“It takes a room full of morons to believe that the world’s problems are small enough for them to fix.” – The Comedian, from Alan Moore’s The Watchmen. While perusing Facebook I came upon a video that purports to demonstrate the dangers of normal food and the superiority of “organic” foods. In it a little girl performs an experiment with a potato bought at a traditional market and one purchased from an organic market. The video shows how the store-bought potato that has been exposed to a chemical called “Bud Nip” will not sprout, while the truly “organic” potato grows like a tree. But what this little girl fails to realize is: sprouted potatoes are toxic. Domesticated from the nightshade family of plants, our favorite tubers become toxic when they grow eyes and begin to green. Though potato poisoning is rare, it tends to occur in impoverished areas where potato shipments take longer to arrive. Farmers created Bud Nip to prevent these poisonings. The fundamental flaw in the little girl’s reasoning is the idea that nature is always good; and while you can forgive the little girl her naïveté, what bothers me is that this same naïveté actually forms the philosophical foundation for modern liberalism.

2,400 years ago Plato wrote about a city-state that we have come to call Utopia, a perfect place where there was no crime or suffering. He postulated a perfect society where everyone worked for the benefit of his fellow countrymen, and were governed by an elite society of the wisest of Greek scholars. For millennia, men have tried and failed to implement this dream for one reason—pPerfection is a fantasy. This fundamental belief in a perfect world leads to the belief that anything “imperfect” is evil and must be avoided and punished at all costs. Take the potato as an example. Liberalism believes that nature is perfect, so anything that deviates from “nature,” like Bud Nip, is bad. This concept is exemplified by the liberal crusades to eliminate the use of pesticides, artificial fertilizers, and genetically altered produce not only here, but abroad.

Case in point: once we were done using DDT to eliminate malaria from our shores, “well-meaning” liberals banned the use of DDT worldwide. Now over 300 million people are hospitalized and over a million, mostly children, die yearly because of the disease. If liberalism had its way, not only would the elimination of pesticides cause the wholesale destruction of food crops, but many of the diseases that plague much of the third world would return. And while the lack of fertilizers would cut our production in half, the elimination of genetically altered produce would put much of what could be produced in danger of disease (like the Irish suffered in the Potato Famine). Never mind the fact that domestication of plants and animals is in itself genetic manipulation. Modern production techniques, from pesticides to fertilizers and genetic manipulation, allow the millions of impoverished people around the world who depend on our wheat, corn, and potato production to live. (Proof of this is the food riots that started all over Latin America once our corn production started going towards that other liberal catastrophe: ethanol) . Liberals love to hide behind the term “unintended consequences” when their theories fail, but Liberalism is always born from the arrogance of societies that have reached a certain level of comfort and security. Because all that liberalism knows of nature is the garden, it refuses to listen to anyone who has actually survived the jungle and so in its ignorance demands the destruction of those things that not only create but support civilization.
Now don’t get me wrong, I actually prefer the taste and texture of organic vegetables, and believe that non-processed foods are better for you. In fact I believe we should be encouraging the diversification of our food supplies thereby making many of these alternatives cheaper and more accessible. I also agree that in a perfect world potatoes shouldn’t be sprayed with Bud Nip… but this isn’t a perfect world. We are an imperfect people in an imperfect world with imperfect methods. As the saying goes: “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and I’ll put the good of our imperfect methods that allow us to feed and clothe over 7 billion people and double life expectancies over the last hundred years against the perfect of a sprouting potato any day.