Libertarians Attack Michael Pollan

When I decided to follow the libertarian Reason magazine on Twitter the other day, I knew I would be in for some nastiness and schoolyard name-calling.

It took less than two days. "Real Farmer Rips Michael Pollan and the Me-Too Gaggle of Food Elitists A New One," wrote @reasonmag this morning, pointing to a "Hit & Run" item about an essay in the journal The American (published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute) called "The Omnivore's Delusion: Against Agri-Intellectuals," by Missouri farmer Blake Hurst.

"Hit & Run" is Reason's front-of-the-book collection of short items (No it isn't. That was an error for which I apologize. "Hit & Run" is the Reason staff blog.) It often lives up to its name, even if the magazine itself too often fails to live up to its name.

Reason is staffed by people who regularly drive in Los Angeles traffic and yet still somehow believe that Americans should be trusted to govern themselves. I follow Reason because I want to keep up with every valid side in the many debates over food policy, and the libertarian perspective is often valid. If expressed smartly (you know, reasonably), that perspective certainly deserves to be heard. It could, sans the juvenilia and manly man posturing, provide a needed counterbalance to the more liberal forces in those debates.

But that doesn't happen nearly often enough. Reason stands as the most rational media outlet of the "right" these days,* but that says lot more about the sorry state of the conservative media than it does about Reason itself. Its rationality is strictly relative, as this "Hit & Run" item illustrates nicely.

Hurst's essay, according to "Hit & Run" writer Ronald Bailey, provides a "reality check" for people who might have been swayed by books like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and movies like Food, Inc. That's because it comes from a "real farmer." As opposed, I guess, to the fake farmers that Pollan talks to all the time for his work, or, I guess, the actors playing farmers who were too frightened of retaliation from big food companies to talk to the makers of Food, Inc.