The Lexington column in this week’s Economist magazine is about the agricultural
(emphasis on cultural) differences of the U.S. and Europe, and it is worth reading
— especially as Washington voters will decide in November whether to follow
the European Union’s lead and require labeling of genetically engineered foods.

Rivals in other lands have sniffy theories about why America, a rich
country, is so good at producing cheap food. They paint American farmers as
pawns of giant agri-corporations, bullied by market forces to produce
genetically modified Frankenfoods. . . .

Foreign rivals are right about the power of market forces in America, but
wrong to see its farmers as passive victims. Americans have thought differently
about agriculture for a long time—and not by accident. . . .

Because America was a new country, argues Greg Ibach, head of agriculture in
Nebraska’s state government, a primary concern was feeding a growing population
and moving food large distances. Europeans fussed about appellations and
where food came from. Americans “treated food as commodities”.

Indeed, there is a lot of land to cover in getting food from agricultural areas to population centers in the U.S., and it took great advances in transportation to make it happen. As economist Edward Glaeser wrote in Triumph of the City,

Before the Ohio and Erie canals, the high cost of moving grain led farmers to transform it into whiskey, which is durable and contains more than twice as many calories per ounce as raw corn, making it lighter, and some might say tastier, on a per-calorie basis. As transport costs fell with canals and railroads, it became cost-effective to ship corn in porcine form, because ham lies between corn and whiskey in both calories per ounce and durability. Cities like America’s Porkopolis, Cincinnati, and Chicago, specialized in slaughtering and salting the animals that were brought there by nearby farmers. Chicago’s stockyards switched from pigs to beef when Gustavus Swift introduced a refrigerated railcar that could keep slaughtered beef from spoiling in transit. Like many important innovations, Swift’s great idea now seems blindingly obvious. He put the ice on top, instead of on the bottom, so it melted down onto the sides of beef and kept them cool.

And, as we wrote in Washington Cargo Rides the Rails (part 3 of a series on trade and transportation — see also part 1 and part 2),

For more than 100 years, Washington’s economy has relied on high quality rail service. The arrival of the railroads to Western Washington in the 1890s connected the state’s timber and agricultural producers to national markets in the east, greatly expanding opportunities in the state. Before then, the state was accessible only by wagon roads to the east or sailing ships to San Francisco.

Rail connections provided a major boost to the state’s growing trade economy.

But back to Lexington:

Such differences of history and culture have lingering consequences. Almost
all the corn and soyabeans grown in America are genetically modified. GM crops
are barely tolerated in the European Union. Both America and Europe offer
farmers indefensible subsidies, but with different motives. EU taxpayers often
pay to keep market forces at bay, preserving practices which may be quaint,
green or kindly to animals but which do not turn a profit. American subsidies
give farmers an edge in commodity markets, via cheap loans and federally backed
crop insurance.

These cultural and historical differences help explain why the European Union requires labeling of genetically engineered foods, and why the U.S. so far hasn’t. It’s not a question of safety; instead, it’s about history and culture. We simply have different attitudes about food and farming.