[aaronbwebber]

So, it's a fine article, with lots of interesting details about Victorian food supply....but you could write more or less the exact same article replacing "cheap food" with "cheap clothes" or "cheap mobile phones" or "cheap any consumer good" and the stories about Victorian costermongers with Vietnamese sweatshop workers, or Chinese electronics factory workers, or Honduran coffee pickers, etc., and the end of the article seems to be arguing for just paying more for food?

I don't think talking about poverty in modern societies in terms of economic sectors instead of trying to address it at a societal level is particularly useful. The point of the article should not be "let's all pay more for food" it should be "give everyone a UBI and if that means food costs more because you have to pay people more to work as cooks or strawberry pickers, that's a _good thing_.

[curation]

My takeaway is that is exactly what this article is about - food is one category along with clothing, phones, material culture - and he is not arguing about what we pay. Rather, he is describing a facet of the structure of Western Civilization that requires a de-humanized constantly replenished underclass to provide us with the cheap good food we want. The fact is we cannot have this infinite growth within a finite biosphere and his article explores the relationship between the West and the so-called developing world and how, though we seem opposite we are the same now, because the neocropolitics we practice is now burgeoning within the West and the shape of starvation just has a different mask depending upon context. The book and the article use a genealogical methodology, which is what is the norm now is this work. (I am a Critical Theorist).

[dragontamer]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump

If anything, centralized food production in the modern, western world is extremely efficient.

The blood of animals is turned into high-grade fertilizer. The bones into soup stock. Every portion of the animal is shipped off to a country that finds it tasty (ie: China eats the ears and feet, we Americans eat the belly).

I think we should continuously think about how to optimize our system. But simultaneously, we need to understand how our system is far, far more efficient than the historical norms.

-------------

Today's machines make the processing and harvesting of food incredibly efficient.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcG0jVuThfs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eTWpLZ-Hn8

Some plants are still processed by hand (IIRC: Strawberries still need to be done by hand). But for the most part, we're moving towards highly automated, highly efficient, food producing machines.

The progress of farming and agriculture continues forward today. I think there's issues in our system that need to be discussed, but the modern day is clearly far better than the past.

--------

EDIT: The issues of today's era, is the production, distribution, and investment of these expensive machines. Who owns the machines? Can small farms afford these machines? Or will farms centralize into monopolies (who can afford the machines, pushing the smaller farms out of business?).

"Who owns the machine" becomes copyright and patent law rather quickly. Right to repair, right to reverse-engineer. Etc. etc.

[adrianN]

A major problem with our relentless optimization of food production is that we don't price in the externalities, like large scale destruction of ecosystems or the exploitation of workers. Few people argue that we should go back to pre-modern agriculture (billions would starve!), but I think it's fairly obvious that our current system is not optimizing a good cost function.

[dragontamer]

That's why they're called externalities. Laissez Faire capitalism cannot handle externalities.

Regulation and laws that run counter to pure capitalism are needed. I'm not talking about going 100% communist here, but anti-trust laws, cap-and-trade, taxes, and other such regulations can help factor the externality problem into an otherwise capitalist marketplace.

[dqpb]

> de-humanized constantly replenished underclass

This is not unique to "Western Civilization".

[an_opabinia]

> requires a de-humanized constantly replenished underclass to provide us with the cheap good food we want

You're going to get further convincing people to care about human suffering (the goal of the article) here by pointing out what a failure Soylent was. Why?

First you'd have to anticipate that all people are going to talk about here is, "Economics. Costs. Pricing. What about if robots made the food instead? Then there is no underclass." Those people aren't even transhumanists i.e. inhabiting some far-off possibly impossible future.

The kinds of foods you could conceive are harvested and processed entirely by robots, end to end, and thus involves no explicit human suffering, are actually really crappy, and no one wants, even when they were made by humans first. That's what Soylent was, it was one guy's algal flour product that probably, truthfully, could be totally automated. It sucked, let's be real.

It's this sort of capitalistic argument, "if it fails in the marketplace it must be bad," that just gets through to people simpler, and clearer. That's the starting fact that gets people to listen. Not de-humanization. Not that there isn't a place for critical theory.

But that you can just discuss facts, like yes, there is a dehumanized replenished underclass, and yet, here we are buying berries from Costco. Their brains turn off. And I wouldn't just brush that off as ignorance, or claim some conspiracy that people are conditioned to first ask if something does or does not make money, because capitalism.

It's just tough to know which things to pay attention to, so if there's a simple framework that helps you, on average, pay attention to the right things and get through life, buying berries, you'll use it.

Unless you're unfortunately born to pick berries instead. So personally, I believe the reason rich people actually frame regulators literally and John Rawls philosophically as the enemy, unequivocally, is that the veil of ignorance much more clearly threatens capitalism than perpetual human suffering through wage slavery (a factual thing!) ever did.

[oezi]

Agree, the point is not "let's all pay more for food" frankly because that doesn't work. Even if you wanted to get more money to cooks and strawberry pickers (or to the animals which suffer as more humane conditions), it is just impossible to achieve because any money spend by the end customer is just siphoned off by value chain. Spend double on organic meat to get maybe 1% to 5% more money spend on the actual product and the employees. The rest is profit.