American Food

By Patrick Appel
John Schwenkler responds to jibes at his article on conservative eating:

What we eat, and where it comes from, and how we choose to eat it, are things that matter: for we are not merely bodily beings who can feed ourselves like so many horses at a trough, but spiritual ones as well. And so the cultivation of the proper sorts of relationships to our food, to its sources in the earth, and to the people who grow it and sell it and those with whom we eat it, is obviously the sort of project that conservatives ought to go in for. That so many professed conservatives refuse to recognize this possibility, and choose instead to react with this sort of bitterness to what boils down to a call for a return to family values and political and economic decentralism, seems to me to say all that needs to be said about the sorry state of the modern American Right. If P.J. Gladnick gets to define who counts as a closet liberal, then I guess I just might be one after all. I’m happy to report, though, that that isn’t his call to make.