Like the epithet "public servant," the word "diet" carries many unsavory connotations, and ranks as one of my least favorite terms. We are all familiar with calorie-restricted "weight-loss diets," which, particularly when paired with frequent aerobic exercise, are akin to the hazardous financial practice of increasing spending while decreasing income. But I will nevertheless employ the term "diet" here, assumed only to imply the somewhat less pernicious concept of a framework for deciding what to eat and what not to eat, irrespective of quantity. And though the cannibals in government may find such a resistance-swallowing regimen highly palatable, the "libertarian diet" here proposed does not entail the poaching, pan-searing, or slow cooking and subsequent eating of defenders of rights to life, liberty, and property. A gastronomy of autonomy this may be, but we are seeking to conserve autonomy, not consume it. The libertarian diet is a diet for libertarians, not of libertarians. Its basic premise is simple:
Libertarians, as much as possible, should avoid eating food that is produced or sold by anti-libertarian means.
That is all. No calorie counting. No macronutrient restriction. No industry-sponsored government food pyramids. Do the above, and besides reducing your support of statism and extending the application of your ideals a little further, you'll be rewarded with better health.
Okay, but what exactly do you eat when avoiding "food that is produced or sold by anti-libertarian means"? And what food could possibly be anti-libertarian? Isn't the abundance of cheap food at the supermarket a testament to the incredible life-sustaining efficiency of the free market? Isn't this cheap abundance also a telltale sign of our food system's relative independence from government interference, in contrast, for instance, to the government-managed and therefore bungling education and medical systems?
In fact, the tentacle-prints of government intervention are slathered all over the industrial food system just as anywhere else, and are a major reason why a twenty-four pack of cherry soda is cheaper than a handful of actual cherries, why chemical additives are not only ubiquitous but considered safe while natural unpasteurized dairy products come with government warning labels if they're even permitted to be sold at all, and why processed grain-based concoctions full of diabetes-, heart disease-, and cancer-promoting refined sugars and vegetable oils are promoted as healthy (and bear stamps of approval from organizations named after and promising to "cure" each of those diseases) while the truly healthy, time-tested, life-giving staple foods of humankind for at least the last 10,000 years prior to the degenerative disease-plagued last century--meat, eggs, and full-fat milk from wild or pasture-raised animals--are smeared as "fattening," "artery-clogging," and even "cancer-causing" agents of disease that are best indulged in only sparingly or avoided altogether. All the while, Americans have gotten duller, fatter, and sicker (and therefore--whether or not by design--easier to control) than ever.
So, what should libertarians eat? What are the anti-libertarian foods to avoid and the market-friendly foods to eat in their place?
As much as possible…
…don't eat food from manufacturers who violate property rights by polluting their neighbors' land, air, and water through run-off contaminated from the use of chemical fertilizers and sprays originally developed for military applications.* Instead, eat organically grown (but not necessarily "Certified Organic") produce and naturally raised animal products.
…don't eat food from manufacturers who lobby and bribe the state for regulations (such as the proposed "Food Safety" bills and National Animal Identification System, as well as raw milk bans and myriad other existing legal obstacles) which diminish consumer choice and privilege large industrial farming and food processing operations by disproportionately inhibiting, and consequently forcing out of business, smaller competitors. Instead, eat food from small family farms and artisanal producers who compete honestly by offering a better product.
…don't eat food from manufacturers who profit from government-granted monopolies in the form of patent rights over genes artificially spliced into crops. Instead, eat food that has not been genetically modified in a laboratory.
…don't eat food from manufacturers who receive corporate welfare in the form of enormous federal subsidies for wheat, corn, and soybean (over-) production, insulating them from competition and distorting world markets by enabling them to sell their products for less than the cost of production and below true market prices.** In other words, avoid artificially cheap processed foods and fast food containing subsidized wheat, corn, and soy--including meat and dairy products from animals fed subsidized wheat, corn, and soy--as well as restaurant foods cooked in corn and soy oils. Instead, eat homemade meals prepared from whole foods--including meat and dairy products from animals fed their natural diet--and use traditional cooking fats like butter, tallow, lard, and coconut oil.
