Like the Constant Gardner, no?

and, why this not a major story?

Panel Faults Pfizer in '96 Clinical Trial In Nigeria
Unapproved Drug Tested on Children

By Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 7, 2006; A01

A panel of Nigerian medical experts has concluded that Pfizer Inc. violated international law during a 1996 epidemic by testing an unapproved drug on children with brain infections at a field hospital.

That finding is detailed in a lengthy Nigerian government report that has remained unreleased for five years, despite inquiries from the children's attorneys and from the media. The Washington Post recently obtained a copy of the confidential report, which is attracting congressional interest. It was provided by a source who asked to remain anonymous because of personal safety concerns.

The report concludes that Pfizer never obtained authorization from the Nigerian government to give the unproven drug to nearly 100 children and infants. Pfizer selected the patients at a field hospital in the city of Kano, where the children had been taken to be treated for an often deadly strain of meningitis. At the time, Doctors Without Borders was dispensing approved antibiotics at the hospital.

Pfizer's experiment was "an illegal trial of an unregistered drug," the Nigerian panel concluded, and a "clear case of exploitation of the ignorant."

The test came to public attention in December 2000, when The Post published the results of a year-long investigation into overseas pharmaceutical testing. The news was met in Nigeria with street demonstrations, lawsuits and demands for reform.

Pfizer contended that its researchers traveled to Kano with a purely philanthropic motive, to help fight the epidemic, which ultimately killed more than 15,000 Africans. The committee rejected that explanation, pointing out that Pfizer physicians completed their trial and left while "the epidemic was still raging."

The panel said an oral form of Trovan, the Pfizer drug used in the test, had apparently never been given to children with meningitis. There are no records documenting that Pfizer told the children or their parents that they were part of an experiment, it said. An approval letter from a Nigerian ethics committee, which Pfizer used to justify its actions had been concocted and backdated by the company's lead researcher in Kano, the report said.

The panel concluded that the experiment violated Nigerian law, the international Declaration of Helsinki that governs ethical medical research and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Five children died after being treated with the experimental antibiotic and others showed signs of arthritis, although there is no evidence the drug played a part. Six children died while taking a comparison drug.

The panel recommended that Pfizer be "sanctioned appropriately" and directed to issue "an unreserved apology to the government and people of Nigeria." The company should also pay an unspecified amount of restitution, the report said. The panel recommended that Nigeria enact reforms to prevent a recurrence.

Aspects of the affair remain mysterious, such as why the report remains confidential. The head of the investigative panel, Abdulsalami Nasidi, said in a brief telephone conversation from Nigeria, "I don't really know myself" why the report was never released.

"I did my job as a civil servant," said Nasidi, who is quoted in the report as saying he has been the target of unspecified death threats.

A New York City attorney for the families of the children, Elaine Kusel of Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman, said her firm had spent years looking for the report, of which they believed there were only three copies. They tracked one to a Nigerian government safe, but it was reported stolen, she said. Another copy was reported to have been held by an official who died.

"It sounds like a mystery novel here, like John le Carré," Kusel said.

The current Nigerian health minister, Eyitayo Lambo, did not respond to calls and e-mail messages from a reporter. Dora Akunyili, director of the Nigerian drug control agency, said she did not know why the report remained confidential but added that her agency had independently concluded that "these people did not have authority to conduct the trial."

Executives at Pfizer, the world's biggest drug company, said they had not seen the report. After reviewing a copy, they responded in a two-page statement:

"The Nigerian government has neither contacted Pfizer about any of the committee's findings nor are we aware that the committee has approved a final report. Therefore it would be inappropriate for the company to respond to specific points in the document.

"However, as we have stated repeatedly over the past several years, Pfizer conducted this trial with the full knowledge of the Nigerian government and in a responsible way consistent with Nigerian law and Pfizer's abiding commitment to patient safety."

Pfizer said it had previously tested the drug in thousands of patients and found it effective. Local nurses explained the experiment to Nigerian parents, it added, and obtained their "verbal" consent. The company said that Trovan demonstrated the highest survival rate of any treatment at the hospital.

"Trovan unquestionably saved lives, and Pfizer strongly disagrees with any suggestion that the company conducted its study in an unethical manner," the statement said.

