(JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic administration passed a piece of legislation it hoped would accelerate the end of the First World War. The new law didn’t directly concern the military — nor was it a revolutionary act of foreign policy. Rather, its target was ordinary American citizens.
Passed shortly after the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act made it a crime to “wilfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States”. In other words, it was intended to stifle dissent. And by all accounts, it was immensely effective: it was used to convict 877 people between 1919 and 1920.
In the century since it was passed (and swiftly revoked), the Sedition Act has largely been viewed as a legislative artefact, an embarrassing quirk that’s best forgotten. In recent weeks, however, its spirit appears to have been rekindled by another Democrat President — one who may not be at war, but nonetheless finds himself under siege. Late last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the creation of a sinister-sounding new unit called the Disinformation Governance Board. When asked to justify its formation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki explained: “It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities, and I am not sure who opposes that effort.”
And so the mask slips. As became clear in the following days, the Board has been established to legislate fake news and mistruths out of existence, as if they were draughts of toxic air, wafting out of laptops and cell phones into the eyes and ears of unsuspecting citizens. It’s hardly surprising that the Board was swiftly condemned as the ill-disguised attempt at state censorship it is.
The main clue to its true mission was the person chosen to lead the unit: Nina Jankowicz, a government specialist in “disinformation” who has an unhealthy record of disseminating disinformation for the Left and then singing about it, Mary Poppins-style, on TikTok. In 2020, for instance, she dismissed the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation and a “Trump campaign product”. In October last year, she claimed that parental concerns about the teaching of critical race theory in schools were merely “one of those hot-button issues that the Republicans and other disinformers, who are engaged in disinformation for profit… have seized on”.
Given her past comments, it’s hard not to view her appointment by Joe Biden — indeed, the creation of the Board itself — as anything other than a cry of desperation. The midterm elections, when congressional seats are contested, are fast-approaching. For weeks now, most commentators have been predicting calamity for the Democrats. And it’s not hard to see why: America’s post-pandemic economic recovery has stalled; gas prices have soared; inflation is above 8%; violent crime, especially homicide, remains at a disturbingly elevated level; and America’s Southern border is seeing record illegal crossings.
Faced with such a crisis, the rational thing for Democrat leaders to do would be to review their policies on these kitchen-table issues and change course. They could, for instance, invite their former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers back to advise the President on the economy. They could reassess ill-considered climate policies, such as the closure of the Keystone Pipeline and the regulatory war on fracking. They could even re-examine their naive programmes on crime and punishment, from defunding the police to putting felons back onto the streets. As for who could lead this course-correcting effort, there are ready-made centrist Democrats, such as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, waiting in the wings.
But this is not where the party is today. The most influential voices are still on the far-Left, in the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez corner of the tent. And the Democratic Socialists want to double down on their madcap agenda — party and voters alike be damned. How they achieve this is where Jankowicz comes in. The Democrat’s progressive wing knows it will never win over the American public by relying on the mundane methods of political campaigning. Its only hope is to frighten, censor and indoctrinate voters into accepting their agenda.
This explains the ill-judged idea of a Disinformation Governance Board. It also explains the hysterical Left-wing response to Elon Musk’s bid to take over Twitter. Having established such a stranglehold on social media in recent years, to the point that the last Republican President was effectively cancelled from the Internet while still in office, the Democrats are appalled by the thought that free speech might be restored to one of the major platforms.
Yet the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board marks a clear turning point, signalling the consolidation of state-sanctioned censorship. Once “disinformation” has been identified, we are told, “DHS then shares factual information related to its mission to potentially impacted people and organisations”. DHS has insisted that the Board does “not have any operational authority or capability”, while Psaki stated that “the mandate is not to adjudicate what is true or false online or otherwise”. But how else is it to identify disinformation and combat it with “factual information”?
This is, of course, a facsimile of the playbook adopted by media companies during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Remember when Twitter started warning us not to pay attention to such “disinformation” as the hypothesis that the Covid coronavirus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan? Or when highly qualified medical scientists were threatened with cancellation for arguing that lockdowns were doing more harm than good? With every passing day, these arguments look more convincing. Yet for more than a year they were regularly denounced as “disinformation”. And for more than a year, they were effectively silenced. Given the option of deploying such an effective political weapon, is it any wonder that the Democrats are now drawn to its use?
