Garth Brown

Food Is Not Magic You may not be able to eat your way to immortality or manliness, but food is something we can make and enjoy together.

I may not be qualified to wrestle with Yarvin, Bronze Age Pervert, or the other titans of the new right, but I am prepared to enter the arena with their dietitian, Raw Egg Nationalist: www.plough.com/en/topics/li...

For no extra money I will even consult on which hobby farm will give him a sense of real, embodied life, and I will help him acquire five (5) sheep.

I have finally developed a foolproof way to make farming profitable. Whenever a Silicon Valley/finance guy, in the throes of a crisis of meaning, comes up with a plan to disrupt agriculture, for a mere 3% of the proposed budget I will tell him why it's a dumb idea.

The interesting part was that no matter what I said a number of them still believed some rando on instagram instead of a farmer who knows a lot of other farmers and would hear if such a program was being implemented.

It's died down a bit lately, but for a few months I routinely had people calling or emailing to ask if the government had forced me to give all my cattle mRNA vaccines. Absolutely not a real thing!

Sorry if you've written about this elsewhere, but have you seen good evidence about the method(s) of transmission between herds?

Reading the excerpt in The Cut I was struck by how profoundly incurious the author seemed about the nature of her marriage, which made me wonder why she wrote a whole book about it. Maybe they should have gone with some of her cultural criticism, but I guess it wouldn't have got the clicks.

Good discussion about the tradeoffs between more and less intensive production. Worth a read!

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life

The introductory essay is free and well worth your time, especially if you are interested in changing things for the better. www.thenewatlantis.com/publications...

which would risk undermining the substrate upon which modern life is built. Food security is a miracle. Famine being a political problem instead of a production problem is a miracle. It is absolutely imperative that those of us interested in improving things do not take it for granted.

I used to think I knew precise radical reforms that would fix the environmental, welfare, and nutritional issues with the food system. I still see all those problems, but I have become far humbler about my ability to recognize which reforms would improve things and..

Because the systems that support our secure way of life are largely invisible, it's easy to take them for granted. We see the food on the shelf every time we walk into the supermarket, but we do not see the intricate chains of production and distribution that puts it there every single day.

I'm not just a farmer, I'm a sentimental, localist, mystical, cows in the pasture farmer. Because of this, people are often surprised to hear how much I respect the modern food system. @charlescmann.bsky.social has just begun an excellent new series that explains this apparent contradiction.

I am generally a raw milk centrist. Rigorous testing and limits on pooling/herd size/distribution strike me as a good balance of safety and choice. But the increasing prevalence of bird flu in dairy herds and the theoretical bird-> cow-> human chain of transmission is worrying.

It's easy to take pot shots at the global food system (it's one of my favorite hobbies!) but I never quite understood how a decentralized food system would necessarily be more resilient. It seems like it could just make regional shortages much more common and harder to address.

A big part of my love for less concentrated ag is that I think it makes for healthier rural communities apart from animal welfare.

Though it varies with species, I think medium sized operations can use practices that are unavailable to the biggest farms, but there is nothing inherently more humane about them. Giant farms with high welfare standards would be better than unregulated smaller operations.

I think there really is a happy middle ground on a lot of this stuff, with operations that are big enough to achieve decent economies of scale but small enough to blunt the problems with extreme concentration. But the middle ground is never going to be as cheap as maximally concentrated farming.

If you were in charge is there a specific aspect of childhood nutrition you would prioritize studying?

The real reason so many of them homeschool.

Can You Solve a Lifestyle Epidemic Without Lifestyle Gurus? When you’ve got a “diseases of civilization” crisis, you’re gonna get some weirdos.

You may have seen a cell phone video of RFK Jr. drinking methylene blue on a flight. I can't prove that Jack Kruse, a neurosurgeon turned paleo health influencer turned MAHA evangelist put him onto it, but I'd bet good money that's the case. Learn more here: www.thenewatlantis.com/publications...

I do think effective weight loss drugs will be net beneficial for health at the population level, though managing cost remains an open question. I am even a bit hopeful that they will shift our collective diet away from Ultra-Processed Food. But we've also ended up in a dystopian situation.

It's good that the role of the food system plays in shaping diet and health is getting more attention, even if none of the participants have a remotely plausible plan for what to do about it aside from hoping novel weight loss drugs live up to their promise.

The American Food System's Very Bad Legacy - Front Porch Republic There’s little appetite for a response that begins with taking up our axes to clear the land for something better.

I've just written a brief post about last month's senate hearing on diet and chronic illness for Front Porch Republic.
www.frontporchrepublic.com/2025/01/the-...

I have some significant disagreements with your piece, which I might write up, but I absolutely agree that richer countries paying poorer countries to directly and robustly protect remaining wilderness should be much more of a focus than trying to change global dietary patterns.

I'm looking at enrolling, and I feel very ambivalent about them. Subsidizing practices rather than outcomes makes sense for a variety of practical reasons but also makes it all uncomfortably nebulous.

Do you think there is any plausible public health intervention that could significantly reduce UPF consumption at the population level?

There's also a whole crop of right coded podcasters like Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau who love nothing more than parking in obscure intellectual cul-de-sacs but have somehow convinced the same people criticizing degree lady that they are doing very important work.

6.) More of a hope than a prediction: he is riding the beginnings of a broader movement to recognize Ultra-Processed Food as a major problem, akin to smoking. The biggest difference RFK will bring will be in the stridence and clarity of this message.

4.) In practice, this program will pay commodity farmers too much money to plant cover crops.

5.) Less confident, but I also doubt he will ban any significant number of food additives or close the GRAS loophole.