Personal Choice

There’s been an interesting discussion about corporate marketing vs. personal choice over at Mark’s Daily Apple lately.

 Here’s the original post that started it:

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fast-food-marketing/

 And here’s a followup post that Mark put up yesterday:

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fast-food-2/

I think about this subject all the time, so here’s the comment I put up.  Mark moderates comments that have embedded URLs, so it may take a few minutes for this to show up on his site.

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Here’s another really wonderful take on personal choice:

http://breadandmoney.com/thefreeradical/?p=138

I came to the conclusion recently that I cannot rely on the food-industrial complex to supply me with full-fat fermented dairy products, so I am in the process of dropping out of that supply chain entirely.  I bought cultures for buttermilk, yogurt, and kefir from New England Cheesemaking Supply, so I simply won’t be buying the junk that passes for yogurt, kefir, and buttermilk any more.  Next step:  find a farm source of milk.  For now, I’m stuck with grocery store milk, much of which is ultrapasteurized and doesn’t ferment well, but I’m working on changing this.

Fermenting your own is very easy - about 5 minutes of prep, including washing your utensils scrupulously clean before starting, followed by about 12 to 48 hours of waiting.  (New England Cheesemaking Supply says 12 to 24 for buttermilk, but I keep my house kind of cool in the winter.)

Is this an example of how the food manufacturers are not, in fact, supporting personal choice, because they are not giving me what I want?  I am not sure — by American standards, I’m a bit of a food weirdo.  I have been told time and again by grocery store managers that they don’t carry full fat yogurt or kefir because it doesn’t sell.  On the surface, the reason it doesn’t sell has very little to do with the food manufacturers and everything to do with official pronouncements and government policy, which has most of us conditioned to believe that fat is bad and sugar won’t hurt us.  But if you dig just a bit below the surface, you realize that it is Big Agriculture and Big Food who are driving the government policies and funding the research.  (Anyone heard of Fred Stare?)

So what is one person to do in a sea of bad information and bad products?  Oddly, after reading Michael Pollan’s two latest books, I am more hopeful than ever.  It takes a bit of work, but there are more choices than there were 10 or even 5 years ago.  There are more farmers’ markets than ever; more CSAs than ever; and people are starting to get turned on to the concept of sustainable animal husbandry.  Plus there are more well-respected, well-known writers (Pollan, Mark Bittman, Gary Taubes) focussing on what’s wrong with the system, meaning more transparency, more outrage, and more people with the information to make informed choices.  And then there are the bloggers, the vast, not-so-underground network of people with passion and critical thinking skills.  Are there misinformed journalists and bloggers?  Absolutely.  But, especially in Blogland, there are more opportunities than ever to hear differing points of view.  As Anna and some of the other commenters have implied, good information is critical.

So, maybe the question of personal choice is as simple as making buttermilk!