Of course, not everyone in the Democratic Party supports what is being attempted here. As Jim Himes, the Democratic Congressman for Connecticut’s 4th District, has observed, “the government has no business saying that this is disinformation and this is information”. Even President Wilson himself quickly recognised that for all its practical, short-term benefits, the Sedition Act was having a poisonous impact on American democracy. It was swiftly repealed in 1920; a year later, Wilson offered clemency to the vast majority of those convicted under the act.
Of those who were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, most belonged to the pacifist Left. Yet the Democrat advocates of the Disinformation Governance Board appear to have forgotten this, along with the age-old problem of censorship’s use as a political tool: it’s incredibly helpful at crushing dissent — until you find yourself on the receiving end.
Could the Democrats be about to learn this the hard way? It’s looking increasingly likely that, come 2024, a Republican will be returned to the White House — with that Republican likely to be Donald Trump. Forget angry parents tweeting about Critical Race Theory. If Trump wins a second term and takes control of the Disinformation Government Board, then the Democrats really will have something to worry about. And if that does happen, they will only have themselves to blame.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an UnHerd columnist. She is also the Founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. Her Substack is called Restoration.
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SubscribeGoodness Mary I do admire your writing but really this is like going through sludge. The problem with food production is that there is too much because people eat too much. If people were more restrained in their eating habits then we would not have to resort to these inhumane food production practises. Let’s get back to rationing problem solved.
The moderately affluent middle class residents of the market town supplement their weekly shop at Waitrose with local organic meat, vegetable and other produce from farmers markets and various upmarket specialist shops.
By contrast, many at the queue at the supermarket serving the nearby, rather run down coastal town, are clearly choosing on the basis of how best to feed a family on a limited budget, with cheap meat and processed foods favored.
People have need the wherewithal to exercise choice whatever the heir ideological convictions
That may all be true but I rather suspect a large number of the people in the supermarket queue subscribe to Netflix, Disney etc etc.
For lots of people the difference is priorities just as lots watch TV rather than exercise or…
The Right today doesn’t care about the minutae of free markets. Only culture counts.
Great piece – but isn’t this just the conservative dilemma in a new guise? Aggressive capitalism on the one hand, along with a desire to hold onto all the things that aggressive capitalism is actually tearing up.
In the U.K. at least wealthy conservatives are able to find a compromise. It’s called “moving to the Cotswolds”.
https://hbr.org/2025/01/trumps-trade-and-deportation-plans-could-be-disastrous-for-the-u-s-food-supply
The population of the United States is projected to be around 371 million in 2050. This is an increase of about 40 million people from 2020.
Explanation
The population growth rate in the United States has been slowing in recent decades.
The population is expected to age, with more people in older age groups.
The population is expected to become more diverse, with a smaller percentage of white, non-Hispanic people.
The population is expected to continue to move across the country.
Factors that may contribute to population growth
Immigration: The number of immigrants and their descendants is expected to contribute to population growth.
Birth rates: The number of births is expected to contribute to population growth.
Factors that may contribute to population decline
Lower immigration rates: The number of immigrants entering the country is expected to decrease.
Lower birth rates: The number of births is expected to decrease.
Older age profile: The population is expected to age, with more people in older age groups.
https://farmlandinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/06/AFT_FUT2040_AbundantFuture_ExecutiveSummary.pdf
Just as sprawling subdivisions and large- lot rural housing eat up farmland, climate change is accelerating sea-level rise, inundating coastal farms. This report shows that, on our current climate trajectory, a total of nearly 450,000 acres of farmland will experience coastal flooding by 2040.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7559051/
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230103-how-plastic-is-getting-into-our-food
https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/melting-glaciers-are-going-to-affect-food-security.htm#:~:text=The%20glaciers%20of%20the%20Himalayas,grow%20this%20water%2Dconsuming%20crop.
The glaciers of the Himalayas and Alps are melting, and this has consequences for the agriculture of the future. One third of all rice is grown around the Himalayas, and countries depend on meltwater to grow this water-consuming crop.
The Ongoing Collapse of the World’s Aquifers
When humans over-exploit underground water supplies, the ground collapses like a huge empty water bottle. It’s called subsidence, and it could affect 1.6 billion people by 2040.
