In Sunday’s LA Times, Nicolette Hahn Niman offers a clear explanation of the misleading claims that real food is elitist. An excerpt:
Commodity foods — from large-scale, industrialized agricultural production — seem cheap by comparison because they’re produced without bearing their true costs, which are passed on in the form of pollution, virulent infectious diseases and animal suffering.
“If the full cost of externalized environmental and health costs were taken into account, those same products would be far more expensive,” the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production concluded in a 2008 report issued with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Read the whole thing here.
Of course, the sad irony is that this trope, that real food is elitist, invoked in the name of the working-class public, serves only to protect the wealth and status of the elite corporate class that has enriched itself by destroying our sustainable, decentralized, delicious, and nutritious, food system, with an evervated, nationalized, industrialized, disease-ridden one.
Nicolette Hahn Niman on her and her husband's ranch in Bolinas, from our visit around New Years 2009