At the time of the Nigerian experiment, Pfizer was developing Trovan for release in the United States, where it was expected to gross up to $1 billion a year.

The FDA never approved Trovan for use in treating American children. After being cleared for adult use in 1997, the drug quickly became one of the most prescribed antibiotics in the United States. But Trovan was later associated with reports of liver damage and deaths, leading the FDA to severely restrict its use in 1999. European regulators banned the drug.

After The Post published its report, Nigeria's health minister at the time, Tim Menakaya, appointed a blue-ribbon panel of medical experts to look into Pfizer's actions, saying, "Let me assure you that my ministry will take all necessary steps to obtain details of this incident and make them known to the general public." The committee collected hundreds of documents and interviewed at least 26 people.

Pfizer had told authorities that a Nigerian doctor directed the experiment. The committee, however, found that researchers from Pfizer's U.S. office controlled the trial, and the inexperienced Kano doctor, Abdulhamid Isa Dutse, was the principal investigator "only by name."

Publications listed Dutse as the lead author of articles on Trovan, but the committee found that depiction "did not sufficiently reflect his role." Dutse indicated he was kept in the dark about the experiment's results and said he did not see at least one publication until the committee showed it to him.

"He was shocked that Pfizer could publish such data without showing him or intimating him with details," the report said, concluding that Dutse was "naive and exploited."

The report quoted Dutse as saying that Pfizer's motive was far from philanthropic.

"I have trusted people and am disappointed," Dutse told the committee. "I regret this whole exercise, I wonder why on earth I did this."

Dutse admitted that he created a letter after the experiment purporting to show that the test had been approved in advance by a Nigerian hospital's ethics committee. He then backdated the letter to March 28, 1996 -- a week before Pfizer's experiment began.

Pfizer used the letter as a key justification for the trial in discussions with reporters and submitted it to the FDA. U.S. regulations require the sponsors of foreign medical research seeking FDA approval to show that the tests have been reviewed in advance by an ethics committee.

The Post previously reported that the hospital had no ethics committee in March 1996 and that the letterhead stationery used was not created until months after the experiment's conclusion.

In a statement last week, Pfizer said that after that article appeared, the company investigated and found that the letter was "incorrect."

"Obviously this should not have occurred and the company very much regrets that it did," the statement said. "It is important to point out, though, that Pfizer thought proper procedure had been followed at the time of the clinical study."

The former director of Nigeria's version of the FDA said the agency had been unaware of the experiment. He told the panel that he "viewed the conduct of the trial by Pfizer as an act of deception and misuse of privilege."

The report said the treatment of two children during the experiment represented unspecified "serious deviations" from the trial's protocol and concluded that those deviations compromised their care. One was a 10-year-old girl identified only as Patient No. 0069, who was given the experimental antibiotic for three days as her condition deteriorated. She died without receiving any other antibiotic.

Last week, Rep. Tom Lantos of California, the senior Democrat on the International Relations Committee, described the report's findings as "absolutely appalling" and called on Pfizer to open its records.

"I think it borders on the criminal that the large pharmaceutical companies, both here and in Europe, are using these poor, illiterate and uninformed people as guinea pigs," Lantos said.

Lantos said he expected to introduce a bill requiring U.S. researchers to give regulators details of tests they plan in developing countries.

"It's the only ethical thing to do," Lantos said. The bill is similar to one his committee approved in 2001 that did not make it out of the House. "There should be a lot of bipartisan support for it. This outrages people."

The report's findings also breathe new life into a lawsuit against Pfizer, according to Kusel, who represents 30 Nigerian families. "It's great news, I'm very excited," she said when told of the committee's conclusions.

The families sued Pfizer in federal court in New York in 2001, alleging that the company had exposed the children to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."

A U.S. judge dismissed the suit last summer, saying U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction. Kusel is appealing.

"A report like this does not get suppressed without someone high up being involved," she said.

Disney losing appetite for fast food

( An LATimes tale via the Sun-Sentinel)

Marketing ties with McDonald's hit lean times

By Rachel Abramowitz
Los Angeles Times
Posted May 7 2006

For 10 years Disney and McDonald's appeared to have a beautiful billion-dollar marriage. Happy Meals bore little figurines of Nemo, Mr. Incredible, and Peter Pan.

