Introducing the Green Tea Party

One tea to rule them allA reader mentions that media coverage of the Food Safety and Modernization Act has been conflicting.  On the one hand, it seems like the uneducated hicks of the Tea Party are behind the opposition, but on the other hand, the loudest denouncers of the bill seem to be dirty hippies.  Perplexing indeed.  

I imagine the Tea Party would be against the food bill because it increases central government control over food production, which - let's face it - is about as Soviet as you can get. We might as well rename Nebraska "Украина", set quotas, and send Grandma to the Gulag for violating provision 6655321 with her latest batch of steak-fried steak.

Hippies and their black sheep cousins, Whole Foods shoppers, would be against the food bill because it requires "safety standards" which would probably just entrench corporate food by making it prohibitively expensive to produce locally and organically and perhaps jeopardize hippie access to the crunchier and more bizarre varieties of honey, cheese, hummus, and dried fruit. (America has already suffered so much for so many years without unpasteurized cheese. If only we could be more like France.) 

For libertarians such as myself, "safety standards" for food is like the Holy Grail of unintended consequences.  Just like financial companies, food companies spend most of their resources finding clever ways to get around the half-assed "We can do it! Let's build a better world!" standards devised by our best and brightest (centralist Modernists) instead of spending their resources producing quality food in response to consumers acting on correct, undistorted information; hence we are all forced inadvertently by the unholy two-headed monster of big government and big business to eat cheaply-produced rubber tomatoes, disguised soy, and secret high-fructose corn syrup. 

What such a system tends to produce more than anything else is heavily-processed crap-cum-nutrient-boosters, like Pop Tarts (I think around 80 or 90% sugar, but I may be exaggerating) with "super-duper added Vitamin C!" or cupcakes "now with totally awesome riboflavin!", which Aunt Shirley buys because she read in the New York Times or saw on Fox and Friends (depending of course on which side of the culture war she's on) how riboflavin is good for high blood pressure or something. (Needless to say, Aunt Shirley can't figure out why she's pushing 300 pounds.) 

Of course the government food bill is going to protect Big Food while pretending not to, just like the healthcare bill protected Big Insurance while pretending not to. That - i.e. rob from the poor to give to the rich while pretending to do the exact opposite so people can feel good and go back to the things that matter, like American Idol - is and has always been the goal of policy.  More euphemistically, this is called "balancing consumer and business interests".  If you don't believe me, look it up: PepsiCo is loudly leading the charge for centralized food regulation.

If only the hippies and Tea Partiers could sort through all the misinformation and recognize that these issues are important to all consumers, we might be able to make some progress.  If all the factions could unite, we could form something amenable to all and have safe food and fewer of da warz, cheaper prices, and probably even lower taxes; but more or less, the two factions of commoners hate each other because they can't agree on what to do about the "homosexual problem", which is clearly much more important than one of the three basic necessities for human survival.

Meanwhile, the corporate fatcats are free to dream up ever more creative ways of enslaving us all into lives of servitude.  The specialists of the food industry laugh at the greedy and gullible generalists of Congress.  They laugh louder at the stupidity of the people.  To summarize: I hope this "bipartisan" food bill goes down in flames and we can take the first steps towards a society driven by informed demand.  

For a demand-driven society to happen, the stupid and the dirty must unite.  I propose a new entity, called the "Green Tea Party" with or without the slogan, "get your government hands off my tofu!"