More Farms, Smaller Farms

Now made with real fruit!I'd like to respond to Josh's last post by modeling what I see as the obverse. Economies of scale in agriculture are desireable when the alternative is crippling poverty. Nevertheless, in developed economies where starvation remains of secondary concern to self-inflicted overeating, more food of less homogeneous nutritional composition and higher quality even at higher costs is sorely necessary for the public welfare. Looming over all of this, the Mathusian insight that gave birth to both modern agriculture and modern economics remains true - the human population will always increase at a greater rate than food production efficiency. (My theory is that the Mathusian condition is an emergent consequence of the tendency for humans to be unrealistically optimistic about the future.) 

For this reason, in developing economies, it remains prudent to hedge against economies of scale in agriculture and some of the evils born of placing ourselves too far from the source of our sustenance via extreme and unnatural occupational specialization. (Indeed, it's possible that all of culture comes from food. And "you are what you eat" is wise on several levels.) The Summer 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly does a good job of balancing and weighing all the complex considerations at the intersection of development, agriculture, poverty, and nutrition.

The short version of my counterpoint to Josh is that what we need in America is different than what we need for countries that can't feed themselves. It might even be that there's a natural developmental arch that all civilizations must follow, and the stage that a particular civilization is in determines what course of action that country should take to maximize welfare: first (1) there's a community wrought of nature based on equality and living harmoniously, where everyone is a subsistence farmer or hunter/gatherer and everyone lives and dies at the whims of the seasons; then (2) primitive accumulation goes down and a primitive capitalist society develops - whether this is a result of contact with other capitalist societies or natural forces, it's safe to say this is where Africa is; next (3) capitalism matures until it can mature no more - intra-industry national power emerges concentrated in few hands, and these hands - instead of toiling honestly to coordinate supply and demand for the well-being of all - begin to build walls and moats around their citadels (see regulatory capture, patent over-filing, health insurance tethered to corporate employment, credentialing and licensing, etc.); (4) diminishing returns compel a premium to be placed on solving social problems or coerced egalitarianism - this is the stage where the United States and other mature social democracies find themselves; Marx went on to speculate that societies after this stage advance to (5) perfect, blissful communism as the profit motive is grdually removed from aspects of socety where it is (deemed) detrimental to the general welfare. Many others (generally social democrats) think (4) is as far as we can and should go. I think these intellectual frameworks are dangerously naïve and/or cowardly; we can combine lessons learned from (3) and (4) in a self-similar federalist/libertarian/anarchist structure that allows for unfettered individual expression and positive-sum cooperation while minimizing the effects of individual recklessness and coercive association.

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America's Most Wanted

My twelve-year-old stepson is not from America, and I wanted to teach him the time-honored, American tradition of kids making a few bucks selling lemonade. We modified our approach a little bit and decided to sell smoothies and green tea which we had brought from Japan after the earthquake. Yesterday, we went to the store near our house, and we bought watermelon, peaches, mangos, orange juice, apple juice, whole milk, ice, cups, and three poster boards for signs.

The two of us woke up early this morning and made our signs along with my two-year-old daughter, who indicated that she wanted to help with the drink stand as well. (She didn't understand that she was supposed to color inside the bubble letters I had written and spread pink crayon all over the board. But that's okay.) After some experimentation around the middle of the day, we created the perfect fruit punch with whipped cream on top and, in the early afternoon, we headed down to the end of our street, where we'd sell iced tea for two dollars and smoothies for three.

Almost as soon as we got down there, my daughter said she was hungry and wanted to go home to eat something. It wasn't the best timing in the world, but these things happen with little kids. My twelve-year-old stepson is quite mature for his age and he's experienced a lot more than most twelve-year-olds, so I had no problem leaving him in charge of the drink stand while I went home to make my daughter some food. Plus, he was just at the end of our street, so if I wanted to check on him, I could just walk out into the street from my front door a bit and have a look. 

