One of the main impediments to forming any alliance with garden variety American liberals (or whatever they are called elsewhere) is that they have debilitating psychological defects. The earlier post Brute Force quoted one observation of the problem.

finding liberals who oppose any new regulation is almost impossible–no matter what the perverse consequences. . .

Unfortunately, once you are ideologically committed to the idea of regulation, you can’t say that a given regulation is bad–or, worse, that maybe doing nothing new would have been the best course.

I've always liked Enoch Root's explanation of this malady.

"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It's leaky all the time - even if it's not raining at the moment. But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment.

No matter what the subject liberals are always seeking regulations. No analysis or account of a system can be made without advocacy for more regulation, even though in most cases the system's defects were caused by previous regulation. It's their only mental tool so it is employed no matter how inappropriate, ineffective or even destructive. The thrill comes from regulating. The effects of regulation are mostly irrelevant except when they provide opportunities for more regulation in future. The more they get, the more they want, the more it takes to give the thrill again.

I've watched with some amusement as regulation-seeky advocates have begun to dimly grasp that emissions regulations are totally ineffective for climate change mitigation. It's a crushing disappointment for them since it was a cornucopia of regulatory opportunities, a lifetime supply of thrills. Even worse, some have had to face the stark reality that previous regulatory thrills - such as nuclear energy opposition - are part of the current emissions problem.

Food, like sex, is a fertile playground for regulation-seeky behavior.

Think about it. When most of us imagine what a sustainable food economy might look like, chances are we picture a variation on something that already exists—such as organic farming, or a network of local farms and farmers markets, or urban pea patches—only on a much larger scale. The future of food, in other words, will be built from ideas and models that are familiar, relatively simple, and easily distilled into a buying decision: Look for the right label, and you're done.

But that's not the reality. Many of the familiar models don't work well on the scale required to feed billions of people. Or they focus too narrowly on one issue (salad greens that are organic but picked by exploited workers). Or they work only in limited circumstances. (A $4 heirloom tomato is hardly going to save the world.) . . .

food is not simple. To make it, you have to balance myriad variables—soil, water, and nutrients, of course, but also various social, political, and economic realities. But because our consumer culture favors fixes that are fast and easy, our approaches toward food advocacy have been built around one or two dimensions of production, such as reducing energy use or eliminating pesticides, while overlooking factors that are harder to define (and ditto to market), such as worker safety. . .

This tendency to replace complexity with checklists is the hallmark of the alternative food sector. Today's federal requirements for organic food, for example, only hint at the richness of the original concept, which encouraged farmers to not only forgo chemical fertilizers but also replenish soils on-site, using livestock manure or crop rotations. The problem is that replenishing on-site is costly and time consuming. As demand for organic has grown and farmers have been pushed to gain the same überefficiencies as their industrial rivals, more of them (particularly those selling to chain groceries) simply import manure from feedlots, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Technically, these farms are still organic—they don't use chemical fertilizers. But is something really sustainable if the natural fertilizer must travel such distances or come from feedlots, the apotheosis of unsafe, unsustainable production? Forget about food miles. What about poop miles? . . .

In fact, most of the familiar candidates for alternative food would have trouble operating on the kind of scale necessary for a world of 6.7 billion people. Consider what it would take to make our farm system entirely organic. The only reason industrial organic agriculture can get away with replenishing its soils with manure or by planting nitrogen-fixing cover crops is that the industry is so tiny—making up less than 3 percent of the US food supply (and just 5.3 percent even in gung-ho green cultures like Austria's). If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use—and assuming dietary habits remain constant—the extra land we'd need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland, according to Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba. Such an expansion, Smil notes, "would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming—making this clearly only a theoretical notion."

These excerpts come from a regulation-seeky source belatedly confronting the fact that what passes for sustainability in the popular imagination of rich world dolts is utterly unworkable except as a hobby for those with more money than sense. But, all is not lost. There are regulatory thrills to be had.

Until we can make the market see all the costs of unsustainable farming, and until we learn how to temper its obsessive focus on ever greater efficiencies, market-driven sustainability will fail. . .

If we're going to ask the market to pull in a new direction, we'll need to give it new rules and incentives. That means our broader food standards, but it also means money—a massive increase in food research. (Today, the fraction of the federal research budget spent on anything remotely resembling alternative agriculture is less than 1 percent—and most of that is sucked up by the organic sector.) And, yes, it means more farm subsidies: The reason federal farm subsidies are regarded as anti-sustainability is mainly because they support the wrong kind of farming. But if we want the right kind of farming, we're going to have to support those farmers willing to risk trying a new model. For example, one reason farmers prefer labor-saving monoculture is that it frees them to take an off-farm job, which for many is the only way to get health insurance. Thus, the simplest way to encourage sustainable farming might be offering a subsidy for affordable health care.

