Went to a talk about Food today.
Not my usual thing, maybe, but Wendy asked me along, and given the fact that I didn’t have anything else to do, I went. It is a decidedly… liberal crowd. I mean, I’m liberal, but these guys are on the far far left. Their basic premise was that food should be grown locally and that the WTO was the bastion of Satan.
I’m summarizing, a little bit, but that’s pretty much it. The problem with the talk, as with many of these kind of partisan things, is that they are convincing to the already convinced but a little short on information that might sway an unbiased rational person. For example, one figure they gave:
Oh! That’s horrible, you think — clearly the government is supporting the large industrialized farm complexes… until a second later, when the obvious question comes to mind: what is the average subsidy per acre? It is possible that the smallest farms are actually getting more subsidy, per acre. But the question is left unanswered, and indeed, even unasked.
At any rate, I had a nice time, picked up some brochures, and went to dinner with Wendy. In reading the brochures about upcoming events I found a paragraph that pretty much exactly typifies the crowd that attends these meetings:
April 4 � “Rites of Spring: Tending the Inner Garden.” Join Larissa Keet as she guides us through a Celebration of SOL food (SOL = “Seasonal/Organic/Local”) with gardening metaphors, music and Dances of Universal Peace.
Dances of Universal Peace? Really, it’s perfect.
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