From bcomnes on Tue, August 05, 2008

Well I read Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish article and related links about the political nature of eating and I say that eating well, expressing appreciation for Slow Food values, wrestling with the fact that local green tomoatoes may be better than the corporate industrial food pushed on us by Monsanto, the USDA and Texas Beef Grower’s may not be good for you after all,  and thne trying to pass off AliceWaters as a “fellow traveller” of conservatism does NOT let those people off the hook. Why plague readers of your blog us with their erudite musings?
Sullivan waxes “…. conservative politics derives not from movement boosterism or extensive familiarity with the texts of the postwar American conservative canon, but from their habits and the virtues they try to cultivate in their own lives.” 
Now consider some of those “virtues and habits” as described by these excerpts from Thomas Franks’ book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.  Franks is succinct when he sttes “Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington……. Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job.”
My point is this - Conservative movement musing on food hardly make up for the damage they have done elsewhere to our Nation and Constitution and do not add value to your site.  Next time just skip it!
Brian Comnes

Slow Food Member, Chicago, Il