Somehow, I really do not think most of the folks commenting on this thread are paying attention to what we are doing to this planet.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/climate-change-is-shifting-plant-growth-zones-heres-what-to-know-for-your-garden-this-year
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/which-crops-are-most-vulnerable-climate-change-and-which-places
And lest we mention climate change:
https://www.agritecture.com/blog/2019/5/6/11-crops-across-the-us-that-are-being-affected-by-climate-change
Not one of you has mentioned that nature is moving on from our calamities:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://lucaskbobadilla.github.io/publication/baek-evolution-glyphosateresistant-weeds-2021/baek-evolution-glyphosateresistant-weeds-2021.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vt6aZ_-4GJKmieoPmpKhsAM&scisig=AFWwaeZHb3q-QF5uEDm_ZwYsIDfN&oi=scholarr
The Promethean human trophic cascade requires much more human produced energy in order to sustain the Promethean trajectory compared to the Organic human trophic cascade.
See ‘overview’
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#:~:text=They%20consider%20that%20this%20is,a%20pig%20or%20an%20anchovy.
Eating up the world’s food web and the human trophic level.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3870703/
This creates an over reliance on fossil fuels, renewable energy and nuclear energy which needs to be sustained indefinitely just to sustain the Promethean model of food consumption.
Without the energy, the Promethean model collapses.
Thus fossil fuel derived fertilisers, pesticides and the fuel for farming machinery need substitutes for when fossil fuels deplete.
Without the electrification of the farming industry, the Promethean model collapses in about 50 years time which will require a large expansion of nuclear power whether fission or fusion.
Consequently it could be argued the Promethean model is built on ecological/technological idealism and the Organic model built on ecological/technological realism.
Prudence would dictate to keep a very close eye on the energy sources available, the density of the energy sources and the net energy production that can be achieved in order to determine the balance of resources, including land, to make available for the Promethean model and the Organic model.
This creates a paradox/trade off between agricultural land based renewable energy production and agricultural land for crop production for example with renewable energy ostensibly providing energy for the Promethean farming model, especially industrialised pig and chicken farms but at the same time, the pigs and chickens need grain which currently is only grown on agricultural land.
Therefore, increasing the ‘mean human trophic level’ of the Promethan model with increased meat consumption, not only increases the energy dependency underlying food production but also increases the need for agricultural land to supply the grain to feed the animals.
So where is all the land going to come from, especially if the Promethean model is to be powered by renewable energy?
With fossil fuel depletion, the dependency on renewable energy increases which requires much more agricultural land.
So ultimately, the Promethean model is doomed without nuclear power so best sustain the skill base and the knowledge base to sustain the Organic model.
Another thoughtful article by Mary. I consider myself a pragmatist first and foremost. I too experience discomfort viewing images of factory farms. On the one hand, I don’t like to see any creature in such conditions. On the other hand, I understand human nature and economics well enough to know that factory farms wouldn’t exist if there weren’t a need for them. There are a lot of people to feed, and if there isn’t enough to go around, the suffering won’t be evenly distributed. It won’t mean everyone has less food, it will mean some will have a lot less, and some will starve. It won’t be even from one nation to the next or within national populations. There will inevitably be rich and poor based on who has the land and infrastructure to farm large quantities of food or who has other resources that are needed to trade for the food they can’t grow. Nations with few resources and little farmland will be last in line because if the past decade and a half has taught us nothing else, it’s that there’s no sense of global fairness or common humanity that can stand up to tribalism, and no set of rules that can endure without a power to enforce them. We are back to square one, the grim reality that nations will feed their own people first, trade with others who have things they need second, and then maybe give out some charity to make themselves feel better. The real choice is between factory/industrial farming and widespread hunger and starvation. We don’t have the luxury of a feel good option.
Further, it bears remembering that having a large number of creatures, human or otherwise, starve for whatever reason is a perfectly natural result. Any biologist or ecologist can point to any number of cases where the natural world produces cycles of boom and bust where animals reproduce beyond the resources of their environment, resulting in mass starvation and population collapse. After this collapse there is suddenly an abundance of resources for the survivors, who then thrive and reproduce rapidly, and the cycle repeats. In nature, the strongest and the fittest, those who are best able to find food for themselves, escape predators, and adapt to whatever environmental changes may come.
