Under consideration: Michael Pollan, The Omnivor’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Penguin (2006), 464 pages; and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Penguin (2008), 256 pages. 

A few weeks ago I attended a meeting of Kansas secessionists. The participants were rowdy, complaining of economic gigantism squashing them flat and bureaucratic thugs hounding their every move. They were all sick and tired of worker-ant existence in the hive-mind of American groupthink and they wanted out. Despite the quintessentially political nature of the gathering, politics proper never came up. Conservative and liberal meant nothing in that room, and party affiliation even less. 

Kansas patriots fomenting disunion? No, though there are a few of those kicking around these parts. These were local farmers organizing a farmer’s market. I had offered the parking lot of my law firm for their use, and was mostly just an observer of the scene. The locals probably couldn’t tell you the first thing about the politics of secession, but the Spirit of ’76 showed up in force. Damned were the federal busy-bodies who tell local farmers what they can and can’t sell; condemned were the centralized agents of agri-business who want ID chips implanted in livestock; mocked were the credentialed witch-doctors from the department of agriculture who own the brand “organic.” 

All that was left undone was a patriotic march to the local Enormo-Mart to dump the limp and faded out-of-season tomatoes imported from South America into the local pond (which isn’t quite Boston Harbor, but it would have served). And while there was no Declaration, it was clear that these small growers wanted out—out of forced participation in the economic union of cheap mass production, central planning, credit money, and the ignorant consumerism they despised. 

Michael Pollan would understand. His The Omnivore’s Dilemma and its sequel, In Defense of Food, amount to a manifesto for farmer’s markets and locally produced food across the country. Meticulously researched, Pollan’s work chronicles and traces the gigantism that defines today’s food economy—and all the deleterious effects which result. 

“What’s the big deal?” many will ask. Let Pollan count the problems—declining health; an obesity epidemic; the collapse of the family meal; environmental degradation; a food system that will eventually tumble leading to food shortage and political unrest; the loss of joy and beauty in eating; the forgetfulness of a people bereft of one of the most basic pillars of tradition—grandma’s recipes; and ultimately, the loss of freedom for a people incapable of the ordinary work of self-provisioning.

If that’s not enough, our food also tastes like shit. In Wendell Berry’s apt aphorism, our food economy is busy turning people into pigs rather than pigs into people. Or as Pollan puts it, “Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing.” Tell me about it.

Pollan issues this simple dictate: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The harping of a food-scold?  Perhaps. But Pollan fleshes his commandment out well, especially the first third. By “eat food” Pollan actually has in mind something quite revolutionary, because you can’t buy “food” most places. Walk into your local Mega-lo-Mart and what you see is not food—it’s processed corn syrup and assorted chemicals and “nutrients” packaged in plastic and shot so full of preservatives it will never rot. 

Food rots. If it doesn’t rot, it’s not food. That’s a good principle to live by.

Or try this one: if your ancestors wouldn’t recognize it as something good to eat, it’s not food.  Imagine a pre-historic everyman fingering the oblong yellow cakey substance filled with white goo. It might be the turd of some exotic as yet unknown animal species. Good to eat?  Certainly not—until, that is, he experiences the artificial sugar intake which stampedes his natural resistance and enslaves him.

Twinkies and Mountain Dew—the body and blood of a new sacrament in the temple of foodshit.  

Pollan pulls the curtain back on the small cartel of priestly “nutrition experts” and “food scientists” emanating from land grant universities who rule this temple, dominate our government’s food policy, and determine what we will eat.  He demonstrates convincingly that if one can penetrate beneath the glitzy plastic wrappers, the know-nothing food pyramids, and the seemingly interminable processing of our foodstuff, we are in reality little more than a nation of beasts in a continuous state of mastication at a Babelesque pile of corn so massive it stretches to the carbon infused heavens. Not pretty, and hardly the wholesome image of the American family at table.

