don't condescend to compete in your arena and steal all your goods and glory. In peacetime.
It should seem rather obvious to many of my readers why this is somewhat puzzling even though we understand the converse prejudice. It's obvious why we pikers don't want to play in the big leagues. We don't want to get our asses handed to us. On the other hand, there are many things that the slightly above average Joe can do that will rank among the best. That is when it comes to consumption.
So this morning I discover that the boots I've been wearing for the past two years have spontaneously and literally become unglued. I thought Johnston & Murphy boots were some of the best that could be bought. It turns out they don't even sew the sole to the bottom of the last. Glue! I'm rather disappointed and pissed. So I've started looking about for a new boot vendor.
I started with Keen and then as I read the reviews, ended up at Carhartt. My latest Keens are not as nice and comfy as my old ones, and I still have an appetite for tactical cools. But really I want to replace the nice J&Ms. So the commenters at GQ Magazine remind me of Church's wingtips. I crawl through a few other clickbait top 10 boots and discover somebody called John Lobb. So I check out this English shoe manufa.. wait what? 1800 bucks for what? Oh no.
Does anybody on the planet know the difference between $500 shoes and $2000 shoes? Evidently so, but I ain't going there. Neither are you. Common sense, right? Yes, exactly that. Common sense does not demand extraordinary quality. Most of the time it cannot discriminate at that level. OK that's our side of the Shadow.
This resonates with some survey I read here or there regarding the outlook of countries like Vietnam. Even though they run under a nominal communist government, the economy is capitalist, and 95% of Vietnamese think things will be better for their children than for them. If you want to hear some awesome anti-communist rants, listen to Hanoi.
But were the shoes in America better in the good old days of wingtips? Or did we just spend more money on good shoes? If we think our kids are not going to be better off than we are, by what standards are we judging? Maybe they don't want the $500 shoes we take for granted, or cars with > 200 horsepower. Maybe kids who can't throw a football 60 yards still enjoy the game. Maybe common sense and a decent life is all anybody needs and our habits of trying to be a better than average Joe with our fascination with 'Top 10' whatever clickholes is just a little bit aberrant.
I'm thinking about my next vacation. Perhaps I should go to Delhi. But what kind of shoes should I wear?
Over the past year or so, I have completely changed my food intake. I now prepare over 50% of my own meals and I haven't been to Carl's Jr at all this year. Starting in October I have created a new kind of diet which I call the Epicurean Paleo Peasant. It's epicurean in that it uses expensive exotic ingredients from time to time. It follows the Paleo recipe (and some dude named Taubes) and a lot of it is Peasant. By that I mean many of the meals are not cooked, but just raw ingredients - stuff I imagine any cave idiot could assemble.
Over the course of the past few months I have perfected the Caesar salad. It has been reborn under my care, and that has been a revelation. I never, ever liked salad. I can remember cycling up monstrous hills in Southern California 25 years ago with the idea in mind that by burning all these calories as a habit, I would never have to be one of those pathetic old men who have to eat salads. I have to admit that at Sizzler, I would pile on the bleu cheese and raisins in my spinach, but that's about it. My tolerance for salad was minimal. Until I started making my own.
The obvious problem with salad is that they don't have enough meat in them, but I always did like since the past 10 years or so of road dogging it, a Caesar salad with my steaks. Once in a blue moon, I'd scarf down a Cobb salad, but that was a rare occasion. So when I started making Caesars, it was clear that I should just put steak in it. It all goes down the same hole, right? But then I started experimenting beyond salmon and chicken to deli meats. Aha. Now I was onto something. And although I cheat by using Ken's creamy dressing instead of making my own from scratch, I had entered a whole new world of taste. And yes this was salad as a meal. Amazing. I realized that like an LA pizza eater who had never been to NYC or a Boston BBQ eater who had never been down South, I was only experiencing a fraction of what the real deal was. I hated salads until I made my own, and now I love salad. My salad, like a mango chutney chicken & prosciutto Caesar salad served in a pie tin, or pancetta & crab with seared watermelon.
I've been sharing pictures of my meals on Facebook now. I'm that proud. And my kids and my wife love my salads, even though the Spousal Unit tends to dislike anchovies and apples with peels still on them. Nevertheless, when I do the boiled egg, avocado and feta versions of the Caesar, she flops over helpless. It is my killer app. So when I went to our annual company picnic, I was eager to make a salad for everyone. Let me tell you about the nightmare.
