Articles by Tom Philpott

The Nation comes out with its first food issue.

"Edible Media" is a biweekly look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web.

The left has always had an uneasy relationship with pleasure -- and thus with food. For every freewheeling beatnik or free-loving hippie, there must be 10 dour left-wingers who see personal pleasure as an obscene indulgence in a world wracked by war, hunger, oppression, and environmental ruin.

Yet one of the most powerful critiques of consumer capitalism is that it drains life of vivid pleasure and offers instead "pleasure." A handmade dark-chocolate custard becomes a dull, corn-sweetened "chocolate" shake. Peddling boundless diversity and freedom, mass-market consumerism delivers regimentation, sameness, and mediocrity. As Michael Pollan showed in Omnivore's Dilemma, the dizzying variety arrayed on U.S. supermarket shelves boils down to endless combinations of two ingredients: corn and soybeans.

By treating pleasure and food as beneath responsible discussion, the left cedes too much to the hucksters who run the show. Rather than deride pleasure as a vice of the rich, the left should try to revive it as a principle for all.

That's why I was happy when the left-liberal weekly The Nation came out with its first issue devoted to food this week.

‘Free’ trade plus nativism equals bad food policy on both sides of the Rio Grande.

In today's Victual Reality column, I note that California's organic farms are struggling with a labor shortage.

Farmers there claim that tighter security at the Mexican border is leaving them bereft of workers; in the nation's organic fruit-and-vegetable basket, produce is rotting unpicked on the vine.

If in California there aren't enough farm hands, in Mexico, there are too many. In an excellent recent San Francisco Chronicle story, Monica Campbell and Tyche Hendricks report that, "An estimated 1.5 million agricultural jobs have been lost since Nafta went into effect in 1994." And the situation is expected to get worse as Nafta strips away what's left of the Mexican government's protection for its corn farmers by 2008.

Where do I begin to tease out the ironies at play here?

David Mas Masumoto breaks down the joy and pain of farming.

This post marks the launch of "Edible Media," an occasional look at interesting or deplorable food journalism on the web.

Food coverage in The New York Times Sunday Magazine has been in a funk for a while now. Aside from the odd trenchant bit of commentary from Michael Pollan, the magazine's weekly food section has been slight and generally forgettable.

This past Sunday, though, the magazine ran a terrific piece on farming by David Mas Masumoto, a California fruit farmer and writer.

Ever wandered into a farmers market and seen a bleary-eyed farmer sitting behind mounds of gorgeous produce, and wondered why the hell he's charging so much? Read this piece.

Regarding a field full of ripe fruit but on the verge of a weed explosion, Masumoto conjures the most vivid description of weeds from a farmer's perspective I've ever read:

While demand for frozen food booms, processing plants head to China and Mexico

Farmers markets may be fashionable, but the U.S. appetite for convenience food remains insatiable. "Retail sales of frozen foods in the U.S. in 2005 reached a record $29 billion, up from nearly $26 billion in 2001," declares a news report.

Meanwhile, the U.S. food-processing giants are shuttering domestic plants and heading to Mexico and China, where labor and produce costs are cheaper than California's central coast, once the U.S. frozen food capital.

In an age of broad energy and climate uncertainty, market forces are conspiring to make our food system ever more energy intensive. How can this be? How can it make economic sense to not only haul food from China and Mexico, but to keep its temperature below the freezing point throughout the process?