I agree with you, of course, that farmer’s market tomatoes taste better than supermarket tomatoes. But then, photos of tomatoes taste better than supermarket tomatoes, so that’s not much of a challenge. The bigger question here was whether we can stop people from guzzling McDonald’s french fries on the grounds that they don’t taste as good as, I dunno, fresh ramps. And I hope you’ll admit that there are a lot of obstacles to that, and price is only one of them.

A related problem is that even aside from taste, we’re discussing three very different concepts here - organic, healthy, and sustainable - that don’t always overlap. It would be easy to concoct a Big Mac and fries from all-organic products and have them be just as unhealthy (and just as tasty, or untasty, depending on your palate) as the traditional versions; wild salmon are excellent for you, but if everyone switched to eating them they’d be extinct in no time. For that matter, there are plenty of organic foods that aren’t all that much healthier for you than the traditional versions - most of the pesticides don’t end up in your veggies, but in the groundwater, so that when you buy organic produce it’s in some ways less beneficial to you than to your Cousin Phil in Iowa.

Which brings me to what I think was my main point: While selling the “organic local food is yum!” angle has been an undoubted success of the modern foodie movement, ultimately I don’t think it’s any more the solution to problems of the American diet or the American ecosystem than the food pyramid is. I just took a break from writing this comment to eat a breakfast of organic oatmeal (not steel-cut, sorry - maybe once Jordan’s in grade school), not just because we like it - it would have been just as cheap, not to mention as tasty, to have non-organic oatmeal, or challah french toast, or a Boston Creme donut - but because we’re conscious of what it does to our bodies, to the environment, and to the economies of scale that will ultimately help make organic foods more affordable.

None of which is very sexy, and none of which should stop people from extolling the taste virtues of local foods. But if the only thing that’s going to get people to the farmer’s market (or the organic foods section) is the craving for a better tomato, I suspect we’re all doomed.

I guess I’m conflating the issues of what is tasty and what is good in the spiritual sense (sustainable, friendly to labor, and so on), when maybe there’s less of a relationship between the two than I’d like to believe.

But c’mon, in the case of a lot of foods—tomatoes and chickens come to mind—there’s a huge and to my mind inherent difference between the factory product and the local small-scale product. It’s really hard to imagine someone tasting a good farmers market tomato next to the kind of tomato they put on a Big Mac and not finding the farmers market tomato superior. (Although now that I write this, I guess I can sort of imagine that, if you’ve grown up believe that tomatoes taste like water.)

Anyway, I guess my philosophy—and I’ll admit this is just what I want to be true—is that the palate isn’t the perfect guide to what is tasty and good, but it’s a better guide than whatever we’re doing now, which seems to be fast food three meals a day washed down with federal nutrition guidelines that you wouldn’t follow at gunpoint. That asking, “How could this be better?” will often lead you to, y’know, better. Wild salmon is an obvious example. Potatoes, too. But maybe those things only taste better to food nerds with too much money. I hope that’s not true, but I dunno.

Neil, as usual when talking with you, I’ve totally lost track of what I was trying to say. I’ll have to ask my pancreas.

As for the aesthetic argument, I don’t think there’s any question that food that’s sustainable and/or good for you doesn’t necessarily correlate with tasting better - if Fast Food Nation made anything clear, it’s that fast food is popular because (duh) people like the taste. I’m not going to be the one to argue that whole grains (for example) taste inherently better than refined ones. They’re different aesthetics is all - when I ate nothing but white rice I thought brown rice was gross, and now that I eat only brown I think white is tasteless. That my pancreas has an opinion in the matter only plays into it if I consciously decide to let it.

All of which is to say: Companies sell bad fast food because it’s cheap and easy to standardize (and can be churned out by untrained, replaceable labor), and consumers eat it because it’s cheap and tastes good and familiar. So while subsidizing organic tofu certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing, I think it’ll take a lot more than that to unravel our current food culture.

I wonder how much feeling like you don’t have a choice plays in? David has really woken me up to the HFCS issue. He hates it with a passion, since he grew up with sugar, not corn syrup. and I’ve started paying more attention to stuff with it in, and I agree with him that sugar is way superior, but I don’t exactly thinking lobbying Congress on the subsidies that created the HFCS madness is going to get anywhere. I try to exercise my consumer power and avoid it where possibly, but frequently there aren’t alternatives. so I grumble and put up with it. which may, on a larger scale, partially explain why we just put up with bad fast food.

If you talk to organic farmers, they will tell you that organic farming is just as productive as factory farming and sometimes more so (although sometimes they mean on a man-hour basis and sometimes a per-acre basis). If you talk to factory farmers, they will tell you the organic farmers are full of crap.

If small organic farming were subsidized the way factory farming is, would organic vegetables end up just as cheap as conventional? I tend to doubt it, but I have no data to back this up, nor have I seen any.

Cooking definitely takes time, but it’s not impossible to produce much better fast food. Why that isn’t happening, I really don’t know. It’s easy to say Americans just have poor taste, but that can’t be the whole story.