Nature abhors a monoculture, but bean counters (kernel counters in reality) adore them. And corn is the monomania of American culture. We’ve even taken to pumping it into our SUV’s and minivans. 

An aside: In 1890 a small western Kansas town sponsored a public debate on the statement: “Opportunities have never been better in Kansas.” Taking the affirmative was a lawyer recently immigrated from the east. By all reported accounts, he acquitted himself well, giving a fine and persuasive speech.  When the lawyer finished, a local farmer, seizing the opportunity to take the negative, got up and proceeded to shovel a load of freshly harvested corn into the wood stove.  He sat down without saying a word.  As the local press reported it, those in attendance unanimously agreed that the farmer had won the debate. In 1890 corn was worth more as fuel than as food. Deja vu all over again, only now it’s “green.”

In the wider (or narrower) world of the pundit “food wars”—think Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons—these discussions tend to illicit either a retreat into faux philistinism or a mockery of the same. Pollan’s own response illustrates this tension well.  His conclusions are in fact deeply traditional—one might even venture to call them conservative—a fact he acknowledges, yet one which clearly makes him uncomfortable. 

Simultaneously exploited and neglected in this debate are the virtues of the actual philistines. Conservatives defiantly celebrating their double-whopper and fries and liberals pacing the isle of Whole Foods in search of the perfect dinner party. Pollan’s work has the virtue of refusing both of these easy outs, but then he can’t he bring himself to tell the whole story. 

Pollan’s sensibility is that of the kitchen lover—an admirable thing to be sure—but it’s a love that tends to go unconsummated in an age of gentile decadence. He frets continuously over the ethics of killing a chicken for dinner. He admits he is uncomfortable with the conservative culture of the farm. His tentative solutions tend towards state intervention rather than true laissez faire. 

Honest redneckery comes by dint of sweat on the brow, clods underfoot, and mud on the frock. Down at the feed store, the sun-burned, dirty men I talk to would be more likely to open up a can of whup-ass on Pollan’s hand-wringing self than celebrate his latest gourmand achievement. 

This uniquely American disconnect is illustrated well by a short anecdote Pollan relates. In Martin Van Buren’s reelection campaign of 1840, his opponent William Henry Harrison effectively ridiculed Van Buren for bringing a personal French Chef to the White House. Harrison, as he let it be known, preferred “raw beef and salt.” The lesson, as Van Buren and Rod Dreher both learned, is that “to savor food, to conceive of a meal as an aesthetic experience, has been regarded as evidence of effeteness, a form of foreign foppery.”  

To bridge this chasm requires a firm recognition that self-provisioning is dirty work done by sun hardened men who obtain not the rarefied sophistication of the credentialed witch-doctors and their organic brews but membership in the rarefied league of freemen who can pretty much tell anyone and everyone, as circumstances may require, to go to hell without concern for the consequences (taxman excepted). 

That’s the feed store definition of freedom in Jefferson (yes, that Jefferson) County, Kansas, though it’s not taught much in social studies textbooks. Only such men—rich or poor, barber or builder, clodhopper or shopkeeper—know true equality, for they know and honor the true measure of the other. They are “equal to their own needs” in Wendell Berry’s terms, which is the foundation of that quaint Aristotelian notion philia politike—political fraternity—otherwise known as peace and happiness. 

There is a sentiment in the punditry for what some have dubbed the emergence of the “Michael Pollan/Wendell Berry right.” Characterizing the food secessionist movement this way is a mistake because the food problem in this country described and catalogued so aptly by Pollan is ultimately a symptom of the must more disturbing problem: that the league of freemen has dwindled to near extinction.  The important questions start not with what we eat but about who we are. Pollan’s insight is to understand that the former tells us a lot about the latter. The Pollan temptation is to believe that the gold ring in the pig’s snout makes a difference. Gilding the sow doesn’t make her free when the slaughter house commeth.     

Meanwhile, every weekend in my parking lot the secessionists now gather to opt out of economic union of their food masters. Growers and eaters. Neighbors. Celebrating interdependence and independence. And not least of all, as Thoreau exclaimed: “I did taste!”