First I didn't buy the ingredients myself but had a friend help. I'm downtown in a hotel, how am I supposed to get groceries enough for a dozen people? We had twice as much feta and half as much parmesan as I wanted. We had no place to boil the eggs. I already knew that some of the guests were vegetarian so I handled that part, but I still really wanted everyone to at least taste my specialty, with garlic sauteed diced pancetta with mushrooms. There was no stove and the pancetta was sliced. So it had to go in cold. It clumped up. Add to all that, I got on scene too late and the crawdads were already on the table. But wait, there's more. Nobody brought plates and forks. An hour later after working through the compromise, my vegetarian version got the compliments I needed to hear, but getting there was a new kind of ordeal for me.
Undaunted, I am doing the same thing again for a family get together tonight at my Dad's house. This time I'm making the salad in my own kitchen by myself. But I realized something ten minutes ago when my wife hung up the phone on me. She told me that I shouldn't put in any meat until I get there in case somebody in my family or guests are vegetarians.
Now I know what's wrong with America.
Everybody has to eat the salad. The salad is the green vegetable requirement of a balanced diet. But you can't put anything in it that's going to offend somebody. That's why you get the kind of salads you get with stupid tasteless iceberg lettuce, plastic fork evasive cherry tomatoes, park pigeon croutons and some nasty dressing on the side. That's why people like me grow up hating salad. We keep eating this rabbit plate of complete boredom and keep hearing that it's suppose to be good for us. Retarded. I don't want that salad. You don't want that salad. Nobody wants that salad. It is a nominal, minimal salad of last resort. It's the Lowest Common Denominator Salad. It makes nobody proud.
They used to say that America was a great melting pot. It was. Then some of us refused to assimilate, proud of our own belly buttons and in so doing, raising the Seventh Deadly Sin to some kind of bizarro world virtue. "We are a salad bowl", we now say. Meaning America has some kind of ineffable chunkiness that doesn't melt, but holds together under some panoptic federal dressing, so long as its complexion isn't too light. We might call that thing federal law which sticks to us giving the same flavor while leaving our impenetrable cherry-tomato skin intact. Because cherry-tomato pride!
Of course the melting pot will be back when it becomes convenient for certain powers that wanna be to melt our individuality into nothingness in solidarity with (insert victim here) or somebody else who is not the evil One Percent.
I like my salad, and I like it my way. Tonight I'm going to prepare a salad for everybody who doesn't prepare their own. AND I'm going to make my perfect salad for me. AND I'm going to leave all the tools in the kitchen as well as all the ingredients. If you don't like what's served, make your own.
Since I'm in a new food regime, learning how to cook better and more foods, and exercising like a maniac, my foodie interests are taking an interesting turn. In the back of my head there has always been some Biome stuff, but the questions around GMO/Monsanto are reaching a peak. Check back with me next year, I will have nailed most of it. Today marks article number two.
So over at Quora I've started following Justin Ma a young PhD in tobacco breeding and genetics at NC State. My first expert. Even though I'm more interested in water as a Biome subject, I think the GMO problem is more knotty. It might overtake. The contrast between the two with regard to market accelerations and regulatory restraints is interesting. Everybody loves overpriced, overhyped commercially modified drinking water in the face of drought. Everybody hates overpriced(?), overhyped(?) commercially modified food in the face of famine. Is water simpler than food? Is waste food so much worse than waste water? Does food matter more simply because it's more expensive to produce?
Anyway. We'll start with Monsanto and Bayer and find some fellow travelers as well. This first pass may sound doofy in a year or so, but coming at it fresh gives me a chance to be bold and without qualification.
GMOs kill bees
BT Cotton made Indian Farmers commit suicide
Taleb's Risk on Monoculture
Big Ag kills diversity
One thing I'm simply not going to deal with is whether or not GMO foods are safe for humans. That's just stupid on its face. Of course they're safe or else you couldn't sell them because nobody would eat them. As much as I hate falling back to the Carlin position, 'Everything causes cancer'. But aside from that, there's penicillin and peanuts. The first will kill me, the second will cripple my daughter. Neither are genetically modified anything.
Ma helps get through some false dichotomies with regard to identifying the market correctly. Consider the following:
First, the basic answer: GMO production will continue to grow, and more crops will continue to have GM traits incorporated into their breeding. At the same time, organic production will likely continue to grow due to the market demand for them. Both will continue to grow because they're defined categories, vs. the general practices we have now. GMOs have been driven by producers. "Organic" foods have been driven by consumers.
