New Deal Was More Than Emergency Programs

The Washington Post runs an article today, by Cindy Skrzycki, on grapes and grocers. While many think the New Deal is long gone and long dead, it actually lives on in unexpected places, such as the marketing of grapes. And others think that our food has gone to hell in a market basket, as the influence of big industrial ag takes over the food stores. And others, particularly conservatives, used to like to compare the federal regulations for [a commodity, like cabbage, or whatever] to something like the Gettysburg Address, as in: "It takes USDA 20,000 words to define a cabbage and Lincoln only took....

This quote from the story is for all those people:

"For the past three years, California growers and produce wholesalers have been feuding over whether the standard for U.S. Grade No. 1 should be changed. Buyers say permitting more loose grapes will lower the quality and make the fresh produce harder to sell.

Now Department of Agriculture officials, who set quality standards for 240 food products, are proposing to increase the number of loose grapes without considering them defective. The debate is over image and the bottom line in the $2 billion fresh table-grape market, which has grown as Americans each eat 7 to 8 pounds of grapes a year, up from 2 pounds a person in 1970."

The legislation for marketing orders, which stabilize and standardize and regulate and render less competitive the markets for fruit and vegetables dates back to the New Deal (and before, actually). The increase in volume has resulted, presumably, from the use of plastic bags to pre-package grapes and the creation of standards for the contents. It certainly makes grocery shopping easier--you can grab a bag of grapes with minimal attention to the contents, being sure that the contents are, in our phrase, "good enough for government work".