Caleb Stegall practices law in Kerry, Kansas, and is a regular contributor to Taki’s Magazine.

This article was originally published June 24, 2008.

Hallowell, a former legislator, was so respected that, without irony, he went by the name “Prince Hal.”  During one encounter, Simpson mocked Hallowell’s fine clothes and silk stockings, to which Prince Hal wrinkled his nose and said silk was preferable to dirty men who wore no socks at all.  From that point forward Simpson campaigned as “Sockless Jerry,” spinning his lack of hosiery into the elusive political gold of authenticity. 

The Topeka Capital Journal described the race as one pitting sober adults against a childish mob.  “The opposing candidates are opposites in every way.  Colonel Hallowell is a brilliant, experienced and competent man who would add strength to the Kansas delegation; Jerry Simpson is an ignorant, inexperienced lunkhead … who would disgrace the state in congress; scarcely able to read and write, unacquainted with public affairs, without experience as a legislator, raw, boorish, [and] fanatical with the fanaticism of sheer ignorance.”

Fanatical or not, Sockless Jerry really was a man of the people.  Dirt-man and long-time third (or forth) party activist, the sockless one stood poised to strike a blow for home and hearth and against the monied interest.  Simpson likewise shared the gallows humor of a people who—by virtue of scratching a living from the earth—understood the principles of scarcity and solidarity.  During one debate, upon hearing that Prince Hal was a man experienced with laws, Simpson reached for a statute book and pointing to a law imposing a tax upon dogs said something to the effect that if Hal’s laws tax bitches, they ought to also tax sons of bitches, for the People’s Party “believes in equal and exact justice to all!”  It brought the house down.

Noted Kansas newspaperman William Allen White, contrary to the Journal’s description, also described Simpson as a man of deep learning and understanding.  White wrote that Sockless Jerry “has read more widely that I,” regularly quoting Carlyle and various 17th Century poets, and “even persuaded me to try Thackeray, whom I had rejected until then.”  While the record does not bear out the establishment’s characterization of the People’s Party as spoiled and ignorant children, the real difference highlighted was one of class.  Prince Hal and his ilk believed rule was their birthright, and urged the masses to “leave it to the grownups” to address complex issues such as monetary policy. 

For it was the money supply that was at the heart of the prairie populist revolt of 1890.  The sturdy agrarian class of the prairie were labor and land rich, but cash poor.  They were also deeply in hock to the central banks and railroads, in the form of both public debt (and the resultant tax burden) and private mortgage debt.  Sockless Jerry and the rest of the People’s Party railed against the centralized control of the money supply by eastern interests. 

Simpson was convinced that the people were wealthy—they were largely self-sufficient and were the greatest agrarian producer class the world had yet seen—but “were without a medium [of exchange].”  In fact, there was less than ten dollars per capita in circulation.  In such a deflationary economy, wage and commodity prices were held down while interest, taxes, and transportation costs were breaking the backs of farmers everywhere.  With a loosened money supply and the resulting inflation, wages and commodity prices would rise and debts would become easier to repay.

There are fascinating parallels between the political and economic situation in Kansas in 1890 and today.  Though of course, they come with the standard caveat that history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.  

The failure of Congress to pass legislation bailing out the credit markets by absorbing up to $700 billion of bad debt has been widely described as a populist revolt against the elite managers of our society and economy.  David Brooks suggested that the House Republicans voting “no” were “nihilists” who “listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their Party.” 

Instead of this, Brooks pleads for the reassertion of an adult elite; the firm hand of authority and legitimacy; the sort “wielded … by rich men in private clubs.”  Brooks envisions a future of stability premised not on constitutional legitimacy or even democratic legitimacy, but on the “wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge.”  While watching the markets tank after the failure of the bailout bill on Monday, Ross Douthat echoed Brooks, writing that: “If the defeat of the bailout is a victory for liberty, it’s a victory whose costs [to stability and order] I’m not prepared to bear.”