More details: One, this is a false dichotomy, as many of mentioned. It depends on your definition of organic. Organic refers more to production practices, while GMOs refer to genetics. While you can't have USDA organic with GM crops, you can certainly practice what might be classified as organic techniques on GM crops. And what you definitely can have are non-GMO crops that are non-organic - this likely constitutes the majority of production in the world, with the exception of Africa. (A little known fact: Europe, by the way, sprays more pesticides and apply more fertilizers than the Americas, due to their subsidies.)
So 'organic' vs 'GMO' doesn't mean anything real. And I am beginning to see cracks in the USDA and certainly a lot of confusion around how Americans perceive that their foods are produced. The fact is that we've been marketed so much food in so many different ways all of our lives that we are living in total isolation from food itself. We don't really know where it comes from, what processes it goes through (or why), and who does what to it. The bottom line is that everybody trusts the label, and the stuff that's not labeled. Well, as I observed at a New York City farmers market, the more dirt on the vegetable the higher the price. Myself, I'm just beginning to know a good avocado from a bad one, and how to time the yellowing of bananas, so I'm not much better. But we're all learning together aren't we?
Speaking of dichotomies, it will be useful for me to get down into the product sets. Part of the GMO'ification of various seed-sets (better vocab soon come) is the embedding of pesticides, and others is some genetic hybridization presumably for flavor, texture, color and/or hardening to grow in previously adverse climes. The third way is for sterilization that makes previously 'seedable' crops now only 'graftable'.
As for the monoculture stuff and Taleb's risk analysis, that's something I too will follow. He says, essentially, that the long-term risk of catastrophic crop failure is not worth any short term benefit. It's like planting roses on a volcano.
I'm also going to defer to farmers who blog, like this guy, who says common sense stuff like "don't take your advice on the farming business from Willie Nelson", and more importantly will talk specifically about the terms and conditions of his purchase of seeds from Monsanto.
Independently of this, I've been skeptical of both E85 and soy milk.
I suffer them in silence, for the most part. When I must go, I troll through them with a heightened sense of awareness, always looking for wolves & sheepdogs. Whenever I go into a bar, I try to find the bad guy and the good guy that would get my back if a fight broke out. In crowds, it's like that too. These are my basic instincts gradually being educated.
Recently, I attended my third JazzFest in New Orleans. And on that Saturday during the Elton John concert, I was in the biggest crowd I can ever remember. It was packed. Took me 20 minutes to move 100 yards in the 80 degree sun.
When you are in a crowd at a concert of an artist that you never heard of or are not particularly fond of, it gives you an opportunity to witness first hand what it is like to be in a foreign culture. The strangers there will dress in clothes that you don't find particularly appealing. They will chant lyrics to songs you simply don't know. They will dance and gesture in unison to strange rhythms. The odd thing about this particular experience for me was that I actually do know a lot of Elton John songs, more than I remembered before hearing them, but they simply didn't resonate in me with the same level of enthusiasm. No big deal, it's all just a party. The same thing can be said for New Orleans itself. It's a city, a crowd, and I am surrounded not only by people who respond to different rhythms, but different ideas about place and most importantly different laws.
Like Las Vegas, Daytona Beach and Orlando, New Orleans is one of those uniquely American towns that is largely defined by the kinds of celebrations it hosts for people who come to visit. We all understand that there are things you do in these places is out of joint with your normal life. In New Orleans, like no other place I know, you can order an alcoholic drink in a bar on one block, take it outside and finish it in the street or in another bar across town. While the rest of us have a set of dangerous thoughts associated with 'open container', in New Orleans that's what all containers are supposed to be. All the time. Laissez les bon temps rouler. So you're likely to see a bunch of drunks stumbling and sometimes even crawling through the streets.
My brother Doc, LAPD officer who works LA's Skid Row, gave me two indicators on homeless folks with regard to their state of relative desperation. The first thing to identify are the shoes. If they are barefoot or wearing shoes in complete disrepair, chances are that they are very poorly off. Good shoes make a big difference. Next, check the face. A man that doesn't wash his face has given up hope. These were things I noticed in New Orleans streets, but also that almost none of them carried signs advertising their fate and soliciting aid. If you're a bum in New Orleans, people pretty much expect that you're just a bum. No cares given.
It has been about as impossible for me as for anyone to keep the national fracas over policing out of my ears recently. What strikes me about policing is the extent to which cops are the Krell to the public will, whether or not the public states it's will publicly. Police in any city express the id and superego of those who get elected. There's really no way around it. People get the police department they demand. If they want people who drink in public, piss in public, panhandle in public, sex in public, smoke in public or whatever to be molested or unmolested, the cops will respond accordingly. If you want crackheads or methheads busted, that will happen. If you want gangs taken down, that will happen. If you want green cross dispensaries left alone, that will happen. One thing I've noticed about cops is that they are machines in service of department policy. They can't give a crap about public opinion on the law. They enforce it at the direction of their sergeants and captains all rolling downhill from the chief.