After my daughter finished eating and as we approached the end of our street where the drink stand was, I could see from afar that the sign was pulled up and put away, the cooler was shut with everything which we had so carefully arranged on the tray table put away, and my stepson was huddled up and sitting on the rail, staring out between his knees at the ocean. 

"What happened?" I asked when I got down there. I wondered if he had gotten discouraged that no one was buying his drinks or maybe that no one could understand his accent. Or maybe he was just lonely down there by himself. 

"The police told me to pack up and go home," he said. Or, more accurately I discovered after making a few phone calls, the town police swung by and wished him good luck, and then afterwards, "someone in brown" came by and made my stepson stop selling drinks at the end of our street, because this required a permit, and my stepson did not have a permit to sell drinks.

After hearing a little more from my stepson and talking to the town police, I discovered that the drink stand was on land under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts State Police. After attempting several times to contact the State Police, I reached only answering machines. Apparently, having someone on call on weekends is not in the Massachusetts budget (but breaking up lemonade stands is somehow cost-effective).

In what world is it acceptable to go around breaking up kids's drink stands? What are we teaching our children?

UPDATE 8/29/2011:

There has been some controversy over my assertion that it was the Massachusetts State Police that broke up my stepson's drink stand. I admit that I may have jumped to conclusions and apologize for my ignorance of Massachusetts state organizational structure and corresponding uniform color. I have amended the piece above accordingly. I wish to reiterate that I mean no ill will towards the Massachusetts State Police or law enforcement in general. This post is clearly not about demonizing any one police officer or policing entity.

Let me reiterate: this post is about how ridiculous - and how obviously ridiculous - it is that a twelve-year-old isn't allowed to sell green tea because it is in violation of some ill-conceived or ill-applied regulations.

Fewer Farms, Larger Farms

Right now, the world is in the midst of a food crisis. Some might contend that we never fully recovered from the food crisis of 2008, but what is certain is that food prices are rising. The reason for the spike is open for debate, but some combination of a growing demand due to population growth, an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events (floods in Pakistan, the Moscow heatwave, etc.), an expanding middle class with a growing taste for meat and dairy, global trade policy, commodity speculation, agribusiness lobbying, ethanol, and many other factors is likely. The success of the Green Revolution beginning in the 1960’s caused food prices to fall year after year for decades. With the world assuming that the food problem had been solved, the limited number of development dollars went to researching other global problems, namely solving public health issues like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.

 
Global warming was another issue. Over the last two decades, economists and climatologists have been contemplating the effects of global warming on food production. The consensus was that, while climate change and the corresponding shift in weather patterns would have an adverse impact on agriculture in certain regions of the world, a rising temperature could actually open up new pockets of arable land. The one bright spot of climate change was that the increased amount of carbon in the atmosphere would actually improve crop yields. Unfortunately, that hypothesis proved to be overstated, at best, and quite possibly downright wrong. It turns out that a warmer world, despite what the computer models may say, is not good for food production.
 

The Economist recently had a special report on the feeding the world. The articles were thought-provoking and alarming, and should galvanize a stronger response from the developed world. As food prices increase, the people who are hit the hardest are those spending the highest percentage of their annual income on food. So, for a person of the developed world, a dramatic increase in the price of maize is less apparent on his grocery bill than it is for the rural farmer who is spending 60% of his income on maize. For this reason, the 2008 food price crisis led to riots in some countries and was hardly acknowledged in others. For the 100 million people driven into extreme poverty as a result of the spike in staple crop prices, the prospect of another food crisis in 2011 is likely terrifying, particularly if they understand the challenges in feeding nine billion people over the next half-century.

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Bathrobes & Beer: A Night at a Japanese Ryokan

Japan boasts a considerable array of accommodation options – to put it in cheesy tourist pamphlet terms. Capsule hotels, business hotels, love hotels; the Hilton and the Hyatt and the Japanese versions of such; you have your youth hostels (thirty dollars with membership) and your campgrounds (thirty dollars without); and on the traditional side, you’ve got your minshuku, with tatami floors, futons and green tea to make yourself comfy as you watch your coin-operated 13-inch television, and then you have your more upscale ryokan, with tatami floors, futons and green tea to make yourself extra comfy as you relax and watch your wide screen high-definition plasma television.