But no more. This is one relationship that's ending because of the children.

Disney is not renewing its billon-dollar, cross-promotional pact with the fast-food giant, which ends with this summer's release of Cars and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The reason, in part, say multiple high-ranking sources, is the family-friendly entertainment giant wants to distance itself from fast food -- and its links to the epidemic of childhood obesity.

Disney's not the only studio that thinks french fries loaded with trans fats may be too hot to handle.

DreamWorks is working with McDonald's to promote Shrek 3, due out in 2007. But according to one top-level studio source, there is already internal debate about whether the lovable green ogre should steer clear of chicken nuggets and Big Macs in favor of the healthier fare on McDonald's menu, such as salads. Compounding the issue is the fact that Shrek is, after all, overweight.

The ending of the McDonalds-Disney partnership comes at a time when the processed and fast food industries are under fire on a number of fronts because of growing concerns about childhood obesity. Just last week, former President Bill Clinton succeeded in yanking sugary sodas from elementary school campuses.

But some say the more discreet actions of the movie industry could ultimately have a much greater impact, especially if other corporate giants follow suit.

"I think it would have impact in contributing to the cultural change that is necessary," says Dr. J. Michael McGinnis, the chairman of a National Academy of Sciences panel that just released a study showing how food marketing affected children's diets. "The committee thought it was important for the use of cartoon characters that appeal to children only to be used in the marketing of healthy products."

One of the industry's most prominent critics, Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, said it will be hugely significant if the Hollywood studios don't want to be associated with Happy Meals. "It will put more pressure on McDonald's to change what they sell in Happy Meals. The obesity issue would be irrelevant if the food in the Happy Meals was healthy."

This month Houghton Mifflin releases a new book by Schlosser and co-author Charles Wilson: Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food, that has already put McDonald's on edge.

Animated ambivalence

Disney declined to comment about the end of its arrangement with McDonald's. The company has not signed any new promotional deals with any fast-food providers even though its recent purchase of Pixar Animation Studios gives it an even bigger slate of potential family-oriented blockbusters to market to youngsters.

In a conference call with analysts last August, Steve Jobs, the chairman of Pixar and now Disney's largest shareholder, was asked about the end of the McDonald's deal, and signaled the company's ambivalence about the fast-food sector: "There is value in [fast food tie-ins]. But there are also some concerns, as our society becomes more conscious of some of the implications of fast food."

Skipping the fast-food sector would certainly impact Disney's promotional strategy, says analyst Lowell Singer, from A.C. Cowen. "Fast food has been a very important promotional partner in promoting films to children. As the animated marketplace gets more competition over the next few years, Disney will need to be much more aggressive and creative in reaching children though other promotional outlets."

Restaurant analysts don't expect the Disney decision to affect McDonald's, which is free to work with other movie studios, as well as toy companies as disparate as Lego and Build-a-bear. In fact, while McDonald's relationship with the entertainment giant boasted hit promotions for such films as 101 Dalmatians, and Lilo and Stitch, some franchisees began to chafe when the studio churned out clunkers like Treasure Planet. The company also had to abide by Disney's strict rules regarding use of their characters, which were not allowed to be seen eating McDonald's food.

While even nutritionists caution that fast food isn't the only culprit when it comes to childhood obesity, it's certainly a factor.

Happy Meals are specifically marketed to children between the ages of 3 and 9. A regular six-piece Chicken McNugget Happy Meal with fries and Hi-C contains 620 calories, 28 grams of total fat, and 5 grams of trans fat. In recent years, McDonald's has also added healthy alternatives such as apples and low-fat milk.

All about the toy

At the end of the day, what often sells a Happy Meal is the toy, not the food. A good toy promotion can double or triple the sales of Happy Meals.

Blame impressionable young minds and "the `nag' factor," said Prof. Jerome Williams, an advertising expert at the University of Texas.

"Kids see a movie, and see it's being promoted with a particular product, they'll nag their parents about it," he said. "Studies have shown that, after a while, parents will give into their children. They're not so much expressing a preference for a Happy Meal but for the character the Happy Meal is associated with."