Anybody who has walked the streets of Salt Lake City, Detroit, Boston, Brooklyn, Houston, New Orleans, knows that street wisdom in different neighborhoods is different. What works in Park Slope Brooklyn does not work in Brownsville Brooklyn. People's expectations of public behavior is very different. What provokes people to call 911 is very different. Around the corner from me is Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach. Back to back bars as tightly packed and overflowing as any block of Bourbon Street. But I'll never see tits flashed or public barfing on Pier Avenue. We allow a different level of drunkenness here at the California Beach than down off the Old Man River. On the other hand, I'll never hear live roadhouse blues or straight ahead jazz of any quality in Hermosa that compares with that in New Orleans. The McDonalds on Pacific Coast Highway and Diamond in my neighborhood is packed full of retirees reading newspapers, some craftsmen with their crews off for lunch, moms with strollers and a gaggle of high schoolers. The McDonalds on Canal Street & Roosevelt in New Orleans has more people hanging on the sidewalk than inside. They're selling smoke paraphernalia there. I recall when I lived Uptown. The McDonalds there was all about how much you could get into an argument with the staff. Every night was an almost fight.
If there's a point to all of this observation, then it goes hand in hand with what I hope we Americans understand with greater respect. Communities form themselves unequally, and they diverge. That's what we want, and we need to stop enabling people who would pressure us otherwise. What reasonable people hate is monopoly and monoculture. Sure if you're a frequent flyer like I used to be, you want Starbucks and Marriott Courtyards to be the same wherever you go in the country, but in other things you want inequality, divergence. Not to assert any notions of superiority, but to get in where you feel like fitting in that week or at that point in your life. There's nothing worse than the set of fools who seek to homogenize American life to their comfort zone. Liberty and justice for all does not imply conformity in the social domain. That's why there is no social justice, only justice.
I want to get out of the crowd. I want to listen to my own music in my own neighborhood. I don't want America to be just one big crowd that says 'ho' when the man on stage tells them to. I want multiple stages where I don't have to hear the music from one, and I can walk across the field to another group when I feel like it. I don't want to hear that the rules for Baltimore apply to Detroit or that the cops in Seattle are the same as those in Miami. If McDonalds can be different, why can't we all?
J-Dub is one of my alter-egos, another existential partner although he may not know it. If I were ten years younger I would have taken computers a great deal more seriously. It would have given me more social cover to be an outer geek rather than just an inner geek. And of course if I were a white dude instead of a black dude, I would have a great deal more invested in the logic of organicism. Although I'm not quite sure on that last score because I *am* organic in a new and interesting way, certainly my relationship with being organic would have gone through a different sort of rationale. Nevertheless, J-Dub is a vegetarian and I am not. Nevertheless, I think we share an organic connection with regards to food and other things which needs some fleshing out.
Let me start with the provocation that gets me here and work through its logic and see where it leads. You see it's often difficult for folks I converse with, especially in larger groups, to finish off what may sound like an offhanded comment spewing out of my piehole, when in fact it's just the beginning of a conversation. These are conversations often never completed, and so I sound like more of an asshole than I actually am. Being non-apologetic doesn't help. On the other hand, if you can't continue the conversation, I'm not likely to take you seriously or view you as deserving of the long answer. Thus this blog and its 13 year history.
The ethical difference between store-bought GMO food and store-bought non-GMO food is negligible.
From an organic POV, if you're not growing your own food, you're a beggar trying to be choosy. From that same perspective, the guy shopping at Whole Foods for natural products is just another consumer infusing his consumption with conspicuous social signaling. This is especially hypocritical for those who aren't using their bodies to social effect. Now that's a mouthful, but let me handle the last part of it because that's particularly where I'm coming from lately.
As some readers may know, I'm in the midst of my martial education. This year I am focusing on my own body and diet. It's working very well and I am rather stunningly pleased with the results so far. It's changing the way I live, but there's a lot of detail below that thread. At a higher level, the point of me doing my body conditioning is to put me into a position of providing some social service with my body as a junior sheepdog. These days that doesn't amount to much more than playing bodyguard around friends and family when walking through sketchy turf, but that means a lot to me. I very much like the idea of improving my physique in service of the safety of others. I am broadening the capability of my impulse to be a big brother and a protector of ladies and gentlemen in the context of the decreased sociability of the urban world today. My intent is to make that clear distinction from that and general badassery for which my cool pose might be mistaken. But the point is that I am moral muscle. I intent to bridge the gap between foolish chivalry and 'protect and serve' on the real. My diet serves that purpose. Not just to make me look sexy.