In the course of my travels around Japan, when not camping (illegally) or sleeping on a beach or a gazebo in a park (maybe legally), I’ve rucked up to many a minshuku. They give you those robes to hang out in, and dinner and breakfast are included so why not? I’m not much of a TV guy however so I never sprang for the more expensive ryokan. And if my wife hadn’t finagled a sweet deal at Azuma-So up the road in Iizaka last weekend I might very well have ended up leaving Japan – or dying – without ever experiencing a wide plasma screen while hanging out on the floor drinking tea in someone else’s bath robe.

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Retrospective of Front Porch Republic

"No man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, [then] each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness." - Alexis de Tocqueville, intellectual forbear of Front Porch Republic

Front Porch Republic turns two today.  From Mark T. Mitchell:

On March 2, 2009, FPR was born. We’ve been going for two years now and our mission remains clear: to advance human flourishing through the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism. The need is great and there is much work to be done. We are committed to fostering healthy communities and promoting discussions about policy and practices that will further this goal.

I am on board with this kind of conservatism.  I am sympathetic to both Austrian and institutional economics and political decentralism.  I think Big Food represents one of the gravest problems for humanity at several levels, and I hope to take up subsistence farming to some degree after moving to the United States.  I'm anxious to produce my own varieties of decidedly non-rubber tomatoes, red and white miso, and mountains of basil, with long-term aspirations to mushroom husbandry, craft dairy production, and bee-keeping.  I'm proud of and love traditional New England culture more and more everyday, and I hope to be a steward of that culture from this summer, when I will be returning to the United States with my family after almost five years of living in Japan.  

If this kind of conservatism seems like an impossible dream, don't take my word that it's not.  Go check out Front Porch Republic.  Here are some highlights from the first two years.

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The Way of the Gods - Part III

tsubaki flowersThis is part three of a three-part series.  Part one can be found here.  Part two can be found here.

A shrine official told us five friends of the bride that we had to wait in the chrysanthemum lobby again, as the shrine would be sponsoring family pictures.  My wife and I thought it was an appropriate time to put the required monetary gift in the pink, frilly envelope that I had bought at a twenty-four hour convenience store for 310 yen at 5:45 that morning after I had finished my hellish night-bus ride to Yokohama.  Before making the trip down to Kanto, we had scoured the Internet for guidelines on how much to give as this was the first time we had been to a wedding as a couple.  

Just as I was about to stick the correct amount of money in the envelope, the rest of the procession returned to the room with the pink carpet where we were waiting, which made us look like assholes; I panicked, and the envelope and cash fell to the floor and flew around comically in the wind created by the door opening.  I had to scramble around on all fours to grab all the cash and put it in the envelope - and I had to do this without creasing the bills (Money with wrinkles is considered in poor taste for a wedding gift, and appropriate for a funerary offering.) - before any more people came into the room.  

Maybe five or six relatives of the groom witnessed me rolling around on the floor grasping for loose cash before I managed to conceal my activity under one of the many brown, industrial folding tables and surreptitiously hand the envelope and cash to my wife so she could go to the bathroom and prepare everything in polite privacy.  

While she was in the bathroom, the shrine baba came and told everybody to head outside and start boarding the microbus.  I obviously couldn't go yet, since I was waiting for my wife.  There was an awkward moment where the shrine baba visibly wondered whether or not to approach me and ask why I wasn't boarding the microbus, but then she decided that the risk was too great for her - me being a foreigner and common knowledge being that Japanese is too difficult for foreigners to understand; she instead just pretended I didn't exist.  After about ten minutes, my wife came out of the bathroom and whispered, "you would not believe how small that envelope is!"  The shrine baba informed her - of course - about the microbus waiting for us outside.  We put on the airs of embarrassment that etiquette demands for taking so long, and pretended to kind-of-run all the way to the microbus parked twenty feet away.