There are many directions the discussion can go from here.  Is liberty a necessary precondition to order (the position I would argue for), or must order come first?  What kind of stability is most conducive to the conservative ideal of free and self-sufficient men—spontaneous order or managed order?  Again, I would argue for the former.  Is legitimacy itself a virtue worth defending, and is it fatally undermined by what has been called the “illegitimacy of failure”?

But for my purposes here I want to look just at the eerie similarities to 1890.  For once again, the debate circles around the difficult question of money supply.  The experts tell us that what we are suffering through is a “liquidity crisis” or a “credit crisis.”  There’s not enough money out there and banks are clamming up.  The doomsayers predict a death spiral roughly along these lines: no credit; failed businesses; lost jobs; further reduced spending; bank failures; bank runs; more failures; higher unemployment; etc.  And once again, the debate has squarely pitted the establishment centralized manager class against the “populist” man-on-the-street.

The difference is that this time around, it is the managerial class agitating for looser money supply and nationalization of large sectors of the economy while the managed class largely views this as an inflationary move that shifts the burden of bad debt from irresponsible fat cats onto hard working Joe Camel whose real wages will now dramatically decline. 

This seemingly incongruent historical reversal can best be understood by the fact that today’s monied classes are now the sellers (or middlemen) in a consumer rather than a producer economy.  The prairie populists of 1890 were likewise the sellers, but in a producer economy.  A loose money supply tends to benefit producers and middlemen (largely farmers in 1890, and global producers teamed with American delivery systems today), especially those who must take on debt to provide capital necessary to meeting demand.  It also feeds the cycle of economic bubble and burst.

One lesson that might be drawn from this is that the populist classes have largely lost the moral authority (not to mention the economic leverage) of being producers rather than consumers.  But the most important lesson is perhaps that while the arguments have changed, the central feature of the debate—that of class—has not. 

In fact, class consciousness is reasserting itself with a somewhat distracted vengeance in America.  Vengeful, because there is real and palpable anger in America against the managerial elites; distracted (and therefore dangerously malleable) because this anger is rudderless and directionless, largely as a result of the fact that it represents no real economic constituency—not labor, not agrarian, not small business.  The “buy American” constituency comes the closest, but even this is not sufficient to create a coherent and genuinely healthy populism as opposed to a merely angry mob (dubbed the “lumpenleisure” class).

The defeat of the bailout in Congress is a good example.  The bill was clearly opposed by a left-right alliance that fed off of anger on the street but articulated its opposition in mutually exclusive terms.  Democratic opposition came from those wanting greater federal control and management over perceived wrongdoers while Republican opposition came from those suggesting market correctives and fearful of encroaching socialism.  Daniel Larison has pointed out the painful fact that this kind of “crisis populism” has no future.

What can be done?  There really is a bubble waiting to burst.  Or rather, several bubbles.  We are in the middle of the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles.  The entitlement bubble looms.  And the mother of all bubbles—peak oil—silently grows while we mostly turn away because to watch is just too painful.  The overriding mission of the managerial class is obviously now to keep people in line and dutifully turned away—to disallow discussion of the obvious and keep the bubble intact as long as possible, pushing the ultimate consequences of a massive burst off on our children or our children’s children.

The only clear political cause the anti-bailout coalition could coherently rally around is the Anti-Federalist one.  A platform of localism and “opting out” of the federal system could take many forms, but it would require that the left give up its dreams of an egalitarian utopia and of running everything by federal fiat and it would require the right to give up its dream of a Christian nation with social control and corporate giveaways.  Both would have to retrench for fights and discussions on the local level which can only happen if and when the leviathan is put back in the cage.  The development of an economic constituency is perhaps even more difficult and would require the turning of consumers into local producers in a local economy.  What flag might this party fly?  I suggest this one.

