Dan Barber in the New York Times-Joe Pastry’s Rebuttal
I missed this op-ed in the New York Times by Dan Barber when it appeared on Sunday. Sunday was our day for the Mexico City to Guanajuato run and thus not a day for sitting at the computer perusing the papers. I’m glad I missed it because I’d have spent the whole day running through counter arguments and ways to expose its wrong headedness.
Luckily Joe Pastry did spot it and here a link to his reply with which I totally agree. You may have to scroll through his other entries until you come to More Free Range Derangement on May 13th. You can enjoy his custard pieces while you’re at it.
But really, what is it with the New York Times on food and agriculture? For every article on, say, fertilizer shortages, they publish one chatty piece after another on produce from urban gardens or how we only have to go back to the good old days of small farms and grandma’s cooking (which I have not bookmarked). At a time when the world’s food stocks are at their lowest point in ages and when food prices are rising, it is criminal that the US paper of record should have such one-sided and irresponsible articles.
The Argentine paper La Nacion, for examples, has a weekly section dedicated to agriculture. Now it is Argentina’s major industry. But agriculture is a major industry in the US too. I find much more informative articles based on serious reporting, not top-of-the-head opinions, in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Economist.
Oh my. Oh my on so many levels. Doesn’t the NY Times vet their articles?? There is absolutely no back up , no validation for Chef Barber’s opinions.
That sort of writing just makes me see red!
The true danger is that the well heeled NY Times reader will dig no further, and smugly proceed to their farmer’s market thinking they are saving the planet.
This is a comment based upon personal experience. In the mid seventies I lived on a small acreage near Topeka, Kansas with a wife and four small children. We got sucked up into that “back-to-the-land”, “grow your own”, “clean living”, “free range chicken” movement. In our spare time we grew vegetables, raised chickens, composted, raised rabbits, composted some more, raised pigs, chopped wood, raised ducks, and kept three hives of bees. After six years of living like this we really appreciated where our food came from and how much hard work it took to grow and process it and store it and most of all…how time consuming it all was. We ate very well but if we did save any money we spent it on subscriptions to magazines like “Mother Earth” and “Organic Gardening”, etc. Like the old saying goes, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything…BUT…I wouldn’t do it again either. Farmer’s markets and hobby farms are nice places to look for the perfect carrot on Saturday mornings but I still thank God for modern large scale agriculture and the supermarket when it is raining or it is late in the evening and I get good and hungry. Having said that I also think that this current focus on food is very healthy in that it makes all of us aware of things that need to be improved. There are some giant companies out there who seem to control every aspect of the food chain and for me this is worrisome. Who decides what is good for us? Us or them?