Hightower Lowdown

A FRIEND OF MINE TELLS A STORY about the political demise in the 1950s of an entrenched Oklahoma state representative, whom we'll call Elmer Goodenuff.

Rep. Goodenuff, who chaired the ag committee, had been in office so long that he'd grown tight with the Capitol crowd, but he had lost touch with the folks back in his rural district. Thus, when some supermarket lobbyists asked him to sponsor a bill requiring that all egg producers be regulated by the state and have to pay an egg-grading fee, he saw no problem with the measure. It was for the public's health, the lobbyists told him. His constituents, however, did have a problem with it. In those days, many small farmers made their spending money by selling eggs fresh out of their chicken yards--yet here was ol' Elmer hitting them with a bureaucratic rigmarole and a fee that would make their little egg stands more trouble than they were worth. It turns out that the supermarket lobbyists' real agenda had been to get rid of all these bothersome mom-and-pop competitors.

Suddenly, the chairman found himself facing political opposition-a young lawyer from the home district had filed to run against him. Shortly afterward, the two candidates came together for a debate at the county fair. The lawyer spoke first, limiting his talk to only three sentences: "Hidy folks, I'm so-and-so, and I'll make you a good state representative. If you give me the chance, I'll fight for you...not for the special interests. Now I yield the balance of my time to Mr. Goodenuff, so he can explain his egg bill to you." Still clueless, Elmer did try to explain it, but his explanation was hardly good enough--the more he talked, the more votes he lost. His egg bill retired him. [ read more ]

Even though winter still has its frigid grip on most of the land, I'm already thinking out-of-season, looking ahead to one special thing: fresh, ripe, right-out-of-the-soil, good-and-good-for-you summer tomatoes. Oh, I can taste them now! And eggplant, too. And peppers. And all kinds of other edible wonders.

I'm a food guy. I've got a small but richly composted garden plot in my backyard, I'm a regular at several farmers' markets, and I frequent a number of great restaurants here in Austin, Texas. I love poking around food stores of any variety, I like to browse through seed catalogs and cooking magazines, and I always try to sample the local specialties as I travel around the country. I enjoy friendships with quite a few chefs and restaurateurs, and I love visiting with farmers and food artisans who are doing creative things. Though it still pisses off the corporate establishment, I was once the agricultural commissioner of Texas.

I know firsthand about the phenomenal cornucopia of good, fresh, nutritious and delicious food that our country is capable of producing. That's why it knocks me whopperjawed to see the stuff that dominates too many American diets -- an array of industrialized, conglomeratized, globalized products that have lost any connection to our good earth. This stuff is saturated with fats, sugars, artificial flavorings, chemical additives, pesticide residues, bacterial contaminants, genetically altered organisms and who knows what else? Plus, the major factor driving prices is not the cost of any actual food that might still be in these products, but the cost of packaging, advertising and long-distance shipping.

What has caused us to stray so far from the farm, so far from the essential and wonderful sustenance provided by nature itself? The answer, of course, is that the brute force of corporate power has been applied both in politics and the marketplace to pervert our food economy. During the past half century, control over our nation's food policies has shifted from farmers and consumers to corporate lawyers, lobbyists and economists. These are people who could not run a watermelon stand if we gave them the melons and had the highway patrol flag down customers for them! Yet they're in charge, saddling us with a food system that enriches corporate middlemen while driving good farmers off the land, poisoning our productive soil and water supplies, and literally sickening those who consume these adulterated foodstuffs. [ read more ]