Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

On the Cleverness of Cauliflower

Still, just because a fat‐tail disaster might smack us in the face at any moment, does that mean we are in favor of more government regulations on food production?

Here, we are forced to hem and haw. Government regulation tends to be ineffective in many cases. And since regulators are frequently drawn from the same industries they are supposed to be regulating, we think they tend to be counterproductive in all the others.

So, we are neither prescribing policy nor proscribing it. We are merely grumbling in our curmudgeonly way that we liked the old genetically unmodified world better. We have no desire to eat strawberries armed against frostbite with herring genes or cauliflower with an IQ higher than ours. We like our food au naturel, unrefurbished, unhedged, and in default drive. Unless it is communion wine, any transformations of nature need to pass the smell test first. We need to be protected from them, as surely as we need to be protected from bad checks, assault, murder, and another Michael Jackson trial.

You see our problem, dear reader? We would like the state to stop telling us what to do—whether it is in airports, in our schools, or in our bedrooms—but we dig in our heels equally at efforts by global corporations to improve our water, our potatoes, or our boeuf bourguignon at the expense of our local culture and with subsidies from our tax dollars.

This is unlikely to win us any popularity contests today when there are only two acceptable ...