WWEBE? (What would Edmund Burke eat?)

Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, two of the best-known American enemies of Big Agriculture and proponents of the local-foods movement, are usually seen as speaking from the countercultural left. But what's leftist about rejecting lousy, overprocessed food?

Coincidentally, both publius at Obsidian Wings and John Schwenkler, in a cover story in the American Conservative, are simultaneously asking that question. The conservative political theorist Edmund Burke, scourge of the French Revolution, didn't embrace tradition for tradition's sake, publius points out. Rather, he saw tradition as "a giant laboratory that provides us insight into what works and what doesn’t work."

Pollan's remarkably parallel argument, as laid out in "In Defense of Food," the blogger continues, is that living food traditions tell us more about nutrition than the nutritionists can. Scientists still don't know why the so-called French or Mediterranean diets are healthy -- and yet they are. Meanwhile, the American diet of processed sugar and other carbs is truly revolutionary: We're putting stuff in us that no humans in history have. (The victims of our revolution die by heart attack or diabetes, not the guillotine).

Publius thinks Burke's arguments "sound a lot more persuasive in the dietary context" than the political, but Schwenkler is an across-the board conservative, meaning he puts more weight than Pollan or Waters do on a supposed link between the rise of big government and the ascendence of the McNuggets-and-corn-syrup culture, and he's turned off by the occasionally "fuzzy headed" rhetoric that surrounds the local-foods movement. But right-leaning readers, he concludes, should look past their biases and recognize that they and Waters, proprietor of the Berkeley-based (gasp!) restaurant Chez Panisse, just might share some values:

Neighborhood gardens, cooking classes in schools and church basements, and the promotion of local and co-operative markets are the kinds of projects that will build community; revitalize regional economies; encourage stable, healthy families; and instill the kinds of civic attitudes that make centralized government appear burdensome.