According to study released last month by the National Center for Health Statistics of the Center for Disease Control, 19 percent of children ages 6-11 are overweight, and 17 percent of teenagers are overweight.

Those figures may be conservative, said Prof. James O. Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado. He says the new governmental data suggests that as many as 40 percent of young children are overweight, and about 20 percent fall into the obese category.

But Disney isn't divorcing itself from McDonald's, either. The fast-food giant will continue to be a staple in the theme parks. They're also leaving open the possibility of McDonald's promotions geared towards adults.

"Our relationship was ongoing before the agreement and will continue after," said Dean Barrett, senior vice-president of global marketing for McDonald's.

Other factors contributed to the unraveling of the McDonald's-Disney alliance.

For its part, Disney grew disgruntled with some of McDonald's more recent advertising efforts, and had problems with the fast food giant's toy production schedule, according to a source. The studio had to lock down release dates at least 18 months ahead of time to accommodate McDonald's needs. If the studio moved the date, it had to pay a steep penalty to McDonald's.

Hollywood and fast food have been closely aligned since the 1980s, with almost every major film targeting children boasting a fast food tie-in of some sort.

Crunchy Culture

Thanks to The Friendly Stranger for the story nod

Author Rod Dreher Has Defined A Political Hybrid: The All-Natural, Whole-Grain Conservative

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 3, 2006; C01

DALLAS

Two succulent, naturally raised chickens with good farm references are in the oven, snuggled up in a roasting pan like doomed lovers. Fat, perfect carrots are peeled, chopped, seasoned and ready to simmer.

"Notice that I am literally barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen," observes Mrs. Crunchy Con, and perhaps, she quips, she should have done her hair for the occasion like Phyllis Schlafly's. The li'l Crunchy Cons, boys ages 2 and 6, are out back in the warm Wednesday afternoon sun, making sculptures out of a bowl of ice cubes -- something constructive and home-schoolish, something very We're Not Watching TV.

In fact, if it weren't for their right-wing politics, the Crunchy Con family could be roasting organic chickens in Berkeley, or Takoma Park. It's that kind of house.

Wearing a faded green henley shirt, jeans and sandals is Mr. Crunchy Con, named Rod Dreher.

By day he is a right-leaning pundit and opinion editor at the Dallas Morning News -- grappling with his disappointment with how the war in Iraq is turning out. At night he comes home in a used 1993 Mercedes sedan with 109,512 miles on it, to live, like Thoreau at Walden, deliberately . (Oh, to hear him spill apologetically on about the car, how he didn't mean to wind up driving something so un-crunchy, so perceptibly fat cat, but really, when you compare it value-wise to a used Honda, and anyhow, please note that the AC is always broken . . . roll down your window and feel that? It's the cool breeze of intentional livin'.)

The Dreher family lives in a smallish, 1914 Craftsman bungalow near downtown Dallas -- a contradiction to the exurb-centric, sprawly-mall Republican ways of the megalopolis that surrounds them.

"A house like this, in a lefty city?" Dreher asks. "We would never be able to afford it. But here? In 'the hood'? We got this so cheap. We like it aesthetically. That's not always valued here."

In his recent book, the grandiloquently titled "Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or At Least the Republican Party)," Dreher, 39, describes his little house as the perfect expression of his politics.

I think Burkean relates to Edmund Burke

Two great quotes from this guy:

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

"And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them."

He and his wife, Julie, 31, put up religious art -- Orthodox icons, prints of divine old paintings. Days after they moved in, he writes of standing at the kitchen window at morning, "wondering what the peaches and figs would taste like later that summer," frozen in a prayer of gratitude to the Lord.

Mmmm, Organic Food

Now is the political season of the marginal, the other, the Odd Fit, and it's a fantastic time to try on new stereotypes. In lulls like these come constructs like Soccer Mom and Patio Man and Bobos in Paradise, and people fight on blogs and in book reviews about whether they really exist. Now is when pollsters and opinionistas seem able to construe any demographic reality you can conceive, calibrating the political nomenclature at will: Anti-war peaceniks and eco-activists are springing up in the swamps and rururbs; evangelicals are preaching green; lefties in Whole Foods aren't so sold on a woman's right to choose anymore.

