Buzz speaks out
On fat, free markets and kitty litter
Dear Lyle Vanclief, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food:
I am glad you boys down in Ottawa finally took my 20-year-old suggestion and put food in your ministry’s name. I’m sure the brown-suit brigade that runs the department told you it was their idea. That’s fine, I’m not writing to set the record straight, I have bigger food to fry today.
I want to talk about the obesity sensation food activists are creating so they can demand the government save Canadians by killing the agri-food business. I thought the know-it-all do-gooders would be satisfied with the Kyoto Protocol’s impending victory over the Canadian economy, but now they have decided the food industry has made us fat, and they want government to respond by taxing processed and fatty foods to death.
It all sounds too familiar for me. If I were the Kyoto regulationists, I’d be suing for copyright infringement.
This attack on Canada’s agri-food sector came to my attention when your colleague, Health Minister Ann McLellan, dared to say some rather sensible things about people taking personal responsibility for their health by eating better and exercising more. Well, that flushed the everything-is-someone-else’s-fault gang into the open. Like magpies eyeing a shiny object, they couldn’t let a piece of personal responsibility just sit in the sun for all to see.
Correct me if I’m barking up the wrong liberal guilt tree, but I am supposed to believe it’s no one’s fault if folks are fat – sorry, obese? Hormones or terrible childhoods aren’t to blame, either. More people are obese today because they are victims of the food industry’s slick marketing efforts to convince people to eat processed, fat and fast food instead of nice fruits and vegetables.
Now, I’m not some junk food junkie scared someone is going to tax my next hit. My wife Mitzy and I are healthy eaters. We have our own garden, buy local when we can, and avoid fast food because it gives us the runs. The closest thing we get to processed food is popcorn at the movie theatre and pretzels when we watch Saturday night hockey games or curling on the idiot box.
I always get scared when zealots overlook human nature and demand that those trying to make an honest loonie be punished to save the rest of us from our own nature. That’s why I had to turn my portrait of Adam Smith towards the wall before writing this letter.
I understand the connection between diet and health, but as in war, political and economic realities often get in the way of healthy life choices. Politicians always want the economy to grow – a chicken in every pot is the path to election. The economy grows by turning resources into products and convincing people to buy them. Unless Canada’s education and research policies leap out of the dark ages, the only resources we have are natural and agricultural.
Kyoto will hammer the first because no matter how you slice the economics of environmentalism, it comes down to using fewer natural resources. The second, the agri-food business, would be devastated by any health food initiatives. It is an industry that only grows if the market/population grows, eats more or eats more expensively. Fortunately, for those of us in the agri-business who are dealing with the stagnant commodity prices, low birth rates and oppressive immigration policies, Canadians have stepped up to eat more and more expensive food.
While growing wheat is a path to poverty, raising inefficient, methane-emitting beef is putting money in farmers’ pockets these days. Some might call that a market failure, but I believe the Bush Gang has unilaterally declared that kind of talk as treasonous to the free world.
Sure, farmers have been told for years there’s gold in them there organics, but it has only been fool’s gold so far. I can send you a list of folks that searched at that end of the organic rainbow and found only repo men.
The reality is, as Canadians reach for the economic grail of growth and productivity, we will save time and fulfill spiritual longings by turning to more convenient and expensive foods. In Dickens’s time, the euphemism for fat was not obese, it was prosperous. With the U.S. being the most prosperous nation in the world, that truth stands tall today.
We in the agri-business sector are ready to meet Canadians’ needs and to contribute to the economy at the same time. A few health tragedies are the price the free should be willing to pay. Besides, it keeps all those well-educated and well-paid health professionals employed.
As one wise travelling salesman once told me, the key to selling more cat litter is selling more cat food.
Yours in a fat free market,
Buzz Angus
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