You've perhaps heard the joke, how can you tell which person at the table is a vegan. Don't worry, they'll let you know. That's a cruel joke if applied to someone with peanut or shellfish allergies. The moral distinction is clear. If you serve the wrong food to an allergic, they become poisoned, if you serve the wrong food to a vegan they become offended. The distinction between an insult and an assault should be self-evident. I am always trying to not be rude, but I am not above mocking a vegan who tries to make the political case that serving meat is an assault or worse.
I think it is reasonable for Monsanto and other food producers to resist labeling of GMO products. I think it is also reasonable for consumers to expect GMO products to be labeled. But to demand it now, in the context of stark ignorance of what GMO is, augurs in favor of the producers. One is harder pressed to demonstrate the perfidy of producers than the paranoia of consumers. This is one area in which I would like to see more responsibility of scientists and other experts, but in these days, such things are difficult to expect. Consider the retirement of Harold Lewis. Nevertheless, my food expert is Michael Pollan.
It has been a long time since I conferred with Pollan on any matter, but I like his approach. His simplest advice is to eat food, mostly plants and not too much. On the matter of what is food we get a simple admonishment. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize it, it's probably not food. I join this advice with that of Nassim Taleb who asserts the primacy of recipes handed down through generations. Of all the experimenting mankind has done with every possible thing there is to eat on the planet, it should be no surprise that bread baking has survived. Fifty generations of baking rather outweigh your sudden aversion to gluten. I tie that finally with our very evolution of incisors and large intestines. If God didn't want us to eat meat we would have teeth like horses or stomachs like cows. Nor do humans eat much insect flesh. These are not random circumstances subject to social engineering.
However agriculture is subject to engineering. Given that, one must ask the fundamental question of how agriculture has evolved at all. Or more specifically, what do chicken farmers know about breeding fowl that genetic engineers don't? What stands out in my memory is that all of those fifty generations of farming and breeding was done in almost total ignorance of genetics. What crops and commodities are today is little more than the eugenics of style, or as Pollan puts it, the botany of desire. Nobody raising corn, cabbage or cows knew if there would vitamins and minerals. Figuring out the calories is an entirely new idea, and counting them doesn't help the way we have been sold. Your grandmother doesn't know how many calories are in the tomatoes she grew in the backyard and made into spaghetti sauce. So why should you care? Because you buy it from the supermarket and that's all you know. Food in a box. Trust the label because for everything else, you are unable. Now what's a GMO label? Just another piece of consumer information to be entered into your iPhone app.
I have two problems with GMO but both are economic in nature, not ethical in nature. The first is the simple matter of monoculture. If GMO methods prove superior to traditional method of hit and miss, then we are possibly depending upon market forces to develop the most efficient crop. That means the overwhelming variety of potatoes might be engineered for french fries, rather than for stews. Not good. Secondly, there is the legitimate question of oligopoly of agribusiness seed stock.
Neither of these are the sort of matters that can be solved by selective consuming. It's like saying that if I only spend my lifetime purchasing red BMWs, then the car manufacturers of the world will respond. And I certainly do not expect any democratic process or social movement to work in any disciplined way. What I can do however is be a smart shopper and a microproducer, and I can give ethical ends to the means of consuming food. Those ethical ends outweigh the means of production.
It's in the microproducer angle that I find myself in complete enthusiastic agreement withJ-Dub as regards his intent to get with the growing veggies program. Aside from the fact that I know he thought his way into vegetarianism and does not in any way get self-aggrandizing in his choices, we gel on the ziggurat of skill. We both move from consumer to gearhead, to hacker to maker when it comes to food skills. And it is in this way we share the ethos that pulls us away from the shallow morality of consumerism to the virtue of study and practical mastery in production.
I don't know if or how I will ever sympathize with the consumer who chooses particular diets. I am rather convinced that people are merely being picky eaters, expressing privileged preferences. Moreover I sense that many people have elevated such preferences to fetishes and are really developing social intolerances and taboos. I don't have any problem with the privileged preferences, and not much with the food snobbishness - but food consumption doesn't weigh much with me morally. I hesitate to, but must make the parellel to sexual appetites, so you can see how this could resonate into another 1500 words.
I don't much care what people eat, but I don't like the moral pretenses of the politics of consumption. Producer know, consumers guess.
Recent Comments