The animals we farm, though, are not subject to this rule by virtue of human protection. They have been tamed, kept, domesticated, and bred for traits selected by people according to what the animals were used for, for thousands of years. If there were some hypothetical 1984 style global government than enforced vegetarianism, we wouldn’t have herds of wild cattle roaming the wilderness; we wouldn’t have cattle at all. With a few notable exceptions (horses and cats), domestic animals don’t survive very well or very long in ‘natural’ conditions because they have been kept in a state protected from those conditions by people for countless generations. One way or another, their survival is ultimately dependent on human protection. Is death better than captivity? Is extinction preferable to an arrangement where a few might live in comfortable conditions but most suffer in misery? These are philosophical questions human beings struggle to answer for themselves, let alone for animals whose thoughts and feelings we can barely guess at.
All of this speaks to a greater problem, that of what we mean when we say ‘nature’ and ‘natural’. It’s ubiquitous in advertising because the word appeals to people emotionally and creates a positive association, and because people don’t stop to define what nature really is and where their positive feelings originate. Without getting into who’s to blame, a lot of people have been sold and bought into a romanticized version of nature, not the real one. It is, like all other romanticized notions, based on selective recall, emphasizing positive aspects and ignoring negatives. They’re thinking of deer prancing in the field rather than being eaten by wolves. They’re thinking of birds singing and soaring through the sky, not pushing the weaker chicks out of the nest to ensure the survival of the stronger ones. It’s almost impossible to have a serious discussion about any topic that involves the natural world and human activities without confronting this particular 800 pound gorilla. Romanticism is always the opponent of rationality because it is based on emotion rather than fact, sentiment rather than logic. There certainly is a place for romanticism in arts, entertainment, and philosophy, but it should never enter into the decision making process of people, let alone entire nations.
I ultimately must side with the tech optimists here on the practical grounds that we have little alternative. The fact of the matter is we are on a path that no living person consciously chose, yet we are all bound to that choice and are stuck on that path. When early humans learned to harness fire to stay warm, tame and domesticate animals for food and labor, and plant crops to grow food reliably, human beings chose a path apart from the limitations of ‘nature’. They used their own ingenuity to extend the possibilities of the natural world, to change the rules. For better or for worse, humanity chose long long ago to walk the path of trying to conquer nature rather than live within its limitations. That decision may have been made ages before any of us were born by people who had no idea what the ultimate implications would be, but it cannot be unmade now, because among the many species people have domesticated, the most important one is humanity itself. Most of us can no more sustain ourselves in a natural environment than the animals we cultivate. We can’t feed nine billion humans without modern industrial farming practices. To my mind, the only way out is through. We have little choice but to press on. Technology in its various forms got us to this point and without it, we couldn’t feed the several billion people that we already have, let alone make their lives any better. Whatever problems our inventions create, we have no other recourse than to try to invent solutions. Nature isn’t going to help us. Nature would be fine if we all starved and went extinct like the millions of species that went extinct long before we were around to fret about it. Personally, I’m against the extinction of humanity so bring on the technology. We invented our way from rocks and animal hides to computers and airplanes so lets invent our way out of today’s problems as well. Either technology will resolve these issues, or nothing will.
Factory agriculture saved the world from hunger. Despotic leaders, much like the loonie left are the main cause of hunger. RFK jr will have a bully pulpit, not direct policy. Else he will be headed back to Hyannis port.
Save the bacon!!!!
Good heavens, a piece in UnHerd which acknowledges the horrors of factory farming for the 96% of animals that live on the planet (only 4% of animals are wild)!
Not even vaguely true. Most animals are insects or similar and almost all (99.9+%?) are wild
But how far can he go in Making America Healthy again, when Big Ag is pulling in the other direction? ——-> Entrenched interests are always going to fight efforts to affect the status quo. This has nothing to do with left or right, and everything to do with self-interest. Big Ag, like Big Pharma or Big Anything Else, is going to treat any attempt to rein it in as an existential threat.
The reality is that we’re – in America, at least – fed garbage and people know it. One reason is that societal urbanization has widened the distance between food and table and corporate production has grown as a result. The European diet – I’ll use my ancestral homeland of Greece as an example – is far healthier. Europeans in multiple nations instinctively know that given the farmer-focused protests that erupted over various nations’ moves to harm their own citizens.
I’m less worried about the growing conditions with all the additives and chemicals that are mixed in for various reasons. Perhaps the takeaway is that consumers should take greater ownership over what they eat instead of relying on someone else to do it for them. RFK2 is growing on me, mostly for his penchant of pissing off so many of the “right” people, and that does not mean right in a political sense, but in terms of the power they hold over individual consumers.