So perhaps you are a Crunchy Con?

Do you shop organic, live closer in, recycle, hike 'n' bike -- yet oppose things such as abortion and gay marriage, on deeply held, faith-based principles? Did your pastor lose you as soon as he donned low-rise jeans and started getting all Dr. Phil and self-love on the congregation, via his Kelly Clarkson microphone headset? Do you sit in your Chevy Meanderthal, with Dan Zanes on the stereo to lull the toddlers, and really, really wonder WWJD?

Crunchiness, and its potential to both irk and challenge the Republican Party, has become Rod Dreher's central preoccupation: In the summer of 2002 -- not long after he'd discovered that Birkenstock sandals make his achin' dogs feel better and that the stuff from the co-op tastes even better than the No. 2 combo at his beloved Sonic Drive-In -- Dreher wrote a brief essay for National Review's Web site, which grew into a 3,000-word manifesto for the magazine.

"We made fun of our liberal friends," he originally wrote of his newfound love for organic food, "until we actually tasted the vegetables they got from the farm. We're converts now, and since you asked, I don't remember being told when I signed up for the GOP that henceforth, I was required to refuse broccoli that tastes like broccoli because rustic socialist composters think eating it is a good idea."

The essay ran, and though his right-wing friends mostly hated it, he got more positive responses from readers than for anything he'd ever written, all on a variation of "Me, too."

A broader manifesto began to take shape. Crunchy Cons prefer smaller houses, older things, the musty truth of Scripture. "Culture is more important than politics and economics" is a bullet-point, as is "Beauty is more important than efficiency. . . . Small, Local, Old and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New and Abstract." Meanwhile, "The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty and wisdom."

The Dreher family likes its comfy, Ikea living-room sofa and nights spent reading. It's about front porches, not Porsches. They like jazz on (yechh) public radio. They are committed to saving the planet. They closely scrutinize what their kids watch and read, and Dreher brags that his sons routinely ask to hear his old college-radio faves on the stereo, the good stuff -- U2 and XTC. What might strike you as sort of post-hippie strikes them, paradoxically, as intrinsically conservative. It's God, family and Elvis Costello. And speaking of kooky old GOP furnishings, they like Peggy Noonan, too. (And she likes them; she's a godmother to their youngest child.)

Before Texas, Rod and Julie Dreher made a really good stab at being Brooklynites. He was a film critic and later columnist at the New York Post. Dreher says he was always the most conservative person at cocktail parties in Manhattan, "unless someone named Podhoretz was in the room."

Since "Crunchy Cons" was published earlier this year (it has gone back for two additional printings, according to a publicist at Crown publishers), Dreher has also taken a drubbing from his punditry cohort, including National Review's Jonah Goldberg, who views "Crunchy Con" as heretical to the "big tent" ideals of the one true Republican faith. Goldberg bites at "Crunchy Con" with occasional essays and blog entries of his own.

"To Rod's credit, he doesn't claim that 'mainstream conservatives' are racists; but he does claim that they are uptight, blue-blazered, two-dimensional men motivated by greed. They are Godless materialists, unthinking dupes of Madison Avenue, with no connection to spirituality or religion unless, that is, you think being an idolatrous votary of the free market counts as being religious," Goldberg wrote in March.

"Crunchy conservatism strikes me now -- as it did back when I first heard about it -- as a journalistic invention, a confabulation fit for some snarking liberal reporter at the Washington Post 'Style' section."

Breaking Bread

Ding-dong, we're here, a smidge late.

Forgot to bring wine, and we are perfectly okay with the idea that most people don't give the tiniest, insignificant poops about what Jonah Goldberg thinks.

The Drehers are funny; they like to laugh at themselves, and they will talk about their ideas and politics and religion (and yours) long into the night. Their older child, Matthew, buries his nose in automotive magazines; the younger one, Lucas, delightfully smears himself with macaroni and begs for sips of white wine. As the night wears on, both will be relocated to the living room for approved media intake (the original 1974 version of "Benji").