We'll also need potent new incentives on the demand side of the equation. Sustainable food products make up only about 2 percent of our food supply in no small part because consumer demand is soft. Yes, some will pay extra for organic or local food. But for most consumers, the costs quickly exceed the tangible benefits—especially as food prices have climbed.

Given that we're not seeing spontaneous consumer demand (even after decades of consumer education by advocacy groups), we must create it via government procurement programs. Federal agencies and food programs are among the biggest purchasers of food in the world. If they didn't buy solely from the lowest-cost bidder, as they're now required to, but could instead source from local or organic producers, or farmers practicing polyculture, this massive new customer would remake American agriculture in a heartbeat. "If someone like the Department of Defense or even the VA hospitals changed how they purchased, it would be huge," says Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Bizarre. The failure of the twee model of sustainability is an opportunity to advocate socialized medicine and subsidies up the wazoo. It still won't work, won't feed the people, but that's not the true objective for regulation-seeky people.

But would it be sufficient? Or does sustainable food simply cost too much to be feasible? After all, industrial food is cheap not only because of the efficiencies of scale and technologies, but also because the industrial system is so good at ignoring, or externalizing, costs such as ecological degradation or poor nutrition or underpaid labor. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the hidden costs of conventional meat production alone are huge—each year, salmonella outbreaks cost an estimated $2.5 billion; properly cleaning up manure leaks would cost at least $4 billion. If our food system reinternalizes such costs—say, by shifting from feedlots to a less concentrated free-range model—food prices will rise. Grass-fed cattle can take twice as long to reach slaughter weight as corn-fed cattle and require more pastureland at a time when pastureland is in short supply—which is why grass-fed beef costs about 30 percent more than conventional beef.

Does that matter? Most Americans could afford to spend more for their food—or could afford to eat less of the resource-intensive foods. It's no coincidence that Americans, who spend less than a dime of every dollar on food—the least in the world—also consume about 200 pounds of meat per capita each year—the most in the world. But in many other parts of the world, spending more on food or cutting back on meat aren't practical or ethical options; nor are investing in vertical farms, store-top produce, or many of the other more Earth-friendly but more capital-intensive farming technologies. As Iowa State's Liebman notes, the resources for sustainable farming—not only adequate soil and water, but access to capital, technology, and market—aren't distributed fairly or evenly, which means the chances for "finding solutions in Iowa are probably a lot higher than in the Sahel."

This disparity underlines what ultimately may be the most critical question about the future of food. We may be certain that the existing food system is broken. We may also be confident that we can develop a more sustainable replacement. What we're still waiting to find out is whether sustainability is something we'll all benefit from, or whether it, too, will go to the highest bidder.

In reality, our food system has never been safer, more nutritious, less environmentally harmful, than it is today. It can be better, and is getting better all of the time, as it has done for a very long time. Rather than focusing on the remaining defects the whole system should be analyzed. The narrative then changes to one that is optimistic rather than pessimistic, and the intelligent response becomes one of gentle assistance rather than brute force control. That's no fun for the regulation-seeky, but it's what sane people should do. Worse still, the smart response is usually to remove existing regulations - including subsidies - that pervert the system and prevent it from improving.

I'll explain just one issue in enough detail to understand the general problem. Take the statement that "Grass-fed cattle can take twice as long to reach slaughter weight as corn-fed cattle and require more pastureland at a time when pastureland is in short supply". That's false unless you assume that the cattle are being raised on marginal land using antiquated methods.

Competent graziers finish their beeves in very nearly the same amount of time as in feedlots - 12 to 14 months. The animals are robust, with well marbeled flesh. They do it on improved pastures grown on good land. They may have had to make the land good since so much has been exhausted by decades of cropping. There's knowledge and skill required, but it's not a black art. The claims by UCS that yada yada are nonsense, as are all of their politicized pronouncements.

My beef is no more expensive, often less expensive, than what you can get at retail markets. I wish it was, I'd like a raise, but there's no real justification for it unless the angels wish to reward me for good behavior. But if the government removes the regulations and subsidies that favor industrial livestock farming then what I do will become common, not worthy of angelic attention. If we want an improved food system then we need to limit the predations of the regulation-seeky.

This is the real health care problem we have. It's far more costly and destructive than other social maladies such as drug abuse. But, we must resist the temptation to regulate the regulation-seeky . . . or do we? Perhaps this is a workable solution. Let them regulate one another to limit regulatory behavior. It would be harmless thrills for consenting adults, and so no concern for society as a whole. Live and let live, tolerate diversity . . or perversity when it is well regulated.