“Alice in Wonderland – The gushing of waters is all Wet. (NRO via Food Dude)

In an interview shortly after the groundbreaking, Alice Waters — the organic-food world’s most active and least humorous spokesperson — commented on the new White House vegetable garden: “The most important thing that Michelle Obama did was to say that food comes from the land. . . . People have not known that. They think it comes from the grocery store.”

Oh, really — is that what people think? To whom, exactly, is Ms. Waters referring? Is she referring to the millions of people living in the grain-belt states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri — states one cannot drive across without spending hours staring at corn and soybean fields? The millions living along the Pacific Northwest coast and Alaska who are supported by the fishing industry? The fishermen of Gloucester, Mass.? Maybe she is talking about people living in Wisconsin — where dairy farms and cow pastures are as ubiquitous as art galleries in New York. Or perhaps she is referring to the thousands of people like me, who — in the suburbs of an East Coast metropolis — just throw a few Lowe’s-purchased plants in the ground, and hope for some rain to support a small backyard garden. Yes, Ms. Waters, even these “people” know that the grocery store doesn’t spontaneously produce food.

The National Review is dismissive of exponents of post-corporate farming? Color me surprised.

America’s robust agricultural sector has made food cheaper and more plentiful not just for our nation’s citizens, but for the entire world. Environmentalists may dismiss big, industrial farms, but it is these largely American innovations that are helping feed the world, and keeping costs down for coupon clippers like me.

This conclusion is simply emblematic of the National Review’s mindset of Corporatism = Good. No mention of the side effects—intense use of antibiotics and chemicals, the monoculture of commodity agriculture, the circumvention of the natural order—that inevitably result from the mass industrialization of our food chain.

—Julie Gunlock, a former congressional staffer, is now a stay-at-home mom.

How very convenient for her to excoriate Ms. Waters for high-minded condescension and to call her out for casting stones from an ivory tower. I mean, who amongst us doesn’t work from home penning op-eds for a magazine (that is subsidized by ideological largesse) after a career working on Capitol Hill?

I think the point Alice Waters is trying to make, however inartfully it may be portrayed, is that industrialized farming has made everything a commodity, and that is precisely the problem. Food shouldn’t be treated like fungible materials such as petroleum or copper. The mass scale industrialization championed by Ms. Gunlock in practice serves the master of cheap protein. Farm land is usurped by a mostly singular goal to provide calories for livestock in an unnatural setting that requires massive amounts of antibiotics to offset the disease and amelioration that results from taking animals out of existing ecosystems and fattening them in cities that are not unlike an animal husbandry version of “The Matrix”.

The factory farm didn’t exist 50 years ago. Government farm policy in the last half-century has effectively given corporations a massive assist in turning society into a socially engineered petri dish for misbegotten “good” intentions. The result is a strangely bizarre, impersonal and mechanically artificial reality where “efficiency” has trumped common sense.