And there you have it. Support natural rights by eating natural foods from small farms. In so doing, you'll reduce your support of property rights violations, anti-consumer and anti-competitive government regulations (not to imply that government regulations are ever otherwise), state-enforced intellectual monopoly, and corporate subsidies, all while better supporting your own health. For more on the health benefits of whole, natural foods, including fat- and cholesterol-rich animal products, explore the sites listed under the Nutrition Links section to the right. Future posts on this blog will also address this subject in more detail, including how state intervention in agriculture tends to depreciate the nutritional value of food and distort truths about nutrition.
-------------------------
* On the property rights-based case for environmental stewardship, see Murray Rothbard's "Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution" or the wikipedia entry on free market environmentalism. On the militaristic underpinnings of industrial agriculture, see "Modern Agriculture: A Byproduct of Military History?" (without assuming any endorsement on my part of Hare Krishna, with which I have little familiarity outside the views expressed in this article).
** See these excellent videos on farm subsidies produced by Reason.tv and the Cato Institute.
June 30, 2010
June 19, 2010
Anarchy, Plate, and Utopia
Utopian authors, each very confident of the virtues of his own vision and of its singular correctness, have differed among themselves… in the institutions and kinds of life they present for emulation. Though the picture of an ideal society that each presents is much too simple… we should take the fact of the differences seriously. No utopian author has everyone in his society leading exactly the same life, allocating exactly the same amount of time to exactly the same activities. Why not? Don't the reasons also count against just one kind of community?
The conclusion to draw is that there will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of many utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one… Different communities, each with a slightly different mix, will provide a range from which each individual can choose that community which best approximates his balance among competing values.
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 311-12
Diet authors are a lot like the utopian authors described above. Substitute the word "diet" for the words "society," "institutions," "community," "communities," "utopian," and "utopias" above, and you have a pretty accurate picture of the dietary advice scene: a lot of different people peddling a lot of conflicting opinions on what to and not to eat, all promising nutritional nirvana through deliverance into the one true Dietary Utopia. It worked for them, so it must work for you. There are authors promoting low-fat/high-carb diets, high-fat/low-carb diets, grain-based diets, grain-free diets, all-fruit diets, all-meat diets, all-raw diets, and all-cooked diets, to name only a few. Obviously, they can't all be right… Right?
Well, a grain-based diet is not going to work so well for someone with celiac disease. But it did seem to work well for the Swiss villagers studied by Weston Price, who mainly subsisted on sourdough bread coupled with dairy products. These healthy Swiss ate the opposite of a "paleo" diet, which claims that we should avoid grains and dairy because humans are not adapted to eating them. Many who eat a paleo diet also limit their carbohydrate intake and have success losing weight. But in the long term, some low-carb dieters gain weight. So do many people on a high-carb diet. Then you have the people of Kitava, who get a whopping 69% of their calories from carbohydrates, and yet remain very lean into old age. Different authors have singled out these different conflicting diets and claimed that one is the ideal diet for all human beings. Confused yet?
Libertarians recognize that all people are different, with different values, backgrounds, tastes, goals, etc. As such, they also recognize that there is no single one-size-fits-all society that can morally and adequately meet everyone's needs and desires. Where the tendency toward seeking to impose a one-size-fits-all society is weak, and all individuals--though their lifestyles and values may diverge in every other possible way--share a single over-arching commitment to non-aggression (i.e. respect for natural rights), a peaceful, pluralistic order emerges, which libertarians call a free market. (Pro tip: modern American capitalism is not a free market.*) Individual differences are harmonized in a free market, where all are free to associate, think, live, and transact as they desire, but none may forcibly impose their preferences on another. By contrast, these same individual differences are divisive under state rule, where people are incentivized to lobby the state through voting, pay-offs, and other "activism" in order to forcibly privilege one race, class, industry, or interest at the expense of another, instead of coexisting peacefully. Libertarianism invites and accommodates pluralism; statism denies and destroys it.
