Monday, April 21, 2008

Why Aren't the Slow Food People Anarchists?

I watched King Corn on P.B.S. It's about the massive amount of corn grown as an industrial crop in the U.S. The documentary clearly establishes that the reason corn is grown is because the government subsidizes it. Corporations find that they can benefit from the situation and they create huge industrial farms to get economies of scale. Then, of course we end up with too much corn. So, again corporations invest capital into turning the stuff into something they can sell. So we have high fructose corn syrup and corn fed cows that would literally die from their corn diet if they weren't slaughtered first. Niether of these situations would exist if the government was involved in the food business.

In fact, we can end the problem today by ending the crop subsidies. High fructose corn syrup isn't a viable product without the subsidies. Instead we are giving people more incentive to plant corn thanks to the biofuel regulations. Poor people have to pay more for food because of this too.

So why aren't the slow food, organic food, and other food purists anarchistic, or at the very least, free market oriented in their approach? Can they only see the corporations and miss the forest that is socialized agriculture? Corporations and government work together and are similar creatures. Notice how the corporations just keep getting larger under the current system, but before we had smaller family run farms.

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