The Boston Tea Party. The Sugar Act. The Quartering Act that authorized British troops to steal beer, vinegar, salt and pepper from colonists. The Fisheries Act.
Many of Parliament’s most onerous curtailments of the colonists’ rights were attacks on food freedom, writes food liberator Baylen Linnekin in Reason, honoring the Bill of Rights’ birthday.
Linnekin argues that food freedom also powered the Bill of Rights: “James Madison himself had food and food freedom in mind as he wrote the words that became the Bill of Rights.”
Linnekin’s viewpoint is very important because our media has a pro-regulation bias in discussions of food and government. For instance, when the House in 2009 originally rejected a federal food-safety law, Matthew Cooper at the Atlantic had a pretty standard knee-jerk reaction: lamenting the failure of the bill, emptily gesturing to things like home-grown vegetable and Michael Pollan and talking about a “national consensus” on food safety that apparently ought to yield federal regulation. Distilled, the argument is: Food is important, so we need more federal rules.
But the bill in question ended up passing, and that hasn’t been good for all the Michael Pollan fans out there. For instance, liberal writer Tom Philpott, in Mother Jones, called the law “a significant and possibly devastating burden to small and midsized players.”
The law could hurt food safety by causing greater consolidation in the industry. In other words, it may not be a tradeoff between food freedom and food safety. Freedom could yield more safety — just not economic safety for the big producers who love the barriers to entry, and one-size-fits-all dynamic created by federal food regs.
Big Food and Big Government have been waging a war on food freedom forever. I held an AEI event on food freedom and one on alcohol freedom. You can watch them online (food here, alcohol here). There are many examples of this collusion. Consider:
° Restaurants trying to regulate food trucks
° Sugar growers keeping out foreign sugar
° The sugar industry lobbying against corn syrup