Applying the pluralistic spirit of libertarianism to the question of what to eat, then, what conclusions can we arrive at other than the obvious one that everyone ought to be left free to choose for themselves? For just as there is no one society that is right for everyone, there is no one diet that is right for everyone, either. Legislate the Inuit into following a vegan diet, and watch them all starve to death for lack of food. Force an infant to choke down steak in place of breast milk and wait for trouble. Differences in environment, age, health status, past diet and lifestyle, and even parents' diet and lifestyle (from preconception through weaning) all produce differences among peoples' present nutritional needs and their feasible sources for meeting these needs. Never mind if bananas could meet all the nutritional needs of the Inuit (I doubt it), they're not a feasible nutritive source for them anyway because they won't grow in their environment; never mind if steak contains all the nutrients newborns need (I doubt it), it's not a feasible nutritive source for them because they haven't developed the ability to properly digest it. All that said, must we then resign ourselves to total dietary relativism? No. While no single diet is right for all people in all circumstances, for each individual, clearly one diet can be better than another. A diet of meat and fish is superior to a fruitarian diet for the Inuit. A diet of breast milk is superior to a diet of meat and fish for an infant. A diet which enables one to prevent degenerative disease is superior to one which causes one to develop degenerative disease. And so on.
Okay, but to return to the question posed at the beginning of the previous paragraph, what else can we conclude from the application of libertarianism to the question of diet? We understand that people should be free to eat any and all food they want, but should libertarians, qua libertarians, necessarily want to eat any and all food? And to throw in another question, if a basic shared social philosophy of natural rights is what unites and underpins peaceful societies of individuals with otherwise divergent personal philosophies and lifestyles, is there likewise a basic shared food philosophy which may underpin and connect all the otherwise divergent opinions of the myriad diet authors? In answer to the first two questions, libertarians, as much as possible, should avoid eating food that is produced or sold by anti-libertarian means. This idea will be a major focus of this blog, and one I will elaborate on in the next post. In answer to the third question, I do believe there is a basic food philosophy shared by most diet authors: whether carnivorous or vegan, raw or cooked, low-carb or high-carb, they mostly all seem to agree that people should base their diets around whole, natural foods. Certainly, there are many who compromise and publish recipes for "healthy" cookies baked with "fat-free oil" (whatever the hell that is) and "guiltless" soy protein isolate smoothies with refined sugar added "to taste," but rare is the diet author who actually prioritizes such frankenfoods over real foods, much less recommends eating Rice Krispie Treats and corn syrup at every meal.** Likewise, while health researcher Weston Price (in ten years of studying isolated and modernized peoples all across the globe) never encountered any two healthy populations eating the exact same diet (some of which were high-fat while others were high-carb, some heavily dependent on animals and others not as much--though none were completely vegetarian), he did find underlying common ground in that wherever people were happy, hardy, and free of degenerative disease, they were eating whole, natural foods, and wherever people were stricken with degenerative disease and deformity, they were eating industrially processed foods.
In closing, if you wish to discover your own personal Dietary Utopia, start by replacing "food" from wrappers, cans, boxes, and bottles (and, most urgently, spray bottles!) with real food from from the soil, the sea, and the sky. You may be in for a long and confusing process, but adhere to natural foods as you adhere to natural rights and you'll find your way in time. Even feeding nothing but banana smoothies to your adopted Inuit newborn is likely to be better for it than just about anything wrapped in a package with a trademarked logo.
In the posts ahead, we'll explore the many ways in which natural foods and natural rights are not only compatible, and good for your health, but interdependent and mutually reinforcing, as well.
-------------------------
* See here, here, here, here, and here.