The Drehers are self-conscious and good-natured about living the "sacramental" life described in his book: Dreher writes in a breezy, slightly Southern style that is less dogmatic than a reader of political tracts might expect. He essentially lays out his family's entire domestic process, from their practice of natural family planning over birth control (Julie's expecting their third child in October), to what they eat, to Julie's decision not to work, to how they home-school their boys with help from a parents cooperative.

In the book he goes on at length about their religious beliefs, and what particular strains of conservative Catholicism appeal to their spiritual sensibility, and why. Theologically, they are a few clicks left of Opus Dei, but they are not fans of bland, mainstream parish Masses; nor are they interested in whatever remains of folksy Vatican II reforms and flying-saucer-shaped churches of the 1970s.

"We'll need bread," Julie announces, from the kitchen.

"Just bread?" Rod asks her. "Not water?"

"Just bread," she affirms, and off he goes to a Whole Foods several blocks away.

We find the Whole Foods blessedly empty, almost private, before the 5 o'clock rush. We walk the aisles and Dreher says that even this, the country's most successful crunchy-grocery chain, can unnerve him, makes him think too hard about the surface details of moral value. "There's still something holier-than-thou about this place," he says, passing the homeopathic aisle with its herbs and echinaceas and all-natural Tom's toothpaste. "When I'm sick, I want Sudafed. I'm a skeptic on all this stuff."

On food, however, he speaks with the zeal of a convert -- though he discourages putting gourmet ecstasies up there with religious experience. A good meal is nothing like the way the Virgin Mary acknowledged his 30 days of prayer to her, back when Dreher, raised Methodist, was in his twenties and looking for enlightenment after too much partying and drinking. The Virgin answered, in her way, and he later converted to Catholicism. Julie, raised Baptist, converted too, after the couple met.

Growing up in St. Francisville, La., a town of 1,700 people about an hour north of Baton Rouge, Dreher says he was a chubby, junk-food kid who got to watch as much television as he liked. Despite a world of hunting and fishing, he became (and remains) "an avid indoorsman." He turned his nose up at the vegetables that came out of his mother's garden. A buck-hunting episode with his father was successful, but fills him with existential dread in the retelling. He ached for his town to get its own McDonald's. (It eventually did; as crunchy as Dreher considers himself, he confesses still to an inappropriate but ongoing affair with the snack machine at his office.)

"My God, our moms were all told that it's better for you to open a can!" he says, retrieving a whole-grain Tuscan loaf from the bakery counter. "It would be overstating it to see them as victims, though. The fact is, if you're going to cook a lot at home, it takes time." Which is another benefit, he says, of Julie's decision not to work. In the middle of "Crunchy Cons," apparently with a laptop in bed so he can take notes, Dreher coaxes his wife into what is essentially a verbatim exposition of her take on the Mommy Wars. Short version: She opted out -- way out -- and left her job as a magazine editor and never looked back.

"My folks think we eat the weirdest stuff," Dreher says. "These are people who suck the fat out of the heads of crawfish, but still. . . . People have the strangest class associations on food. It's a difficult conversation to talk about the virtues of certain foods or certain kinds of housing. Pretty quick someone is saying you're an elitist, you're a snob."

He has seen something among the whole-grain muffins:

"Are these, like, the 'organic' Peeps?" he marvels, holding up a purply-green package of awfully correct candy. He squints at them through squarish, thoughtful specs.

'Hurtful' Criticism

"Crunchy Cons" is riven with the careful ambivalence of a seeker.

Dreher will make an argument for the environment or against capitalism and then sugar it with waitaminnit paragraphs that begin with the folksy "now" and "look" (as in Look, don't get me wrong. Or Now, I'm not saying . . . .) He realizes that others have been living politically conservative, back-to-the-land lifestyles years and decades longer than he has, which fascinates him.

In the book, he sets out to find and talk to them. There are farmers and home-schoolers and theological rebels. There are charismatic Catholics living in an "intentional community." There are prayerful, hardworking families that never buy anything. Some of them he finds through people who e-mailed him to huzzah about the original crunchy manifesto; some he finds at the co-op, where they're selling organic meat. The result is an often tangential journey, with a sometimes naive air about it, which Dreher's critics have noticed:

Dreher is "weighed down by self-referentialism and a worrying tendency towards self-congratulation," one reviewer sniffed in the conservative Washington Times. "A somewhat arbitrary launching pad for a variety of fairly tepid critiques against mainstream conservatism and the modern world." (The New York Times, predictably, sorta dug it, man: "Makes a convincing case that there is a market for his brand of half-hippie traditionalism, even if it is not exactly the conservatism we know today.")

