The crunchy libertarian

While we’re on the subject of food, I’m very much looking forward to John Schwenkler’s upcoming article on “culinary conservatism” for the American Conservative, which he mentions here. In the same post, John makes the case for what I think it’s fair to call a libertarian approach to food production, the idea being that our current system is the result of excessive government intervention in the form of subsidies, tariffs, foolish regulations, etc. (as amply documented by Michael Pollan and others) and that small, local and organic farms would be in a better position to compete with WalMart and big ag under a more laissez-faire regime. I plead ignorance as to whether this would actually work, and I think that some regulation (at least to limit harm in the form of environmental externalities, animal cruelty, worker exploitation and so forth) is necessary, but I do find the aspiration of attaining green ends by libertarian means an appealing one.