** Though it wouldn't be a stretch for such a diet (being low in fat after all!) to receive a "heart-healthy" stamp of approval from the federal government. (Ditto "independent" medical associations.) If you don't like their financial policy, or their social policy, or their foreign policy, or--especially--their health care policy, you should really be wary of their dietary policy.
The conclusion to draw is that there will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of many utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one… Different communities, each with a slightly different mix, will provide a range from which each individual can choose that community which best approximates his balance among competing values.
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 311-12
Diet authors are a lot like the utopian authors described above. Substitute the word "diet" for the words "society," "institutions," "community," "communities," "utopian," and "utopias" above, and you have a pretty accurate picture of the dietary advice scene: a lot of different people peddling a lot of conflicting opinions on what to and not to eat, all promising nutritional nirvana through deliverance into the one true Dietary Utopia. It worked for them, so it must work for you. There are authors promoting low-fat/high-carb diets, high-fat/low-carb diets, grain-based diets, grain-free diets, all-fruit diets, all-meat diets, all-raw diets, and all-cooked diets, to name only a few. Obviously, they can't all be right… Right?
Well, a grain-based diet is not going to work so well for someone with celiac disease. But it did seem to work well for the Swiss villagers studied by Weston Price, who mainly subsisted on sourdough bread coupled with dairy products. These healthy Swiss ate the opposite of a "paleo" diet, which claims that we should avoid grains and dairy because humans are not adapted to eating them. Many who eat a paleo diet also limit their carbohydrate intake and have success losing weight. But in the long term, some low-carb dieters gain weight. So do many people on a high-carb diet. Then you have the people of Kitava, who get a whopping 69% of their calories from carbohydrates, and yet remain very lean into old age. Different authors have singled out these different conflicting diets and claimed that one is the ideal diet for all human beings. Confused yet?
Libertarians recognize that all people are different, with different values, backgrounds, tastes, goals, etc. As such, they also recognize that there is no single one-size-fits-all society that can morally and adequately meet everyone's needs and desires. Where the tendency toward seeking to impose a one-size-fits-all society is weak, and all individuals--though their lifestyles and values may diverge in every other possible way--share a single over-arching commitment to non-aggression (i.e. respect for natural rights), a peaceful, pluralistic order emerges, which libertarians call a free market. (Pro tip: modern American capitalism is not a free market.*) Individual differences are harmonized in a free market, where all are free to associate, think, live, and transact as they desire, but none may forcibly impose their preferences on another. By contrast, these same individual differences are divisive under state rule, where people are incentivized to lobby the state through voting, pay-offs, and other "activism" in order to forcibly privilege one race, class, industry, or interest at the expense of another, instead of coexisting peacefully. Libertarianism invites and accommodates pluralism; statism denies and destroys it.
Applying the pluralistic spirit of libertarianism to the question of what to eat, then, what conclusions can we arrive at other than the obvious one that everyone ought to be left free to choose for themselves? For just as there is no one society that is right for everyone, there is no one diet that is right for everyone, either. Legislate the Inuit into following a vegan diet, and watch them all starve to death for lack of food. Force an infant to choke down steak in place of breast milk and wait for trouble. Differences in environment, age, health status, past diet and lifestyle, and even parents' diet and lifestyle (from preconception through weaning) all produce differences among peoples' present nutritional needs and their feasible sources for meeting these needs. Never mind if bananas could meet all the nutritional needs of the Inuit (I doubt it), they're not a feasible nutritive source for them anyway because they won't grow in their environment; never mind if steak contains all the nutrients newborns need (I doubt it), it's not a feasible nutritive source for them because they haven't developed the ability to properly digest it. All that said, must we then resign ourselves to total dietary relativism? No. While no single diet is right for all people in all circumstances, for each individual, clearly one diet can be better than another. A diet of meat and fish is superior to a fruitarian diet for the Inuit. A diet of breast milk is superior to a diet of meat and fish for an infant. A diet which enables one to prevent degenerative disease is superior to one which causes one to develop degenerative disease. And so on.
