Food For Thought

While Stephanie Herseth Sandlin was adding to the world's population (congrats, congresswoman), Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa, was being named Agriculture secretary.  Rod Dreher is not impressed:

How depressingly conventional. Vilsack is Mr. Big Agribusiness, and his selection is a sign that Obama has no interest in changing the US food system. King Corn still reigns, and we'll keep subsidizing industrial agriculture until kingdom come.

Obama has picked for his Secretary of State a hawkish internationalist (Hillary), and retained Bush's Secretary of Defense. His economic team is made up of Clintonite free traders and Establishmentarians. I'm not saying this is all bad, but you see these appointments, and you wonder what kind of "change" Obama was asking the American people to vote for. Maybe I'm missing something, but his line-up looks to me like thoroughly conventional picks from soup to nuts -- with the lone exception of his having done something unusual by retaining Bush's man at the Pentagon.

Slap a "New! Improved!" label on this box of the same old Democratic soap, and you're done. I suppose we'll now see Democrats behaving like us Republicans did whenever Bush did something disappointing: vigorously insist that the alternative (Gore, Kerry) would have been far, far worse, so nobody has any business complaining.

Apparently Vilsack will continue to head the Department of Agribusiness, as opposed to the Department of Temperance, as Prof. Deneen suggests. 

In a column last week, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof proposed that Barak Obama should consider re-naming the Department of Agriculture to "The Department of Food." This change would signal a fundamental commitment to altering the course of agricultural policy in the United States, away from destructive forms of industrial farming in which a few centralized industrial players are given substantial advantages and smaller farmers either "get big or get out," and toward sustainable practices that emphasize more local crops, smaller producers and fewer petroleum inputs. Now that's change I could believe in.

In particular, Kristof calls for reduction of subsidies on "unhealthy calories" like high-fructose corn syrup, more and decent space for farm animals, and in general an overall reduction in the amount of costs being "externalized" by reducing the amount of costs like sewage and soil runoff being shifted to the public. In effect, the proposed name-change - emphasizing "food" - is to call for policies that would assuredly increase the cost of basic foodstuffs (almost all of which is derived from subsidized corn or soy), and thus result in a shift in the American diet and even a reduction of the overall calories being eaten. If we were to name things properly, we would be shifting from the Department of Gluttony to the Department of Temperance.