The reception was at another facility, Meiji Kinenkan, which was where the Imperial Constitution of Japan had been hammered out some one hundred and forty years before in the presence of the Meiji Emperor himself.  After a ten-minute, meandering microbus ride through the crowded streets around Harajuku Station, we entered the drive of a very ostentatious building which managed to retain the general architectural theme of Meiji Jingu while simultaneously looking thoroughly Modernist.

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It's, Like, From the Earth, Man

"Graduation" by Peter BlinmanThere is a pervasive yet erroneous idea circulating these days that things are "good" because they are "natural".  Advertisers for foods or beauty products often engage in label-slapping to that effect; moneyed hippies and bobos buy up "natural" products like nature is going out of style; obesity and cancer are explained away as cosmic justice for our civilization of plastic's forsaking of the earth goddess.

Nowhere can this idea be heard more stupidly (or more harmlessly) than in a circle of close friends and random acquaintances passin da righteous civil disobedience on the left-hand side whilst listening to music about that with which goats love to play and/or watching marijuana-related comedy:

“Why is marijuana against the law? It grows naturally upon our planet. Doesn't the idea of making nature against the law seem to you a bit . . . unnatural?”

Which one might naturally (no pun intended) counter with this pithy dialogue: 

Nick: Come on, what's the big deal? It's from the earth, it's natural. Why would it be there if we weren't supposed to smoke it?

Lindsey: Dog crap is here and we don't smoke that.

The clear and obvious truth is that marijuana is harmless enough without having to appeal to its being natural.  People high on marijuana don't commit crimes.  They don't die.  They mostly just sit around watching stuff on TV and figuring out how to order pizza.

But this post is not about marijuana.  It's about "natural" not entailing "good".  After all, arsenic is natural.  The black plague is natural.  Even rape is natural.  In fact, the entirety of human society - from our legal code to our hallowed institutions of medicine - exists as a Hobbesian bulwark against the evils of the natural world.

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Five Amorphous Question Marks

Some shallow impressions of the new America of 2010 before my declarative and non-declarative memories and American sense of etiquette are fully restored:

(1.) My mind meld with the Great Economic Spirit upon entering the country suggests things are back on track.  I now look forward to - instead of dreading - the opportunities for putting bread on the table when I come back here more permanently next summer. 

(2.) For all the hooplah and big stink about security theater and don't touch my junk and opt out day, this time was actually the easiest I've had it in the last five years, and I've been badmouthing the government and the TSA all over the Internets.  Even though our ESTA information was lost, we were not presumed to be terrorists, my children were not groped, and no one got his or her junk touched.  I attribute this entirely to the hooplah and big stink about security theater and don't touch my junk and opt out day.  

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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.)

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Conspiring With Him How to Load and Bless

November in Japan is a lonely, depressing month.  The bright colors of fall have peaked and gradually turn to brown.  It is still too early to ski, and Christmas vacation remains over a month away.  The weather is too cold to play outside, but not cold enough to play outside in the snow.  Days end at 4:30.  And there is no football.  Or Thanksgiving.   

To alleviate periodic episodes of anomie, I turn to the rustic luxuries of onsening and the harvest.  

An onsen is a Japanese hot spring resort.  Unlike western hot springs, onsens are not simply muddy holes in the ground, but carefully decorated and managed pools of varying size, shape, and material.  They are often deep in the mountains, or at least on the outskirts of civilization.  Fukushima being a rural urban center, I live at the confluence of several onsen resorts and often visit one if I have a free half-day.

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to a modern hotel which sported a swimming pool, a jacuzzi, a traditional indoor bath, an outdoor bath called a rotenburo, and a sauna.  No one else was swimming in the pool, and the afternoon sun reflecting off the peak fall foliage on the other side of the river behind the resort shone through floor-to-ceiling windows and turned the slightly broken surface of the water a flickering golden, orange, and red hue.  Freshly fallen fall leaves floated on the surface of the rotenburo.  The dry heat of the sauna provided a comforting respite from the crisp fall air and the pervasive water vapor of the indoor bath.  After soaking in a welcome and rare aether free of infants screaming, I bought a glass bottle of 5% milk from the vending machine and floated aimlessly back to my home with my family in our four-door Nissan

