Have you ever noticed that the food in the cafeterias of our public schools is not all that different from prison food? Nominally nutritious, it does not taste very good. The same is also true for food in other institutional settings, where people have very little choice. This is why food in hospitals is not very tasty, though it can be quite expensive, and why the food in concentration camps is also pretty bad. And don't even get me started on what they feed chimpanzees in zoos and sanctuaries!
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| A Bowl of Oatmeal Can Be Had At Home |
Now, before you stop me and say: "Well, of course, the food in concentration camps isn't very good! It's not supposed to be!" -- Let me tell you, not every concentration camp is intended by the people who run it to be a death camp. Some Camp Commandants really do want to provide their inmates with humane and even happy circumstances. But there is something about the concentration camp setting that makes it impossible, even when the inmates themselves are preparing the food they will eat. And while we might be tempted to say that this is just the nature of cafeterias, that is demonstrably not true.
Contrast your average institutional cafeteria -- school, hospital, geriatric nursing home -- with your favorite cafeteria-style restaurant. Why is it that the food is bad in the former and good in the latter? It's not so much the price, but the fact that diners have a choice. We vote with our money, rather than in some other way, and every vote is a veto. The votes are not averaged out. There is no majority rule. We do not collectively decide which restaurant we are all going to patronize. Each of us takes our small wad of cash and decides for himself. And that makes a huge difference!
Each of us gets to decide whether we eat out or not, when we eat out, how often we eat out, and where we choose to eat. The money that we use on our dining choices does not merely pay for the food and the service -- it also serves as quality control. Take away the right to say no, to decide not to eat there, and while there still will be food on the table at first, it will not be as good -- nor will the service be adequate.
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| Excerpt from Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way |
The problem with public as opposed to private cafeterias is not redistribution of resources. It is that marketplace voting is no longer operating as quality control. At Weihsien, people could still vote who the head cook would be, but they made that decision collectively. Individuals had lost their veto. They could no longer decide to take their business elsewhere, because to allow them to do so might cause somebody who is not as smart or farsighted to go without food altogether. Even when the choices are more varied than that, the fewer choices people have, the less likely their choices are to function as quality control.
Of course, it's not always clear what has happened. For instance, in the average American school cafeteria, people can still bring food from home and turn down the cafeteria food. But did you know that once most of the children are eating cafeteria food, some entirely subsidized by the government while others still paying a fee for their share, the votes of the children who do not like the cafeteria food count for considerably less than in an open market? It is this kind of creeping change that has reduced the quality of the food in the American supermarket, as well. When free market-style choice is coupled with forced choices that are legally introduced into the system, we don't always see clearly how we have been robbed of our veto. Many food choices that we might like to make today, such as buying unpasteurized milk, have been driven underground, where people must pay cash. Yet the people on public assistance with food stamps are becoming a bigger and bigger market share in the supermarket. When producers of valuable food are forced to sell it not on the open market, and a large percentage of consumers are forced to buy only in the supermarket, the food in the supermarket no longer represents our free choice. In those areas where a majority of shoppers are not there by choice, the quality of the food in the store is considerably reduced. Even liberals have noticed that food in poor neighborhood supermarkets is not as good. But do they understand why? It is because the free market has been disrupted there.
When people have no choice, they cannot exercise a veto on bad food. And that's why a lot of food available in the store today isn't as good as it used to be. This is not a failure of the free market, but rather evidence that the market is not free.
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Loma Linda University serves vegan and vegetarian food, but they are known for actually having good food because they are a private hospital. They also believe in actually making food that is nutritionists, part of the Adventists mission statement, so it is one of the few cafeteria hospitals people actually mention liking.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a good place to eat. Do people who are not in the hospital come to eat there, too?
DeleteI think most people avoid hospitals if they can, but their local supermarket also has a cafeteria, and even non-vegetarian people admit eating there. It is simple food, but actually good quality, etc.
DeleteThat sounds very nice. I would try eating there if I were in the area.
