So what’s the solution?
Glad you asked.
We need a more centrally managed economy, but also a more locally sourced and distributed model, for basic necessities of life. In particular, our food production would benefit from less centralized distribution and much better planning. If this sounds like socialism, it’s because it is, at least for the basics. Letting capitalism anywhere near the things we all need, food, shelter, energy, water, and healthcare, was an enormous mistake.
Ya, I know capitalism gives us great stuff, and lots of it, but that’s the problem when it comes to basic needs. What sane person wouldn’t trade off hundreds of varieties of cereal for a more basic selection if that variety came at the price of malnourished kids? Remember the matronly lunch lady we all knew from school? She no longer works for the school, but for a private company the school hired to make lunch preparation more efficient. That company likely has a very highly paid CEO and staff that will fire lunch lady if she lets one kid slide on paying for their meal.
No one escapes capitalism once it gains control of some facet of life where there is a potential profit to be made, not even kids.
America currently wastes, as in throws away to landfills, forty percent of the food products it grows and processes but will deny food to kids. If the parents can’t afford a lunch ticket it’s a pretty good bet that isn’t the only meal the kid is skipping. The purpose is no longer feeding children in such a case, so the kid skipping lunch is not an issue. The purpose is making profits for the lunch company and lunch lady’s kindness, or the nutritional needs of the kid, don’t fit into that model.
Consider if you will (can’t write that without conjuring Rod Serling) a large nation that dedicates forty percent of its productive capacity to grow food, including all the environment destroying methods of modern agriculture, to landfills. After topsoil destructive tilling and microbe killing chemical land preparation, GMO seeds are planted. Those seeds are given a steady supply of precious groundwater until they mature.
At that time the mostly nutrition free plants are harvested and sent to processing facilities, perhaps far away, by air polluting large trucks that demand resource depleting and environmentally destructive concrete roads. Since those facilities only pay a portion of the cost of growing the food, with government subsidies picking up the bulk of farm profits, they can be selective, rejecting any blemished or “not pretty” production. This will cull out about 20% of what the farmer grew.
Another 20% will end up sent to other landfills via spoilage or expiration dates that may, or may not, affect the quality of the end product. Some of that may be donated to food banks as liability and tax benefits dictate, but the bulk will be tossed, complete with the packaging, handling costs, and other investments required to deliver it as if it were to be sold.
If we blocked off a section of the country that represented the land required to produce forty percent of our total production of food, moved the processing facilities needed to process that into the same zone, as well as the infrastructure and transportation needed to move it all from farm to table, only to bury it, causing massive methane releases, the world would react by attacking us as completely and destructively insane. But hey, that’s how capitalism works. As long as dollars are moved from consumers to corporations it all seems to flow efficiently, even if it doesn’t, and even if it threatens life on earth. No kind matronly lunch ladies allowed.