Brooks’ piece is noteworthy for its insight that belief in God has never been very threatened by modern science, but the Bible is.  This has the potential to open up new and possibly productive arguments in the by now stale and boring debate between “science” and “faith.”

But Brooks gets the causal connection all wrong.  Neurobiology is merely an easy fall-guy for the threat posed to organized religions based largely on sacred texts (as was Darwin before); a threat that has been a long time in the making during a drawn out historical period of cultural declension.

The Bible is at risk primarily due to the declining standards of rigor and membership which are the social phenomena most in need of some steely analysis.  Because beneath the decline of real standards lurks the soft threat of social ostracizing and the unhappy fate of the cultural outcast.  Modify your attitude or else!     

The newly imposed rigor for what a friend of mine calls “rearranging the Feng Shui of academic life” can mean only one thing: that every act, idea, and relationship must be expressed with the pantomime of egalitarian uncertainty, opinion, and doubt.  Naturally, this is complete excrement and represents a total rejection of the classical model of learning in which there were only two rules: 1) accept that you are not the master and not even close; and 2) take your beatings and work harder. 

Brooks’ insight that it is the Bible being threatened, not today’s bricolage of faith, demonstrates that people, probably including Brooks, have no idea how texts, myth, and cult work as historical and cultural forces.  Consider the recent rise of vanity presses and diploma mills.  We’ve all received the spam advertising these services and by all accounts the fake qualification business is booming.  In a society that has rejected the historical function of texts and myth, people begin to confuse the possession of a discreet object (a “book,” a “diploma,” or “faith”) with the accomplishment and public esteem they really desire.  As this breakdown occurs it is driven by a resentment that perceives “faith” or “authorship” as a kind of exclusive club which they either no longer know how to enter or do not have the chops to do so.  And they certainly cannot accept that they might not be allowed in under any circumstances.

Trading on this confusion layered with generalized idiocy and low self-esteem, the credentialing industry (including the massive “faith credentialing” industry) seeks to remedy existential unrest with a piece of paper that requires anything but hard work and talent.  Has a star been named after you yet?

And this is how many people view even formerly legitimate faiths, diplomas, or other indices of human struggle with existence.  Legitimate and illegitimate accomplishments collapse in on each other.  Americans do not now know what the fixed standards are for quality, competency, and real achievement in any area of life (certainly not in the area of faith), except maybe sports.  If you tell them they will deride you as an elitist.

This is now endemic and in fact fundamental to the nation: our citizens habitually dislike and rail against established institutions that are necessarily particularist and exclusive.  When they are healthy the institutions don’t care what outsiders think of them, they put big demands on those who want in and they remain unapologetically “elitist.”  The rabble is motivated to start new, more open and inclusive churches, universities, presses, record labels, etc. out of a reactive need that lacks real direction.  Well-founded traditional institutions including the Christian church float in this corrosive ooze which threatens and erodes those institutions bit by bit.

Paradoxically, this intolerable rule of the new class of mediocre-elite is partly the fault of the rise of modern science itself, and of a fundamental fallacy at the root of both the institution of scientific discovery and the modern Church.  Alfred North Whitehead named it the fallacy of the misplaced concrete. 

The enormous success of [the enlightenment’s] scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand matter with its simple location in space and time, on the other hand mind, perceiving, suffering, reasoning, but not interfering, has foisted onto philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact.  Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined.  It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes.  There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on an equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind.  But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the [wrongful] ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century.

Following Whitehead, our greatest mystic philosopher of the 20th Century, Eric Voegelin, noted that the fallacy of the misplaced concrete “becomes the vehicle of the trend toward materialism in the sense of a worldview wherein all realms of being are reduced to the one and true reality of matter” which in turn leads to “the belief that human existence can be oriented in an absolute sense through the truth of science.”  The social “preoccupation with science and the possession of scientific knowledge has come to legitimate ignorance with regard to all problems that lie beyond a science of phenomena.”  Growth in scientific knowledge is “paralleled by an unspeakable advancement of mass ignorance with regard to the problems that are existentially the important ones.”

