The most adorable thing I read on a recurring basis is that anti-biology, anti-vaccine and ban-happy social authoritarians are "bipartisan". The entire public is on board with banning Big Gulps, we are told, and the same guy then endorses a candidate because his city had a hurricane before the election. Yet we never actually see those issues being bipartisan. The anti-science contingent invariably finds ways to embrace and be populated by the goofy left and then we still get the weird rationalization that the left is somehow more pro-science - maybe that is why people even sign up to be Democrats - and then much-lauded elites get cheered for taking a whole bunch of votes that defy science by people who claim to care about science.
This new Food Policy Action group scored all members of Congress on 32 floor votes related to a vast array of issues supported by the board members. There were, what they arbitrarily included, 18 votes in the Senate and 14 in the House over a two-year period on issues like support for organic farming and more environmental regulations. Though their report put all Democrats at the top and all Republicans at the bottom, "Top Chef" television celebrity Tom Colicchio, founding board member of FPA and owner of Craft Restaurants, said the FPA was not “partisan at all.” It's a 'we are just laying out the facts, Republicans suck' story worthy of ThinkProgress.
Who else, besides a left-wing celebrity chef, is on this supposedly nonpartisan board? A chief lobbyist for United Food and Commercial Workers union, the CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, the executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest - they are the 'food police' who sued McDonald's to try and have toys removed from Happy Meals - and a bunch of other social authoritarians who hate farmers unless they buy an organic sticker and hire only union labor. The new organization is even run by the president of the Environmental Working Group, which basically exists to criticize GMOs and endorse 'organic' food.
Will Tom Colicchio's statements change any minds? Absolutely not. The reality-based community knows no one watches "Top Chef" for Colicchio, they watch the show to see Padma Lakshmi.
How many Republicans would prefer to listen to Lakshmi being patronizing regarding their food rather than Colicchio? How come Pew Research Center never tackles the really interesting questions like that? Credit and link: www.padmalakshmi.com/
"Studies show that only 2 percent of our food economy is food that's healthy, clean, green, and fair," said Navina Khanna, co-founder of Live Real and FPA Board Member in their statement. Fair is, of course, progressive codespeak for mandating artificial equality by banning and subsidizing things until everyone is the same. It's anathema in science, certainly - great science won't get done by giving all scientists, no matter how incompetent, $50,000 in grant funding and calling it fair because good scientists are hindered - but also in any field where we count on people caring about success. America has dematerialized in agriculture over the last 30 years, to where farmers are producing far more food on far less land and using less pesticides per unit than even in 1980. That's a terrific achievement and the world should want to emulate it.
Instead, groups like the FPA want to send us back to the 1700s, when only the rich could afford food and everyone else worked as tenant farmers to get it. Organic farming requires far more fertilizer, and resultant nutrient run-off into the water supply, far more pesticides and herbicides and far more land. How is that more fair to anyone except wealthy elites who can be Board members of food advocacy groups?
The target market for this advocacy group is not the general American public, it is the agricultural 1% who can afford locally grown, organic, artisan cuisine and already believe in the cause and therefore were already unilaterally voting for one party anyway - and that's cool, but advocacy groups who claim to be nonpartisan solely because they don't officially endorse a candidate (and then implicitly endorse entire political parties, like this group) are as annoying as Colicchio is.
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