Okay, but to return to the question posed at the beginning of the previous paragraph, what else can we conclude from the application of libertarianism to the question of diet? We understand that people should be free to eat any and all food they want, but should libertarians, qua libertarians, necessarily want to eat any and all food? And to throw in another question, if a basic shared social philosophy of natural rights is what unites and underpins peaceful societies of individuals with otherwise divergent personal philosophies and lifestyles, is there likewise a basic shared food philosophy which may underpin and connect all the otherwise divergent opinions of the myriad diet authors? In answer to the first two questions, libertarians, as much as possible, should avoid eating food that is produced or sold by anti-libertarian means. This idea will be a major focus of this blog, and one I will elaborate on in the next post. In answer to the third question, I do believe there is a basic food philosophy shared by most diet authors: whether carnivorous or vegan, raw or cooked, low-carb or high-carb, they mostly all seem to agree that people should base their diets around whole, natural foods. Certainly, there are many who compromise and publish recipes for "healthy" cookies baked with "fat-free oil" (whatever the hell that is) and "guiltless" soy protein isolate smoothies with refined sugar added "to taste," but rare is the diet author who actually prioritizes such frankenfoods over real foods, much less recommends eating Rice Krispie Treats and corn syrup at every meal.** Likewise, while health researcher Weston Price (in ten years of studying isolated and modernized peoples all across the globe) never encountered any two healthy populations eating the exact same diet (some of which were high-fat while others were high-carb, some heavily dependent on animals and others not as much--though none were completely vegetarian), he did find underlying common ground in that wherever people were happy, hardy, and free of degenerative disease, they were eating whole, natural foods, and wherever people were stricken with degenerative disease and deformity, they were eating industrially processed foods.
In closing, if you wish to discover your own personal Dietary Utopia, start by replacing "food" from wrappers, cans, boxes, and bottles (and, most urgently, spray bottles!) with real food from from the soil, the sea, and the sky. You may be in for a long and confusing process, but adhere to natural foods as you adhere to natural rights and you'll find your way in time. Even feeding nothing but banana smoothies to your adopted Inuit newborn is likely to be better for it than just about anything wrapped in a package with a trademarked logo.
In the posts ahead, we'll explore the many ways in which natural foods and natural rights are not only compatible, and good for your health, but interdependent and mutually reinforcing, as well.
-------------------------
* See here, here, here, here, and here.
** Though it wouldn't be a stretch for such a diet (being low in fat after all!) to receive a "heart-healthy" stamp of approval from the federal government. (Ditto "independent" medical associations.) If you don't like their financial policy, or their social policy, or their foreign policy, or--especially--their health care policy, you should really be wary of their dietary policy.
May 27, 2010
It usually begins with Weston Price
The cook on the government boat was an aboriginal Australian from Northern Australia. He had been trained on a military craft as a dietitian. Nearly all his teeth were lost. It is of interest that while the native Aborigines had relatively perfect teeth, this man who was a trained dietitian for the whites had lost nearly all his teeth from tooth decay and pyorrhea.
- Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, p. 160
My name is Mike. I believe that traditional, whole, natural foods--especially cholesterol- and saturated fat-rich animal products--are healthy, and, equally heretically, that all government intervention results in social and economic harm. This is a blog especially for folks who are convinced of the latter but not the former--for those who know all about Austrian price theory but little of Weston Price theory, whose politics revolve around natural rights but whose diets do not yet revolve around natural foods. (Those who are convinced of the former but not the latter, or who are already convinced of both, are also encouraged to follow along. Those who are convinced of neither have probably long since moved on, or are otherwise mopping up the residue of their exploded brains.)