Thomas Massie talks about the problems of regulation. It’s not that small farms are impossible to run in and of themselves, but that regulation compliance makes it too expensive. If you get rid of regulation, you’ll get additional options of buying local organic meat which might be more expensive and healthier, but at least gives us that option.
I am unabashedly on the side of Massive Agriculture here – make food cheaper and cheaper and cheaper! It’s good for everyone, and its the backbone of human progress. Random squeamishness about industrial processes has been the bane of American and broader industry, the industry that has brought unimaginable wealth to everyone in the entire world! Bring on the industrial pig pens, the stacked chicken coops and the massive combine harvesters! Bring on the genetically modified mega yield wheat and the artifical fertilizer! Make food so cheap that every man, woman and child in the world can eat his fill thrice over! As God said,”Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth”. It’s all ours so let us take it!
Mmmm. Tongue in cheek. I hope.
Partly, but mostly not. I have friends who are farmers and I’m from the countryside. I don’t share urban squeamishness about agricultural processes.
I could be wrong, but RFK2’s argument is about the chemicals used in processing rather than the question of how much space a cow has.
It’s connected. More chemicals and meds means livestock (commodity crops too) can be raised on less land, i.e. high density. RFK2 will find the happy medium between minimizing meds and keeping food affordable.
‘We’ don’t need more human beings but LESS!
The Roman practice of ‘Damnatio ad bestias’ has much to recommend it if only we had the will.
I do a bit of small-scale farming and don’t like to see animals suffering, green deserts with no wild plants and flowers, poor fruit harvests for lack of bees, fewer birds for lack of winged insects etc. Or to eat tasteless, low-nutrient food. Your argument about ‘being from the countryside hence have position X’ doesn’t hold. Further, hyper-rational positions about extremely complex systems, where there is constant change, are nearly always wrong because they don’t and can’t account for that complexity
If being rational was always wrong, explain the massive growth in crop yields! Being sensible at scale about agriculture is always a better idea than not being sensible. Intelligence and technology are what make humans unique, and should be leveraged to the fullest.
When did he say it was always wrong to be rational?
“I’m from the countryside” isn’t an argument.
True and I’m not using it as one. My argument is more that big agriculture has brought unparalleled prosperity to the vast vast majority of mankind – for the first time in all history obesity is a bigger problem than famine, which is wild. And thus I embrace it completely and utterly as another part of what makes humans great.
I have a smallholding and am not squeamish either. Slaughter my animals (myself where possible) but that doesn’t mean I like animal cruelty. Just as I would be OK killing the enemy in war but wouldn’t torture them once my prisoners.
It is not squeamishness but morality and decency.
We human beings like to think of ourselves as living at the top of the food chain—doing so implies we have dominion over all the other plants and animals living on this planet. And while that implied perspective is perhaps correct in one sense, it’s not when looked at in its truest biological sense.
Organisms at the very top (apex) of the food chain eat only meat—the meat of other predators, that is. Organisms at the bottom, conversely, eat only simple plants. With that definition, in mind, we know we’re not going to sit at the top—we eat lots of vegetables, thus we’re not going to compete with the likes of tigers or crocodiles.
https://phys.org/news/2013-12-human-trophic.html
You sir are deliriously irresponsible
One of the, many, problems with Big Ag/intensive farming is the short termism. Don’t worry about what is being done to the soil and water, just maximise profits now. This is even worse with fishing as no-one owns them so every fisherman just wants to get every fish they can as otherwise someone else will. There is no incentive to leave some behind for next year.
If farmers were charged for the damage caused by their pesticides etc (and probably medicines) then they would use more cautiously. If fishermen owned the rights to future fish they would be more careful with the current ones.
I’m wondering how much extra it actually costs the consumer to buy decent food? As I understand it, a lot of the cost arises further up the chain, so if the farmer’s costs rose by, say, 10% to produce better food, what would the impact be on shelf prices. ‘Better’ is of course a difficult thing to quantify, but would include animal welfare along with pesticide use etc.
This is where where pure capitalism, naked market forces, needs regulation (proper, thoughtful regulation) to benefit society as a whole. It might even require an element of subsidy. But in reality it is a national security issue, & needs to be kept out of the usual party politicking. Serious discussion is required.
In Unherd‘s debate about Trump it was particularly shocking to hear one of the speakers dismiss Britain’s farmers as ‘one percent of GDP’.
