Washington Insider-- Wednesday

What Would Grandma Think?

Here's a quick monitor of Washington farm and trade policy issues from DTN's well-placed observer.

TPP Opponents Say COOL-Like Rulings Could Be Repeated in Proposed Trade Deal

Congressional Democrats who oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal are suggesting that if the United States signs on to the agreement, it could be facing future threats to domestic policies similar to the outcome of the recent World Trade Organization ruling against the U.S. country of origin labeling law for meat.

Critics say the trade agreements can diminish U.S. sovereignty by taking down congressionally enacted policies, including those designed to protect consumers. It is a major reason that groups like Consumers Union and Public Citizen, as well as many Democratic lawmakers, oppose the TPP, which is being negotiated among the United States and 11 other countries on the Pacific Rim.

The threat of a loss of sovereignty is a powerful issue among congressional Republicans, so the fact that Democrats have raised shows they are committed to peeling away some GOP support from upcoming votes on trade legislation. Their effort regarding sovereignty is not expected to have much effect on the final vote.

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Preliminary Global Climate Talks Underway this Week in Germany

International climate talks got underway this week in Bonn, as officials began 11 days of discussions that many hope will lead to the first global agreement to fight climate change at a summit meeting this coming December in Paris.

The discussions in Germany may produce early signs of progress on several topics that could be important during the Paris meetings, where the UN hopes to finalize the first global agreement to fight climate change.

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UN officials told the press that the goal of the Bonn talks is to find any proposal that makes it easier for delegates of the world's nearly 200 nations when they meet in December. "Success in Bonn is that the challenges for Paris are a little easier," said one official.

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Washington Insider: What Would Grandma Think?

There are several new cottage industries springing up around food these days but, even so, there are new critics, too, and very little escapes those gimlet eyes. For example, Rachel Laudan wrote in Jacobin that most people think that nothing modern quite compares to their collective memory of a time that never really was. At least, not quite the way we remember it. Much of her mission is to reintroduce reality.

She is brutal. "The foods you think are 'natural' probably aren't," she says. "Virtually all the fruits and vegetables that you eat have been bred over centuries and millennia to the point where they barely resemble their natural progenitors."

She then notes that the traits horticulturists selected for are many of the same things that food processors do to modern food: Thick, fibrous coatings have been bred down to thin skins, and the starchy parts that we eat have been developed to many times their normal size, further decreasing the ratio of fiber to starch.

Fatty flesh, she says, has been punched up in fruits such as olives and avocados. "Like modern humans, early horticulturists also like their food sweet, so they selected over and over again for the most sugary varieties, while thinning out bitter compounds. If your food tastes good, it's not natural," she cites a naturalist as commenting — and notes that while this was obviously an exaggeration there's considerable truth under the hyperbole.

There's more. As Laudan points out, the cooking you think is "good old-fashioned peasant food" also isn't" In fact, she says, "peasants often spent a lot of time being hungry." "In Europe and much of Asia, the idea that everyone was constantly enjoying meat and fresh produce, or any of those lovingly hand-produced foods that Grandma liked to stuff you with, is ahistorical.

"The reason those are cherished family recipes is that they were special. Daily diets for regular people, especially outside summer and fall, frequently consisted of a lot of dried and processed grains and/or beans, prepared with minimal seasoning."

She also thinks that most of this "good country cooking" didn't really come from the country since many dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. She mentions examples and concludes that cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation. Laudan notes that most of our ancestors were not wealthy urbanites; they were peasant farmers. Only after cultures got richer and expanded trade networks did new species follow settlement.

Technology, trade and, "yes, the miracle of modern food processing made fruits and vegetables available year-round, made it possible for ordinary folks to abandon less appealing grains such as buckwheat and millet, and put meat on the table every day."

She also notes that those trends made us fatter — and also taller, healthier and less prone to die of infection. She thinks that was a "good tradeoff," along with ending the reliance on gruel and "practically hibernating through the winter to make the food stretch." When our grandparents got richer, they started preparing the stuff that rich people ate that was deeply appreciated by our peasant ancestors.

So, now the food elitists — and many others — think those early food inventions were "real people food." Which it was, if your "real people" happened to be unusually prosperous, she says.

Still, to some degree, that may be "real enough" Laudan says. She thinks that we should eat family foods we love because we love them. We should make good food because it's good. "But we should not imagine that in doing so, we can go back to the way things used to be. We can't, and if we could, we wouldn't much like it," she concludes.

She might also have noted that it probably is futile to imagine that policies based on a romantic view of history will make us healthier or happier — along with a romantic view about the inherent dangers of technology. Food policy is complicated, and romance is always at least a little dangerous. Romanticizing food history is probably as dangerous it is concerning other aspects of the long, dark past.


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(GH/CZ)

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