Bearistotle

Once again for the folks in the back: labor rights are speech rights, and speech rights are labor rights.

Opinion | We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents

"But dumping industrial food from your plate would do little to change things for the better and, in some cases, would actually make it worse. " www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/o...

Should we think of food as "appropriately processed" to needs and context?

This comment on mine and Gabriel's NYT piece really hits at the heart of what we want for a better food system: Improving the quality of diet and life for the average eater.

Wish we'd thought of that phrase oursevles...

Opinion | We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents

ICYMI @gnrosenberg.bsky.social and I wrote about why you should not want to eat like your great-great-grandparents and why modern, industrially-produced food is "real food."

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/o...

Fair enough. Most of the research I've seen suggests that improving food insecurity, particularly for children, has a measurable impact on improved nutritional outcomes. That wouldn't, of course, solve all of the country's dietary problems, many of which do not derive from food insecurity.

YouTube video by Farm to Taber How Did Farming Become Conservative?

Some farming 🔥 from sarahtaber.bsky.social. Lots of insightful stuff here.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVnJ...

Abso-fucking-lutely. You killed it here!

No one did more to valorize Joel Salatin and his old-school reactionary values than Pollan and The Omnivore's Dilemma. A perfect example of Pollan dressing up a self-professed "Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic" in the trappings of well-to-do Democrat voter-ese.

We listened to Michael Pollan on The Interview yesterday, and it made me so mad. And I used to be a food movement person!

We don't think a "fix" versus "broken" framing is useful, nor do we advocate silver bullets. There are policies that would be helpful. Universal school lunches improve nutritional outcomes and access. Public investment and better regulation can steer GMOs and land use to more productive ends.

Opinion | We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents

I think this may work: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/o...

"We should go back to farming it how we did back when...."

Every single time it's just the fucking Jonathan Frakes "We Made It Up" meme.

He enjoys his marasmus, thank you very much, and you would too if you just gave it a chance.

Well, I guess I'm an idiot (true!) but I don't find this critique very persuasive, Malcolm.

RFK’s tailgate spread features mainly road-to-table bear and death cap shrooms in an aioli of secretions from his own body.

Merging.... or mating? 😱

"Gee, I like this Joel Salatin guy's food lifestyle aesthetics. Not so wild about his take on vaccines. I wonder if he has any interesting takes on the idea of a functioning regulatory state..."

Shoot it right into your veins, Mike. Or maybe smoke it. I dunno how he does his psychedelics.

The thing that gets me is that there is exactly zero self-reflection coming from the alternative food movement. Read the Michael Pollan interview that ran yesterday in the NYT and he's like: "MAHA and me share some ideas! Huh! Weird!"

MAHA is the food movement's ecofascist Frankenstein monster.

Opinion | We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents

imho

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/o...

Opinion | We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents

*cough* *cough*

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/o...

and even were it not, the primacy of the aesthetics of production is absurd given the stakes of its *outcomes*. Many small farms abuse workers. Many non-GMO farms pollute waterways. Many large farms degrade soil. Narrow focus on production stylings over outcomes masks these tangible injustices

Opinion | We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents

if I see one more of you share some Whole Earth Catalogue bullshit from a, let's say, Nazi-curious beef farm tradwife whose follows evince a less than perfect understanding of vaccine science because it has the word 'natural' in it I swear 2 god

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/o...

AG *from Montreal,* you'd be eating your shoe this winter if you stuck to a diet of fresh, local, and seasonal ingredients.

This indemnification, tied to marketing and propagandizing, converts complex technical descriptors into moralistic pablum: this tomato is good, pure, and moral; that one is bad, defiled, and immoral. Every waffle bar becomes not just a potential health hazard but the occasion for a moral panic.

The crops may not be grown using synthetic chemicals, but companies that farm them may still be multinational corporations producing food at scale. And they're likely to still use other industrial technologies to do it. One tiny aspect of production is fetishized to remove the whole from analysis.

More land use drives deforestation and wilderness encroachment, losing carbon carrying capacity and reducing biodiversity, by taking previously uncommoditized land and placing it under commodity-oriented agricultural production, albeit using boutique techniques.

The former focuses on one aspect of production, creating the false impression that the organic tomato has not engaged with other aspects of industrial production, indemnifying it from holistic scrutiny. It turns out low-yield cropping may involve fewer toxic chemicals but requires way more land.

Sometimes these terms do describe positive goals. Eg, it's bad to bathe food in toxic chemicals. How to accomplish that? One answer is to eschew all synthetic chemicals (including fertilizers and pesticides). Another approach is to use them more selectively and sparingly.

In each case, the marketing buzzword usually describes (sometimes with accuracy) one limited and narrow aspect of production: a local tomato is local because it was grown within 200 miles. Ok. It was still shipped in a truck on a highway. The farmer used a tractor. He didn't forge his own steel.

One thing we say in this piece, but that isn't its primary focus, is that "industrial" vs "real" framing is silly because virtually all food is produced with some reliance on industrial supply chains. It's all industrial food! Yes, even local, organic, non-GMO, whole, regenerative, agro-ecological.