International Sustainability Kool-aid from Prince Charles
I promised a post on this intersection of crunchiness and royalty, so I'm delivering on that, albeit a little late. Excerpt from Prince Charles's remarks:
With so much growing concern about this, my International Sustainability Unit carried out a study into why sustainable food production systems struggle to make a profit, and how it is that intensively produced food costs less. The answer to that last question may seem obvious, but my ISU study reveals a less apparent reason. It looked at five case studies and discovered two things: firstly, that the system of farm subsidies is geared in such a way that it favors overwhelmingly those kinds of agricultural techniques that are responsible for the many problems I have just outlined; and secondly, that the cost of that damage is not factored into the price of food production. Consider, for example, what happens when pesticides get into the water supply. At the moment, the water has to be cleaned up at enormous cost to consumer water bills; the primary polluter is not charged. Or take the emissions from the manufacture and application of nitrogen fertilizer, which are potent greenhouse gases. They, too, are not costed at source into the equation.
I'm laughing about the entire thing, including the comments, and I really don't know where to begin. First of all: check out the first sentence of the blog post: "In the next issue of TAC, I’ll have an essay about the Prince of Wales as a Traditionalist." Gee, can't wait until that comes out.
Also: here's a royal guy who probably never gets his hands dirty talking about organic farming and how all those big, bad corporations are doing it ALL WRONG. Prince Charles states: "as things stand, doing the right thing is penalized." What is the right thing? The elephant in the middle of the room to me is that these food fascists want to make a lot of money doing their organic thing and they can't because their inability to crack into the market. This whole thing about environmental cost is a big bunch of blather. Industrial farms and slaughterhouses have to spend beaucoups bucks on pollution control, that all gets factored in to the final cost. And their product is still cheaper. And I know what I'm talking about here; federal inspectors live at large meat-packing plants.
Another reason I'm laughing at the whole conversation involving Prince Charles and food is that I recall a really funny segment of Michael Savage that I heard several years ago when he used to be on WHK. Savage was going off on one of his many food tangents (Savage was a published nutritionist before he started doing whatever it is he does on the radio.) The topic was about how Prince Charles would sit downstairs, constipated with expensive French cheese, while his wife, Princess Diana, would bang her lovers upstairs. Then he riffed on this whole tragic speculation until a conspiracy nut called stating that Diana's murder was somehow related to Prince Charles's desire to join the Eastern Orthodox Church. I just shook my head and shorted at the time, but I should have known that this all was somehow related to crunchy conservatism.
Comment away, Pikkumatti.
