Exclusive
I like Michael Pollan’s books a lot. And it’s good that you’re hearing more discussion of agriculture and nutrition policy. But a lot of Pollan’s forays into this area seem to mostly reveal a lack of understanding of how the political process works. For example, this idea:
Make the House agriculture committee exclusive. The most important committees in the House — Energy, Finance, etc. — are “exclusive,” which means their membership has to be drawn from diverse geographical and ideological sources. Ag isn’t exclusive, which means it can be (and is) packed with representatives of Big Ag. It’s where decent ag legislation goes to die.
Ezra Klein observes that it would actually do the reverse. If House Ag were exclusive, then only members representing farm interests could ever possibly afford to give up the chance to sit on other committees for the sake of a seat on the Agriculture Committee.
22 Responses to “Exclusive”
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January 16th, 2009 at 9:37 am
basic problem is pollan just doesn’t know what “exclusive” means in hill-speak. here’s pollan’s gloss:
“are “exclusive,” which means their membership has to be drawn from diverse geographical and ideological sources.”
and here’s ezra’s gloss:
“An “exclusive” committee is a committee considered so powerful that members who serve on it cannot serve on any other committees.”
if ezra’s right, then pollan just doesn’t understand the concept of committee exclusivity.
we all get the jargon wrong now and then.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:05 am
“if ezra’s right, then pollan just doesn’t understand the concept of committee exclusivity.”
I think they’re both right in a strict sense. Exclusive Committees are under a lot of pressure to balance geographic and ideological sources. That’s because they’re powerful, not because they’re exclusive. Pollan seems to be misidentifying a by product of Committee status with a cause of Committee status.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:06 am
It also probably overstates the importance of committees in the House. This would be an important point in 1978, but less so today. Even if you took away power from the Ag. committee, farmers would still be powerful because of their geographic dispersion and the apportionment by state in the Senate.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Uh, Matt, why on earth do you like Pollan? His ideas about what would be best for humanity–more peasant farmers and more expensive food–would be absolutely terrible for most people in the world.
January 16th, 2009 at 11:41 am
What would be best would be a _Select_ Committee on Agriculture. The members would be selected by the leadership, and members who don’t represent districts full of farmers could still afford to serve, because service on a select committee doesn’t reduce the number of other committees that you can serve on. If Pelosi were picking members we would have a better urban-rural balance than if the membership were entirely self-selecting.
January 16th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Energy has never been an exclusive committee. From the committee’s own website:
January 16th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Uh, Matt, why on earth do you like Pollan? His ideas about what would be best for humanity–more peasant farmers and more expensive food–would be absolutely terrible for most people in the world.
I think you may be confusing Pollan with Jared Diamond (who describes farming and civilization as the worst mistake in the history of the human race.) Pollan’s books address themselves much more directly to an audience of first world discretionary spenders–he advocates change on the margins (i.e. creating a market for “pasteured” meat and eggs by buying them if you have the chance) rather than some sort of Kunstler-ish revolutionary crackpotism. You can certainly make jokes about his stuffwhitepeoplelike appeal, but he’s hardly telling starving Africans to buy organic.
January 16th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Curly, his general idea, though, is that food prices are too low. Now then, he’s been saying the same thing for a while now, so I will give him props for consistency in having the exact same plan to deal with the global food crisis as with previous historically low food prices. But this consistency means that he has an end-state in mind that definitely means it’s harder for people to get at fod. No, he’s not quite as bad as the wretched people who are full of worry because blacks and Latinos don’t hate their body image enough, but his ideology of the farmer’s bond with the soil muddies a whole lot of his thinking.
His whole business about global food, for example, fails to take into account that long-distance food travel is a nineteenth century phenomenon.
His recent article in the New York Times about what Obama should do about the global food crisis is particularly bad. He starts out with some reasonable points, but by page six, he’s calling for the removal of people from the cities to farm the countryside. Now then, it’s easy for someone whose life and livelihood have never depended upon the next harvest to romanticize farming and enjoying a bod with the soil, but there’s a reason that people who grow up on farms tend to leave them quickly.
Him and Wendell Berry both annoy me, especially because they don’t seem to realize that their love the farming lifestyle is a form of slumming.
January 16th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Mike,
I liked how the Intelligence Committee rotated members (not sure if it still does) out after 6 years. Too bad that isn’t done for every committee.
January 16th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Andrew R.,
I work in this area for a living, and I’ve also worked for three years in an African peasant community. I can tell you that what most developing countries need, more than anything else, is to develop rural communities in ways that allow farmers to stay on the land, and to strengthen rural economies. The flood of people to urban shantytowns has been a disaster all over the developing world. People don’t leave rural areas because they don’t like farming: they leave for a complex of reasons having to do with the urban bias of development efforts, and with the lack of support for rural economies. The fact that third world peasants are
There are many countries throughout the world, not just the US but also many Latin AMerican countries, which would be well served by depopulating the cities and ecnouraging people to move back to countryside. This is what, for example, Venezuela has been trying to do over the last few years. Chavez is probably the world leader who has been doing most to put Pollan’s ideas into practice. Although I doubt he’ll get much credit for it from Yglesias and the like.
Your blatherings are simply the decadent, cosmopolitan hipster whinings of someone who doesn’t understand agriculture, and therefore thinks it must be terrible. Thankfully, not all of us are decadent hipsters, and some of us have an understanding of the natural order and humanity’s place it it, and how badly modernity has thrown this out of whack. Globalization might be good for you and your buddies, but it has been a disaster for peasant communities all throughout the continent. What Venezuela needs is a focus away from the cities, away from trying to emulate the modern Western lifestyle, and an effort to build up sustainable and strong peasant communities based on cooperative production and ecologically sustainable methods.
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