We shouldn’t let politicians define what we eat as a partisan choice, but that’s indicative of the way we avoid decision-making on tough issues. (Photo by KWON JUNHO on Unsplash)

Inflation has become Public Enemy No. 1 in America, even though it’s clearly a temporary condition — since, as the stock market is painfully reminding us, what goes up must come down. A crisis always exposes our weaknesses, this one revealing how vulnerable we are to the kind of knee-jerk policymaking that’s aimed more at impressing voters than actually advancing their best interests.

Not that millions of people aren’t affected by inflation — they are, and it’s especially hard on people with less disposable income — but a cool analysis wouldn’t elevate the short-term problem of higher prices over concerns that have forever implications. Take human-induced climate change, for example, which threatens to displace millions of people and yield mass starvation and violent political upheaval by the middle of this century.1 Have you heard much about that lately?

Here's what you are hearing about: We’re paying five bucks a gallon for gasoline and we’re less than five months away from an election. One party wants to assign blame and the other wants to avoid it, so we’re all in on the inflation fight. Don’t go saying it’s Vladimir Putin’s fault, or that it’s a global phenomenon connected to the pandemic; Americans want retail prices to fall and stocks to rebound, right now, so somebody had better fix the economy.

Of course, in the meantime, we also could try to patch things up on our own rather than expecting quick and painless answers from our political system. Take, for example, your rising grocery bills. We’ve been told that one way to protect ourselves from inflation’s peril is to change what we’re eating. Food prices are up 10 percent year over year, but the price of meat has risen at a much faster rate than prices for fruits and vegetables.2 If we were to eat less meat, then, we could cut our food bills.

But that’s about as unlikely as Mitch McConnell singing bass in the Senate Kumbaya Chorus. Americans eat more meat than anybody else in the world: about 219 pounds per person each year (closely followed by Australians and Argentinians).3 We’re a carnivorous society, with only about 5 percent of us claiming to be vegetarian, and 3 percent taking the label of vegan.4 We will not go gently if we are asked to hand over our Whoppers and Quarter Pounders With Cheese.

One reason for that, it turns out, is politics: What we eat, like practically everything else in our country, has become partisan. It’s a pretty good metaphor, in fact, for the way political identity is seeping into every aspect of our lives.

It goes beyond meat, though you could start there. Back in the middle of the Trump administration, The Economist surveyed Americans’ eating habits, and found that Democrats were 1.8 times more likely than Republicans to say that they wanted to reduce their meat consumption. That result emerged even after the researchers used what’s called a logistic regression model to account for factors other than political affiliation in the decision — like education, sex, household income and the like.

Maybe Democrats were simply turned off by Donald Trump’s well-known appetite for fast food. When the Clemson Tigers came to the White House after winning the 2018 national collegiate football playoffs, Trump served a spread of what he called “great American food” — from McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Arby’s and Domino’s. It might have disappointed the young athletes who imagined a swell White House spread, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise: In a book published the year before, aides had said Trump’s favorite meal on the campaign trail was this: Two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and a large chocolate shake.5 (Mike Pence might have been closer to the presidency than we imagined: That one meal is 2,381 calories, by McDonald’s measure, which experts say is more than even a moderately active male in Donald Trump’s age group ought to consume in a whole day.)6

Of course, Trump is not alone in this gastronomic neopopulism. As if to suggest that a patriot wouldn’t show up at a Nancy Pelosi dinner party, some Republican politicians have stretched their imagination to denigrate green food. Ted Cruz, for example, has often bragged of how much he loathes avocados, seeming to suggest that eschewing the flavorful big-seeded fruit is a mark of right-wing bona fides. Marco Rubio, too, not long ago spoke sneeringly of people whose mornings include “drinking your caramel macchiato, and then you’re reading The New York Times and as you’re eating your avocado toast.” Not to be outdone, the senator from Louisiana, John Kennedy, deplored “cosmopolitan, goat’s milk latte-drinking, avocado toast-eating insider elites.”

I’m indebted to a Northern California farmer/philosopher, Andy Griffin, for cataloguing the right wing’s anti-avocado sentiments. Griffin insists that he doesn’t drink macchiato or subscribe to the Times, though he concedes to owning some avocado trees on his Mariquita Farm, “which apparently makes me an enabler or enhancer of politically incorrect thought.”

Just to be clear, food as a tool of political branding isn’t a new thing. In the late 1980s, George H.W. Bush sought to shed his image as a New England prepster by asserting that he loved pork rinds and hated broccoli. And in 1972, when Richard Nixon visited the Texas ranch of John Connally during his re-election campaign, an elite crowd of 200 invited guests enjoyed juicy steaks washed down by Moet et Chandon champagne, while a few miles away, Democrats sought to make the point that they were the party of ordinary working folks by featuring their vice presidential candidate, Sargent Shriver, at a $5-a-head street party featuring vats of tamales and kegs of beer.7

But efforts to use food to establish a candidate’s identity — chowing down on hot dogs at the state fair, or sampling pizza at a local pub — aren’t the same as what we see nowadays, which is a branding of voters by diet. I’m a political progressive, but don’t try to stop me from eating pork chops or bison burgers, nor shame me for putting avocado on my toast. I drink black coffee with lunch, as my Republican-leaning parents did, but does my occasional latte with whole milk reveal me to be a leftie? Are conservatives really supposed to avoid vegetables, because Donald Trump does?

This is not the way that food ought to figure in American politics. How we produce, process, pay for and distribute food in this country deserves deep scrutiny at government’s highest levels, but it’s overshadowed by the topic of the day, which never seems to involve that basic issue of what we eat. We need to be discussing issues like this: Tax policies encourage corporate ownership of farms, and low commodity prices for years have driven out of business millions of small farms, the kind that tend to better conserve the land. And our federal standards for what’s called “organic” products are so lax as to be laughable. Rather than using food preferences as a cudgel, politicians could view food policy as an environmental issue, a rural development issue, an immigration issue and a foreign policy issue.

But that requires the kind of long-term thinking that is hard for a public official to embrace when an election is just around the corner, as an election always is. Right now, we’re all signed up to board the bus to bust inflation, and if we can’t quickly do that, well, we’ll just blame it on somebody else — like, maybe, those folks who enjoy some avocado slices on toast. That approach to our politics is, sadly, as American as a juicy burger and fries.

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