Voegelin explained the fallacy with this illustration:

A plant is a plant.  You see it.  You don’t see its physical-chemical processes, and nothing about the plant changes if you know that physical-chemical processes are going on inside.  How these processes will result in what you experience immediately as a plant (a rose or an oak tree), you don’t know anyway.  So if you know these substructures in the lower levels of the ontic hierarchy and go into the physical, chemical, molecular and atomic structures, even farther down, the greater becomes the miracle how all that thing is a plant.  Nothing is explained.

If one seeks to construct an explanation of a plant—or a soul, or a text—from the material knowledge gained through science he commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.  “If you deform your experience by trying to explain what you experience by the things which you don’t experience by which you know only by science, you get a perverted imagination of reality—if you see a rose as a physical or atomic process.”

This “scientistic ignorance becomes a civilizational disaster because the substantial ordering of existence cannot be achieved through the acquisition of knowledge in the phenomenal sense.”  The problem proceeds beyond mere ignorance (which can be remedied, though not easily) when the “belief in the self-sufficient ordering of existence through science is socially entrenched.  … The spiritual desire, in the Platonic sense, must be very strong in a young man of our time in order to overcome the obstacles that social pressure puts in the way of its cultivation.”  This creates social stratification through the mechanisms of prestige and various economic incentives.  It also gives rise to what Voegelin calls “aggressive dilettantism” in matters outside the narrow purview of the expertise possessed by the scientist and imposed as a standard on all others.  “What the scientistic dilettante cannot understand must not be proposed in discussions of a problem.” 

Adding to the complexity of the problem—and to the reserve of black comedic material being accrued by our culture—is the parallel phenomena of what one might call scriptural materialism in the American church.  It is the faith-based version of the fallacy of the misplaced concrete and can be seen in the anxiety and hostility among American Christians toward the historicity of texts and textual variations and proliferations.  This anxiety both undermines and explains the popular and constructed conception of the Reformational rise of scripture as based in the unqualified good of truth and accuracy enabled by the emergence of print culture and a class of intellectuals engaged in ensuring the truth and accuracy of materials published for public benefit. 

Brooks is correct, where two false concretes vie for supremacy, the socially sanctioned scientistic fallacy will destroy the biblicist and fideistic fallacy.  False gods brook no opposition.  Voegelin wryly comments that “when the faithful become fundamentalist, one cannot blame the intellectuals if they take them at their word and make nonsense of God or the gods.”

Again, the problem returns to generalized civilizational decline and democratization of effort and, correspondingly, of achievement.  Developing an understanding of God and the Bible that medicates the pain of the tensions of existence may be understandable, but it does not make for an adequate beginning from which to develop the substance of faith.  Clearly, a lot of American Christians and other “religious” types are petrified of pain and death; and they are also afraid that at bottom they lack belief in and/or are angry at God.  Intelligent adults who think about God and the Bible the same way they think about their 401(k) accounts are scriptural materialists and strike me as atheists in denial.  I suspect they are mainly concerned with producing and protecting respectable, adult, modern, intellectual constructions of “religious faith” because this is the only way they know to protect an experience of faith that has not only become very distant but is also largely inaccessible because there is too much effort involved.

The development of doctrine, scriptural interpretation, and the art of theology in general has historically been understood as a process of discreet uncovering of oneself and others in service of wholeness, health, and prudential wisdom.  True theologians know that they are in the business of creating secondary inspirations that are “filters” through which the faithful can be exposed to the rawer and more immediate human experience of transcendence which is at the heart of the Bible.  So long as the secondary inspirations restore and preserve a faithful openness and proper tension in the soul towards transcendence while also insulating us from its terrifying implications, they produce health and wholeness.  Which is to say they produce the strength to suffer in faith, hope, and love.  We cannot all be Desert Fathers, and if we could, there would be no need for theology.  Even Moses, after all, saw only God’s hindquarters.