Over the course of the past year and a half I have had the pleasure of working as the Campus Kitchen Coordinator at W&L, working with a dedicated group of students to address issues with the food system in and around the Lexington-Rockbridge community. In any given week the student leaders of the Campus Kitchen may prepare 300 meals for our partner agencies in the community, teach nutrition lessons at an afterschool program, deliver 800 backpacks to local elementary school children for the weekend, or recover unserved food from the W&L or VMI dining hall that would have otherwise gone in the compost. These efforts are incredibly important, and the statistics surrounding the work this organization has done since 2006 speak for themselves. However, a crucial component to the work of the Campus Kitchen lies outside of the direct service these students perform, and that is the learning and education about the systems they are interacting with.
Throughout this summer I have been doing just that with a small cohort of dedicated student leaders. We have been reading, watching, listening, and discussing pressing issues in our society that drive right to the heart of why the problems we work to address each week with Campus Kitchen exist. The food system as we know it is a complex beast, and one that touches almost every member of our society. The broad scope and varied topics of these conversations has led us multiple times to a crossroads.
In our readings we have seen time and time again the exploitation of the environment, animals, and even human beings that come with the production of cheap food. Yet we have also seen the incredible injustices experienced by marginalized, low income communities in terms of food access, poverty, and health. How then do we juggle these two codependent forms of oppression? How do we reform our food system to create humane working conditions for laborers in meat packing plants in a way that doesn’t make meat entirely inaccessible for our communities experiencing poverty? How do we provide access to culturally appropriate and healthy foods at a price that someone living on SNAP, the federal food assistance program that averages roughly $4.20 per person per day, without necessitating a food system focused on producing food in the cheapest way possible?
This may seem to be an impossible task, a tragic choice if you will, and in many ways, it is, but we must recognize that the entire structure that frames this choice is an artificial one.
The state, state in this case referring to the interdependent relationship between public government and private corporations, has brought us to a point where it is cheaper to eat a McDonald’s hamburger than a head of lettuce. Think for a second about the absurdity of that statement. Think about the true costs of producing an eighth of a pound of ground beef if it was grown in a truly free market system. Between the original cost of the cow itself, the land to feed said cow, the processing time and equipment needed to turn a living being into a slab of salt and grease unrecognizable as such, you are looking at the most cost intensive way we could possibly feed ourselves, and yet it is sold for a dollar (this doesn’t even begin to address the litany of costs that industrial meat production creates as a result of the degradation it causes in our environment, or the people involved in it’s production). The system in which that is possible simply does not fall into the category of capitalism unless you begin to examine the role of government in that system.
There are several ways of viewing the idea of capitalism in this specific sense, and I argue that the differences between them stem from the role that government is meant to play.
On one hand you have the popular idea of what capitalism is, pushed primarily by the right, and that is a free market within a country that the government administers and keeps “free.” This is the general way in which our current governmental system is portrayed in popular media, taught in schools, etc. It is incredibly common to hear the need for deregulation, and the incentivization of business activity through tax breaks, land rezoning, etc. as a need for the government to take a more active role in protecting our free market from outside threat. This then leads to the argument that any programs the government implements towards regulations around how private business operates is a step towards socialism, or at least a step away from “capitalism”.
For anyone who has a conservative family member this argument is all too familiar. It pervades common politics, popular media, and the family dinner table. In the case of the United States this idea is one that is entirely constructed and falsified. To not acknowledge that government incentivization of business (take the annual $10 billion in government subsidies to crop insurance as an example) is inherently an infringement upon capitalism is buying into the myth of “capitalism” as it is presented by the state. In a truly free market system administered by the government the government would come nowhere near that sort of programming as it very directly moves them away from their supposed role as an administrator. This idea of course is espoused nowhere in popular culture as it doesn’t fit the narrative that our current corporate-political system has created. So the question then becomes, if the role of government in our economic system is not one of an administrator tasked with keeping the market free, then what is it?
In order to understand the role of the government in economics as it currently stands, we must shift our perception of what the government is. In the real situation we find ourselves in the government is an institution that, rather than being an impartial administrator, is an active member within the economy that can directly benefit from engaging with it. Far from being a police force aimed at protecting the rights of consumers and corporations within the capitalist system, the government has every incentive to construct a system and accompanying narrative (see last paragraph) that generates the most profit for itself or the people who make it up. How this ends up manifesting is a relationship between the government and private corporations that utilizes the strengths of each to maximize profits for the other. We see this very clearly in the tax breaks and direct revenues a company like Walmart gleans from government programs (see essay #1 if you missed that note), and in the massive donations these corporations make to political campaigns. Understood in this role, the actions of the government make total sense, and may even be justified (in a future essay I plan to write through the lens of positive intent on the part of our governmental system).
Now, what does this all have to do with the food system and the tragic choice we seemed forced into making between the oppression of laborers, the environment, etc. on one hand, and the oppression of individuals experiencing poverty on the other? When viewing the government as an active participant in an economic system rather than an administrator, you begin seeing the ways in which the rights of individuals become targeted in order to create a society that is dependent upon corporations and government to provide for our basic needs. From the policies designed to keep low income communities from acquiring wealth, (redlining, over policing, etc.) to laws directly preventing the production of safe, healthy food in urban areas, (zoning laws, “lawn standards” etc.) the government has taken an active role in restricting the rights and freedoms of individuals in order to limit the choices we all have around where we get our food and water. The limitation of these choices has come at the cost of our collective health, and independence for the sake of corporate profits time and time again.
So how do we begin to address these massive and complex issues? How do we avoid being forced into the tragic situation of having to choose between the wellbeing of two oppressed groups? To start with we must take a serious look at the system we currently live in, and have a frank conversation about the role of government within it. If the society that we want is one in which the government actually serves to administer, rather than participate in, our economy, we must walk back the laws preventing our people from striving for food sovereignty in meaningful ways. We must create a society that not only allows, but actively encourages its citizens to define and solve problems for themselves, in their own ways, rather than prescribing solutions to problems that may or may not exist. We must actively combat corporate interference in our political system, from our elections to our governmental departments. We must get really “radical” really quickly.
On the other hand, if the society that we want is one that the government does participate actively in the economy, then we must determine how that economy can actually benefit all of our citizens. Moving away from a culture of dependence upon corporations to solve problems that they create, we must accept the fact that the government does play an active role in the economy, and remove the stigmatization of regulation and oversight as being “socialist.” We must state very clearly that the government should be an actor for the interests of us, the people, rather than the interests of corporations. These corporations can advocate for their own profits just fine, they don’t need the government to buffer their profits at the expense of the citizens.
The choice of protecting the rights of farmworkers, meat packing employees, and other oppressed groups should not have to come at the expense of our most vulnerable citizens. If we reject the system that has created that choice, refuse to sacrifice our people for the sake of continued corporate profits, and give citizens back the right to define their problems and solutions on their terms, we can strive towards a more just society. To do any less is to perpetuate the violence and bloodshed of our communities.
This is not a call to communism. This is not a radical socialist perspective. This is an honest look at the differences between the propagandized picture of capitalism that is espoused in America every day, and the real implications of what capitalism actually looks like. If we continue to buy into the divisive narratives perpetuated by the state we will continue to be exploited for the sake of profits.