You might get the wrong impression of David Frum’s politics from his grocery shopping:
I happened into my nearest Whole Foods on Saturday. Among other things, I bought a half gallon of milk for $3.79 — almost double the price I could have paid at Walmart. For my money, I got organic milk from cows raised on grass rather than corn.I prefer that my children drink milk free from pesticides, herbicides and artificial hormones. I am relieved not to contribute to the promiscuous overuse of antibiotics in cattle, hastening the development of anti-biotic resistant superbugs. If the extra tariff secures more humane treatment for the dairy cows on which we depend, that’s welcome news too.
As I bicycled the groceries home in my “I used to be a plastic bottle” recycled Whole Foods bag, I must have looked the image of a northwest Washington progressive. Yet it is very easy for me to imagine how the cultural polarities on food might have been reversed.
I can imagine a cultural left that fumed: The local family farm is as obsolete as the two-parent family! If you have an extra buck and three quarters burning a hole in your pocket, David Frum, why not give it to the panhandler on the corner rather than an overpriced dairy? Before getting exercised about the welfare of milk cows, how about some concern for the child prostitutes of the Third World or the underprivileged here at home?
Likewise, I can imagine a cultural right that championed premium milk in exactly the same way that it now champions luxury cars and $20 cigars. Or that worried as much about its own health and nutrition as it did about the strength and fitness of professional athletes.
No, it didn’t work out that way. But it easily could have — and could still again.
From the time of Teddy Roosevelt until the day before yesterday, it was the American right that worried more about the fitness and strength of the American population. (While the left tended to dismiss such concerns as imports from militaristic Prussia — as indeed they were.) It was President Eisenhower who founded the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, President Nixon who empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to monitor pesticides, and President Reagan who allowed himself to be photographed lifting weights. (He looked good at it too.)