DeleteYou've missed a major factor, Aya… the quality of ingredients available has declined drastically over the last 70 years: trace elements have declined, traditional varieties have vanished, and so on.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, these changes came about because of the "free market", as the newer varieties were cheaper, the new growing methods ensured more uniform (though poorer) quality, and so on.
But this wouldn't suit your argument, would it?
Grow Up, I think you are missing the point of "quality control". Part of quality control is making sure that better ingredients are used instead of cheaper substitutes. Cheaper is not always what the free market chooses. When people are allowed to choose what goes into their food, they usually are happy to pay more for something that is high quality. But when they have no choice and no veto, the quality of everything declines.
DeleteAs an example, consider Wedel chocolates in Poland. They were wonderful and luxuriously rich before WWII, and there is no doubt that the best of ingredients went into them. This probably meant that not everyone could afford Wedel chocolates, and even those who could did not get them every day. But... the market saw to it that the chocolates remained high quality. Cheaper ingredients came into use when the government took over, and the customer no longer got a veto.
The same thing is happening in the US. More and more people who can opt out of the cheap ingredients in the supermarket do so -- choosing to buy at the farmer's market or to deal directly with the farmer -- even when that is illegal. But... many people receive SNAP -- and you have to go to the supermarket to take advantage of that. These people lost their veto. They have to shop at the supermarket and accept the drop in quality.
If you think the free market was all about the cheaper the better, then you do not understand what a free market is.
The reason that food is not considered tasty in cafeteerias. schools, hospitals and the like is not quailty of food. Those places feed many kinds of foods for those who are on diets of whatever. For instance, they do not add sugar or salt or fats...and all that takes out the great tasted that we once had manyyears ago. It is the state of the diet and it seems that everyone needs to be on a diet weather they are on one or not. Free Market has been in place for thousands of years ever since people traveled around the globe for spices and other riches. That is not a "new" concept.
ReplyDeleteHi, Debbie. The free market is indeed a very old concept. But subverting it and then blaming it on the market is a relatively new thing. All those prescribed diets are ways to get people to accept cheaper ingredients as better for our health. They are not!
DeleteI agree with that. People are being blinded to their own needs and the needs of others in their diets. Not everyone is on a slat-free, fat-free or sugar-free diet. Most propaganda is spread about the body not needing any of those, but in fact our body needs all of those. They do not have much choices either anymore. Fr instance: got into a super market and find someting that isn't something *free. It is getting harder and harder. When they took Home Economics out of the school in the last decades it really didn't give anyone a chance to learn about nutrition. Government, the FDA and some other organizations have stripped that from us. We are suffering for it.
DeleteI had the awful experience of finding aspertame in gum that was not marked "sugar free". I went off most chewing gum after that. But I hear they changed the name to "amino sweet" to confuse people. They are sneaking fat free and sugar free into more and more foods, requiring us to look for real fat, real salt and real sugar as if it were a weird dietary requirement on our part. I don't think we need government sponsored home economic classes, because they would just teach the same dietary guidelines as the Feds. We need the government out of our grocery stores and our kitchens. Parents should teach children about nutrition -- not govt stooges.
DeleteWe need someone that teaches the children who become adults to teach their children. Though I didn't think that the government was teaching us when I took a few years in Home Economics in school, they certainly do not want to teach anyone of that age groups to know about nutrition. People just need to know how the body works and that is taught in Biology 101 which they cannot get unless the are in college and going into the pre-medical feilds......dumb. they need to know those things way before they even get out of Middle school...preferably before graduating grade school. I think it is just another form of mass control, Pharms, Chemicals and the Health Insurance industry......to what means...that is the scary thing....
DeleteHi, Debbie. Even the medical profession has been forced to accept the Federal dietary guidelines, despite the fact that they have been to college and took Biology 101. We also need the government out of our schools and our colleges and universities. Doctors are not telling diabetics to go off carbs, even though that is known to help.
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