Calling Out Hypocritical Factory Food Industry
By:
NWHF Staff
| Posted on: May 2nd, 2011
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Categories:
Food & Nutrition •
Public Health •
Rural Health
Bob Stallman, President, American Farm Bureau Federation
In a recent editorial in the Washington Post, Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, attacked the factory farming industry – in this case he was referring to American Farm Bureau president Bob Stallman – for misusing the term “elitist.” Stallman had recently referred to critics of industrial food production as “self-appointed food elitists.”
As Schlosser says, this name-calling “gets the elitism charge precisely backward. America’s current system of food production — overly centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a handful of companies, overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels — is profoundly undemocratic. It is one more sign of how the few now rule the many. And it’s inflicting tremendous harm on American farmers, workers and consumers.”
Organizations such as the Farm Bureau, Monsanto, McDonald’s, and Dow Chemical often lobby against laws that would make it easier to learn about their practices, which include the above, but also antibiotic use and animal cloning.
The term “elitist” is often used by conservatives to attack those who are looking for ways to protect the common good. Should those who use this term, such as Bob Stallman, recognize that this is a dying argument, or is there some truth to the point that elitism is at play on the part of food advocates?
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