discussing food in freemarket capitalism

The first rather existential and philosophical piece we read on the different ways food can be seen and for what purpose it serves was rather illuminating in highlighting important aspects of the way food presently works that I have never considered before. Something that has been on my mind is this concept of ‘removal’ from what older generations might call ‘reality’ but really, from traditional systems and ‘feeling’ based ways of understanding the world. This is a hard metric to measure with any accuracy as each generation and even society had its issues; for it was only at Rome’s downfall the centers of entertainment had enough combined seats to hold the capacity of half the city at once.

I have my own philosophies around food and how current systems are functioning as well, and it is something I am passionate about, as I feel an important but sometimes neglected aspect of environmentalism is the less obvious, urban environment based dangers that affect individuals to great extent. I find our society increasingly disconnected from long-term emotional-chemical stability, at least compared to how I felt myself operate earlier in lifetime.

My main point I want to highlight is that I feel that largely unregulated consumer based capitalism has produced systems that aren’t designed with the common good in mind; but rather to figure out how to take advantage of the consumer, allowed by a system that rewards it. I think that food is a great example of this. This is evidenced in America by obesity, chronic disease (heart disease, diabetes) and food insecurity statistics, to name a few.

In a “late stage” freemarket system, if a company was attempting to become competitive in the market for a certain food product, and found that adding (potentially harmful) food dye to the product was a great way to boost sales to a competitive level; they may be very likely to follow this strategy as there may be no other way to compete in a market that otherwise allows it. I can equate it to how anabolic steroids are allowed in some bodybuilding competitions, as the competitors that choose not to use them barely stand a chance on stage (if they even get there). The issue is that perhaps years and years of less-than-should-be-regulated market competition regarding food makes it a self-sustaining cycle, with food companies eventually becoming rich enough to lobby politicians, further cementing less-than-should-be-regulated policies from the FDA. Attempting to fix these systems, even just to match European standards, would dismanted hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure, jobs and exports that the government would be extremely apprehensive to enact.

To more directly relate it to waste, I think that these systems that make food so addicting rely on many waste products being generated at a greater pace; single ingredient food items don’t require extensive processing that is often associated with byproducts or degradable industrial machinery. They also come in more packaging, sometimes relying on packaging that provides no practical use. Imagine a reinvention the dynamics related to the grocery store; perhaps having some system of healthier / easier to understand ingredients, and having customers bring their own reusable packaging (tupperware, bags, boxes etc.) to the store in an attempt to both reduce waste and producer related costs of packaging. I think there are viable solutions that are going to become more prevalant as people both gain awareness of the system and resources in general become more scarce or valuable.