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Season of Mist and Mellow Fruitfulness

Fukushima peachesFood-wise, Fall is the best season in farm country Japan.  The last several weeks saw an epic grape harvest.  Typhoon 11 spooked many Fukushima and Yamagata vinyards into sending all their grapes to market early, allowing the laws of economics to do their thing.  Small red grapes with no seeds, big red grapes with seeds, medium-sized green grapes with seeds, big green grapes with no seeds, medium-sized purple grapes with seeds, big purple grapes with seeds, and even big purple grapes with no seeds - the best kind - were available en masse at a fraction of the price of last year, all locally grown and locally sold.  

My Mother-in-law recently purchased ten big bags of the best kind of big purple grapes with no seeds for about eighty-five U.S. dollars, and we've had the best kind of big purple grapes with no seeds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the last week or so.  I can say without a doubt that they have been by far the best grapes I have ever eaten.  For the last three days, I've been making smoothies from four different types of grapes: small red grapes with no seeds, medium-sized green grapes with seeds, big red grapes with seeds, and big purple grapes with no seeds - the best kind.  First, I put grapes into the blender, then ice, then blend, and even the seeds are reduced to pulp.  And I don't even have to add relatively inexpensive, locally-produced honey, because grapes, like bananas, are sweet enough.  Before blending, the mise-en-scene is so beautiful that I almost feel guilty blending it.

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Unsung Japanese Foods

tsukemonoWe've all heard of sushi, sashimi, tenpura, ramen, the fairly rare teriyaki. and "sake" even if we can't technically identify those foods or tell them apart, but sushi and sashimi are not so popular in the thousands of Japanese towns and cities cut off from the sea and fresh ingredients by mountain ranges (and their American versions seriously suck), tenpura is based on food imported from the Dutch during the Edo Period, ramen is Chinese, and sort of like Japanese fast food.  The word "sake" in Japanese just means "alcohol", so when foreigners talk about "sake", many Japanese think they're talking about beer or wine or moonshine.  I'd like to discuss five of my favorite unsung Japanese foods, which maybe haven't caught on in the West because they're difficult to pronounce.

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ESL American History

the Eastern Wild Turkey, perhaps a national symbol superior to the Bald EagleRecently my Saturday night class of Japanese students has taken a keen interest in American History, and last week I lectured about the roles of various immigrant communities in creating the current demographics of the United States.  This week, one of my students asked me about whether American states, cities, and towns had holidays unique to themselves, as is common in Japan.  After waxing about Boston's Evacuation Day and St. Patrick's Day being both on March 17th, I mentioned that Thanksgiving was originally a local celebration, but had spread to the rest of the United States as homesteaders from New England made their ways to the midwest, mountain states, and west coast.

In a way, I realized, the history of Thanksgiving serves as a metaphor for the entire history of the United States.

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Big, Bigger, Biggest

The 4-all-beef-patty Megamac has long been a staple at Japanese MacDonalds.  Sometimes I'm tempted to order it just to prove I can eat it, but then I remember I'm a human and not a Tyrannosaurus Rex:

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Industrial Agriculture and Solutions to World Hunger

In this essay, the author discusses the right approach to combating the problem of hunger - an attribute shared by closed to 900 million people worldwide.  He takes issue with the arugula-eating liberal elites, like Food First, a California-based organization that opposes the technological advancements of the Green Revolution.   Modern improvements in agricultural technology and sciences create higher crop yields.  When land ownership is limited to a few hectares, it is critical to maximize the output on these small plots,  which is what industrial improvements in agriculture enable.   It is true that there are downsides to the Green Revolution, including further marginalization of subsistence farmers and, in some regions, a widening of the income gap in the agricultural community.  But what cannot be said about this approach is that the food it produces is either inferior to organically-grown crops or that the process is any less sustainable.  Industrial technologies, chemical fertilizers, and improved seeds generate more food, feeding more mouths, reducing malnutrition and generating income.

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