Edward Heath, when trying to get Britain into the Common Market in the 1970s, dismissed Britain’s 22,000 fishermen and their families as ‘politically insignificant’.
After William of Normandy’s troops had harried the North, the villagers could no longer produce any food. Before they starved to death they ate human flesh.
Great piece, thank you MH. Am pleased and interested to note that UnHerd has added farming and food (security and ethics) to its regular roster of subjects it monitors.
I can’t bring myself to give up meat entirely but have got increasingly fussy about its provenance. This means more and more fruit and veg – now some homegrown on my (organic) allotment. Am fascinated by this micro urban farming and how much effort it takes actually to grow food. I hope to produce most of our vegetables this year; with the monthly side benefit of 10-15 kg of peelings going into soil-improving compost not landfill bin.
The same applies to fruits and veggies, too. The crop is immaterial; its production is a massive exercise in exterminating any and every creature that stands in the way. It’s just that people have less heartburn over the frogs, snakes, moles, and other critters that are wiped out in services to their kale, arugula, and berries than pigs and cows.
You appear to be part of the “every project pleases and only man is vile” community. A hunter-gatherer economy might meet your requirements for a population of millions, not billions, but is massively irrelevant.
Alex seems to have a healthy dose of cynicism and/or anger emanating from just about every comment he posts. Of course people feel worse for larger animals. They are more complex beings, and also more intelligent than frogs or moles. It’s the same reason people don’t get as upset when their pet mouse dies, as opposed to their pet dog.
Back to the topic, the older and more observant (and wealthier) I become, the more squeamish I get when I think about what goes into that hamburger, chicken breast, or slice of bacon. This isn’t to say factory farming is bad all around. People need to be able to afford food. But, I wonder if, as people become more and more aware of factory farms and how they operate, we will naturally shift away from the meat they produce, and into more “ethical” ways of obtaining it.
I lived in my allotment shed for six years during which time I grew most of my vegetable, fruit and bean needs for the year. Including soil fertility maintenance, plant care and pest control along with processing the excess veg and fruit for jarring and drying and storing the beans and drying seeds for the next year I’d say it is a part time job for the year.
Hard relentless work but very satisfying alongside an immersion into one’s ecological self.
In the past ten years I’ve gone from a left-of-centre paleo dieter to a right-of-centre vegetarian who occasionally eats wild game. I’ve always had difficulty mapping concern for environmental protection and food quality onto the traditional left-right political spectrum. Until recently it wasn’t a spectrum that needed to engage with such issues.
It’s not a Left-Right thing, it’s a Corporate-State Sector mindset that forgets that, in a (sort of) Democratic, Capitalist System, it’s the individual’s choice that drives demand, whether at the ballot box or in a shop, or even on a one-to-one with a farmer.
Since the left has politicized every aspect of life, what you eat is absolutely on the political spectrum.
Excellent article which nimbly takes on the complex weave of interests on the subject of food production.
However, I haven’t yet seen much evidence of a significant cohort of “Britain’s younger rightists, many of whom are entirely unsentimental about Britain’s agrarian heritage..”
I think that rightists here – even the young ones – are more likely to challenge the intrusion of Big Ag practices from America in order to protect British farming. Our industry is, necessarily, smaller scale and (still) somewhat family orientated. The young rightists are aware that those traditions are worth preserving. While they are very much on board with MAGA, I don’t see them unable to adapt those ideas to suit our farming industry which preserves our own traditions.
Ironically, it is Labour which seems hell-bent on destroying our farming industry, and thus lay ourselves open to Big Ag, but probably more influenced from Brussels than the U.S.(Labour would dearly love to have our food policy set by Brussels).
Agree to a degree. Rightist working class here in the UK is pouring tampered-with Arla milk away on tiktok or being middle class and trying to trying to keep nasty stuff out of their fridges and choosing Waitrose.
It is going to be a real dilemma though and maybe for the USA it is coming back to consumer choices to shape the market not regulation.
“If you don’t like it don’t buy it”
Being Waitrose isn’t enough, for Milk and Cream anyway: to guarantee there’s no Bovaer®, it needs to be Organic, Waitrose or not.
While more expensive food is likely to be better quality, it ain’t necessarily so. Asking about each product is the only way, though there are pools of information on the subject on the Web.
For anyone interested in diving down the rabbit hole, here’s a good start:
https://youtu.be/J9e6eFnukWg?si=dwH6P0lFLmkAT1GU
And clicking on the first ‘more’, and then another, then ‘https://old.food.gov.u…’ will give you a spreadsheet of British dairies and their codes, circa 2018.
