"The obsession with eating natural and artisanal is ahistorical. We should demand more high-quality industrial food."

This one's a few years old, but fascinating. Historian and philosopher Rachel Laudan coins a derisory term and identifies a major problem, one requiring immediate polemical action.

Like so many of my generation, my culinary style was created by those who scorned industrialized food; Culinary Luddites, we may call them, after the English hand workers of the nineteenth century who abhorred the machines that were destroying their traditional way of life.

She devotes several thousand words to correcting the historical record with regard to the spurious claims of the Culinary Luddites, who apparently have brainwashed the media.

Modern, fast, processed food is a disaster. That, at least, is the message conveyed by newspapers and magazines, on television cooking programs, and in prizewinning cookbooks.

The conclusion is a stirring call to arms on behalf of Culinary Modernism.

What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it, an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor, and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial.

Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time.

In Laudan's eagerness to assume the role of a foodie Ayn Rand, and conclude the exacting torture required to annihilate her straw man (really, can we equate the scattered activities of "Culinary Luddites" with ISIS or Al-Qaeda?), she skips past a major point with just one sentence.

Certainly no one would deny that an industrialized food supply has its own problems, problems we hear about every day.

Think so?

Unfortunately, that's the sum total of Laudan's recognition of problems in the industrialized food supply. She offers no further recognition of additives, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides and other minor irritants, and proposes no solutions to problems she concedes exist, but doesn't define.

The overall accuracy of her historical survey is rock solid, but in her zeal to crush the relatively small number of dissenters comprising the straw man, she completely ignores the 800-lb gorilla.

And while we're dispensing cliches, remember that the devil's in the details.

A Plea for Culinary Modernism ... The obsession with eating natural and artisanal is ahistorical. We should demand more high-quality industrial food.

Lawsuits are a fine antidote to stubborn, reactionary pigheadedness.

But enough about Harvest Homecoming, the mayor and the newspaper, combining to defend New Albany's peculiar institution against the godless Commie fun-killers who can't be identified by name, who spread subversion on blogs no one reads, precisely because no one reads at all.

Let's enjoy a nice, new Counting Crows tune, because what's a scarecrow after all?

That's right. A straw man.

What I learned this week, local indie business owner's edition.

Last night, Susan “Marktmeister” Kaempfer was permitted (nay, actively encouraged by both city and council) to erect a straw man (“they’re going to take away our farmers market”) and to smash it to pieces. This she proceeded to do, as any five-year-old child might have done in the absence of adult supervision.

It should suffice to say that adult supervision did not materialize.

The council needn’t have abetted it by moving non-agenda speaking time forward, but it did, because the body does not possess firm, principled leadership. It has barely any leadership at all in the absence of texting the Democratic Party chairman prior to meetings.

City Hall remained aloof because it received a few phone calls, and it persists in thinking that the telephone is the only means of communication on the planet, and so it feared them, reverting to the traditional rope-a-dope: Heck, we can’t do anything. After all, we’re only the mayor and chosen staff. Let the council have what it wants, as inherited from the departed England administration.

It was the usual black eye for New Albany; the usual squabbling, bickering and nutjobbery, and the same old political paybacks to the same old suspects without any intrusion of contemporary reality. Of course, at the end of the meaningless, senseless, insulting, Kaempferesque spectacle, there was no firm resolution of anything at all, because there was no rational consideration preceding or prompting any of it. There was nothing to vote up, or down, just fetid air heavy with fear, loathing and lies.

As Billy Preston once advised, “Nothing from Nothing Leaves Nothing,” although in New Albany, nothing from nothing leaves a $300,000 bill for a project on a plot of land no one knows the value of, on behalf of a transient retail organization, as politically enabled by a non-profit group unable or unwilling to restrain the for-profit political avarice of certain of its members. City Hall slouched, whistling. Thumbs were twiddled. Shirley Baird nodded knowingly to a tomato vendor, whose thumb would be taken off the scale henceforth.

But here’s the kicker.

We already knew it. Been there, done that.

There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but in New Albany, there are 108,000 ways to know when the fix is in. Rather, here is what I learned yesterday, as composed of two equal parts: First, the morning meeting between city officials and representatives of downtown groups, at which we learned that economic development policy (or non-policy) is determined solely by the "tools" handed down to the city by others, and are confined by a box with clearly delineated lines that preclude creative thinking, and second, the staged, pre-arranged and gloriously Abner Louima’ed farmers market debacle.

In New Albany, part-time, short-term market vendors, most of whom do not reside in New Albany, and who avail themselves at rapidly escalating city expense of the farmers market facility for 40-odd prime days during the year, are far more worthy of City Hall’s and the city council’s attention and money than local independent small business owners who have invested millions of dollars and countless hours in operating 365 days out of the year.

It would seem that our phone calls don't count. 

On second thought, the Scarecrow of Oz was a straw man, wasn't he?

Just the other day I was asked this question:

“Who would you use as a straw man if Dan Coffey weren’t around?”

My answer was Steve Price. Actually, I would cherish the opportunity to refrain from exposing the inadequacies and other local nonentities, but at root, the question itself is invalid.

Wikipedia defines a straw man as follows:

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw man argument" is to describe a position that superficially resembles an opponent's actual view but is easier to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent (for example, deliberately overstating the opponent's position). A straw man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it carries little or no real evidential weight, because the opponent's actual argument has not been refuted.

Its name is derived from the practice of using straw men in combat training In such training, a scarecrow is made in the image of the enemy with the single intent of attacking it. Such a target is, naturally, immobile and does not fight back, and is not as realistic to test skill against compared to a live and armed opponent.

It isn’t necessary to misrepresent Coffey’s or Price’s arguments in such a manner, because their actual views are easy to refute. If anything, it's far less a case of straw men as it is fish in a barrel.

I'm perfectly content to permit posterity to be the judge. In a few years, read back over the hundreds of postings herein, and tally the scorecard.

But thanks for asking.