Others have decried crunchy conservatism as pure fad, a folly of book marketing. "Some of it was hurtful," Dreher admits, "because it was coming from people I consider to be my friends."

This seeking seems to never end. He was a typical, left-leaning undergrad at Louisiana State in the late '80s. Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman came to campus, and Dreher volunteered to escort him around town. A wigged-out Hoffman demanded to be driven to Jimmy Swaggart Bible College so he could yell obscenities out the car window and maybe pick a fight. There was an arrogance to it. It was a small moment in a Dreher's journey rightward, toward something that seemed more sensible, upstanding.

"Julie said something to me on the same lines not long ago, in response, I seem to recall, to how once I get fixed on a new idea, or set of ideas, I allow them to take up every spare space in my mind as I follow them wherever they lead. My ninth-grade English teacher told me back then that I reminded her of 'The Elephant's Child' in Kipling, full of 'insatiable curiosity,' " Dreher says, later, by e-mail.

Their devotion to Catholicism is strong, but Mr. and Mrs. Crunchy Con have had problems with the church of late, over its handling of its priestly pedophilia scandals. They even considered converting to the Eastern Orthodox church, with its incense and icons. It had a liturgical and communal vibe that "was so much more crunchy than any parish I'd been to," he says. "Though Orthodoxy feels right, the main obstacle for us is the question of capital-T truth. . . . If I come through this and stay Catholic, I'll be a much different Catholic, that's for sure."

Julie took a play-date trip with another home-schooling mom to one of Dallas's megachurches recently, where she discovered "the best food court I've ever been to in my life." Rod says he's never been to a megachurch, and in his book he criticizes what defines the spirituality and politics there: "Almost all on the religious right are Christians -- and in this broad sense, I am on the religious right -- but it's odd how we limit our political concern to sexual issues," Dreher writes. "Jesus had as much or more to say about greed as he did about lust. But you will not find most American religious conservatives worrying overmuch about greed."

Dreher prospered as a film critic at a few papers in the 1990s, but he recalls sitting in a festival screening of indie filmmaker Todd Solondz's 1998 movie "Happiness," in which, among other things, a pedophile rapes his young son's friend at a slumber party. The critics and cineastes around him swooned over and praised it, and Dreher sank into his chair with a growing alienation from the pop machine. Not long after that, he became a conservative op-ed critic of cultural and social mores. He thrived as a pro-Bush, pro-war pundit. (His views on the war now? Changed; and certainly crunchier.)

Jangled by 9/11 and feeling cramped, the Drehers moved in 2003 to Dallas, where she grew up.

It didn't, he sighs, "seem very crunchy."

Soon he was pontificating online against sprawl: "In my part of town, developers are tearing down older houses left and right, and putting up McMansions on small lots. . . . [T]he developers invoke the Free Market, as if it were the Magisterium of the Church. I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification. . . ."

"Seems the folks in God's Country -- well, now don't git him wrong, they got plenty of them seeds o' faith and virtue, but they jes' don't share ole Rod's sophistercated view of housing preservation," slammed Roy Edroso, a frequent Dreher critic who writes hilariously sharp liberal screed at Alicublog. He has called Dreher "a professional Ned Flanders impersonator," and the Crunchy Con concept a "revival of Jesus Freaks as home-schoolin', homo-hatin' yuppies. . . . I liked hippies better when they had weed.

"You made your bed, hoss," Edroso railed, about Dreher's ooky feelings of dislocation in Dallas. "Now die in it."

One for the Road

The chickens are perfect.

Julie has made a loaf of pumpkin bread with chocolate chunks in it.

Driving away from the house of the Crunchy Cons, go ahead and eat the slice you took along in a paper towel. Eat it before the first stop sign. It is warm and comfortable. It's the bread of the new right. God, we think, merging onto the freeway, those people sure seem happy.