Instead of wondering what the Government could do, why not wonder what they could stop doing, like subsidising Sugar production (from sugar beet)? Why not add tariffs to imports (from sugar cane) instead? We could have a smaller sugar beet industry, and grow other (healthy) crops, with the government financially supporting the change. Diversifying would also spread the labour required throughout the year.
The answer is mandatory food labelling which would give consumers information on environmental impact, chemical additives and animal welfare standards. Give the consumer the information and let them choose. British farming can’t compete on price but they can on quality. See Conservative animal welfare foundations reports. On sugar, we consume 2 million tonnes a year- far too much and at great cost to our health. A £5 tax on every kilo would raise a useful £10 billion.
Or better and more rational. If it’s advertised don’t eat it.
I am sorry that Ms. Harrington has cheapened this article by making the issue Right versus Left. It is Big Ag + Big Pharma versus middle class groups who want to fight for causes. The real issue is that changing farming methods would make meat impossibly expensive and any government would have to find a way to educate the masses about how to avoid serious problems with lack of vitamins and other important nutrients. An impossible task. Of course, the middle class groups are already armed with this knowledge.
If meat became seriously expensive, we should prepare for weekend breaks for people to go out and shoot rabbits – or anything which moves. That would take a month or so to remove all wild animals and birds, mainly as collateral damage. A black market would arise and Albanian gangsters would bring in Russian meat hidden behind panels in trucks. More state employees would be needed to inspect trucks, to raid warehouses and ‘suspect’ houses where meat parties had been organised. On the positive side, smuggling Russian meat could be more lucrative for the Albanians than smuggling immigrants or even heroin.
Does anyone really understand what would happen because it really, really matters.
I’m not sure why you think meat would become ‘impossibly expensive ‘ if produced more humanely. More expensive, yes. But as another poster has already pointed out, the cost of primary production is only a fraction of the supermarket price.
Transport, refrigeration, middle man and retailer costs and profit margins are the principal component. And it’s just as cheap to ship, refrigerate and retail organic and free range meat as it is the other sort.
You haven’t been to the store recently. ‘organic’ produce of all types is 30% – 100% more expensive.
In the end this is a balancing act like so many others. There is no ‘one size fits all’ with regard to different farming practices. Maybe crowding the pigs together is OK as long as they get an hour out of the pen every day (Iike prisoners).
Don’t be deceived. Those who would make meat too expensive are also intent on putting grains, fruits, vegetables out reach to 75% of the west’s population.
Another good article and think-piece from Mary. I am an admirer of Musk and am more pro-Trump than anti, but I think I come out as an “organicist” rather than a Promethean. On this issue anyway.
Definitely food for thought….
I’ll give you an uptick just for the pun.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Trumps current various groupings hold together. We’ve been watching the various left leaning parties tear themselves apart for over a decade now, with the old traditional working class left fighting with the middle class managerialist types and “progressive” groups that now control those parties. I can see a similar battle for what now passes for the right, which now consists of Thatcherite neoliberals, working class protectionists and hyper capitalist tech bros, whose interests are almost diametrically opposed
Thanks, BB.
I thought I might be pitching it too subtly.
I agree with you it’s refreshing to see a slightly more granular analysis than just the tired old Left/Right binary.
A friend once worked for an agricultural supply company. His first job in the morning was to ring around the farms and get the previous day’s death count. This determined how much antibiotic powder went into the feeds- sometimes up to a third by weight. As a consumer I’m at the more queasy end of the spectrum and try to get by on chick peas and brown rice and the occasional splash out at farmers markets. But realise its a luxury belief and not for everyone.
Same here…but I notice that my husband and I, eating a mainly vegetarian diet and shopping carefully at Lidl, are spending a lot less on our food per capita than our takeaway-eating, meat-munching adult offspring.
There is no such thing as cheap meat – the cost is huge in terms of land wasted on animal feed and indeed in terms of sentient, sensitive animals forced to live lives of unremitting misery.
They bred pigs to grow fast but they never bothered to breed out their intelligence and their foraging instincts. What we do to pigs makes me absolutely sick. And I do NOT like being lumped together with the likes of R Kennedy!!!
Who was who said “if slaughterhouses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians”?
I was agreeing with you until the final sentence.