Few people move from the premise, I'm a libertarian, to the question, what should I eat?, as though there's any essential connection between the two, but in this blog I'll attempt to sketch out just such a connection. I aim to persuade libertarian-minded men, women, and babies that, contrary to official government-sponsored nutritional advice, not only can eating saturated animal fat and other traditional, whole, natural foods ("real food") make you a healthier person, it can make you a more consistent libertarian as well.
But before we dive into all of that and what it means, for now I only want to point out how many prominent bloggers writing about traditional foods and real (i.e. not low-fat) nutrition also just happen to be libertarians, or otherwise libertarian-friendly. For example:
Health blogger Michael Miles is a voluntaryist who often reports on the government's war on real food.
Cholesterol skeptic Chris Masterjohn has posted at LewRockwell.com.
Paleo blogger Richard Nikoley supplies intermittent reminders of his resolute market anarchism.
Melissa McEwen leans libertarian and eats a paleo diet.
Don Matesz links to the Mises Institute and eats a paleo diet.
Meat and veggie eater Art DeVany is a libertarian-minded economics professor.
And my personal favorite, health researcher Matt Stone, a self-described "political atheist," has referred to Ludwig von Mises as "the Weston A. Price of economics." (For libertarians who don't know the name, Weston A. Price is the Ludwig von Mises of nutrition.)
And the list goes on. Still more real food bloggers (of a specifically paleolithic/evolutionary persuasion, in this case) are listed here.
What can you conclude from this? If you're already a libertarian, there's little cognitive dissonance in ditching processed supermarket food products and the low-fat paradigm of nutrition in favor of traditional whole foods (including lots of saturated fat) and a radically altered understanding of what constitutes sound nutrition. But more on that later.
- Weston A. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, p. 160
My name is Mike. I believe that traditional, whole, natural foods--especially cholesterol- and saturated fat-rich animal products--are healthy, and, equally heretically, that all government intervention results in social and economic harm. This is a blog especially for folks who are convinced of the latter but not the former--for those who know all about Austrian price theory but little of Weston Price theory, whose politics revolve around natural rights but whose diets do not yet revolve around natural foods. (Those who are convinced of the former but not the latter, or who are already convinced of both, are also encouraged to follow along. Those who are convinced of neither have probably long since moved on, or are otherwise mopping up the residue of their exploded brains.)
Few people move from the premise, I'm a libertarian, to the question, what should I eat?, as though there's any essential connection between the two, but in this blog I'll attempt to sketch out just such a connection. I aim to persuade libertarian-minded men, women, and babies that, contrary to official government-sponsored nutritional advice, not only can eating saturated animal fat and other traditional, whole, natural foods ("real food") make you a healthier person, it can make you a more consistent libertarian as well.
But before we dive into all of that and what it means, for now I only want to point out how many prominent bloggers writing about traditional foods and real (i.e. not low-fat) nutrition also just happen to be libertarians, or otherwise libertarian-friendly. For example:
Health blogger Michael Miles is a voluntaryist who often reports on the government's war on real food.
Cholesterol skeptic Chris Masterjohn has posted at LewRockwell.com.
Paleo blogger Richard Nikoley supplies intermittent reminders of his resolute market anarchism.
Melissa McEwen leans libertarian and eats a paleo diet.
Don Matesz links to the Mises Institute and eats a paleo diet.
Meat and veggie eater Art DeVany is a libertarian-minded economics professor.
And my personal favorite, health researcher Matt Stone, a self-described "political atheist," has referred to Ludwig von Mises as "the Weston A. Price of economics." (For libertarians who don't know the name, Weston A. Price is the Ludwig von Mises of nutrition.)
And the list goes on. Still more real food bloggers (of a specifically paleolithic/evolutionary persuasion, in this case) are listed here.
What can you conclude from this? If you're already a libertarian, there's little cognitive dissonance in ditching processed supermarket food products and the low-fat paradigm of nutrition in favor of traditional whole foods (including lots of saturated fat) and a radically altered understanding of what constitutes sound nutrition. But more on that later.
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