IMO every city should have public cafeterias that:
A) Grow / process ingredients onsite (greenhouse), or source through a local network.
B) Provide nutritional food free of charge
C) Create entry level jobs that teach practical skills such as cooking and horticulture.
D) Increase food security. Global agriculture supply chains are about to be completely disrupted by climate change.
Sorry, we’d rather keep paving over farmland to make unaffordable mcmansions because our leaders cannot fathom a country that is self sufficient where values aren’t constantly increasing
Or allowing our wealthiest to buy up all the farmland so they have complete control of everything…like a feudal king.
B-bbut where will we put all the over priced shoeboxes for better offs from out of town to party in?
What you propose has existed for decades. See the link:
Only available for children in the summer… I don’t think this isn’t the solution being proposed.
It is a solution in search of a problem. And it would create far more expensive problems than it proposes to solve. The Soviets already did this kind of thing–the same Soviets who deliberately starved millions to death with manufactured food shortages.
Is there a name for the fallacy that something is doomed to fail just because some quasi-communist state tried to implement something similar at some point?
The fallacy is failing to understand the authoritarian spirit behind purported ‘humanitarian’ causes, especially those that involve using the deadly force of the state for funding. People who worship the idol of political power are generally lacking awareness of their own desire to boss others around. Failing to learn from history is part and parcel of the matter. Giving government ubiquitous control over the food supply has one result, and history has proved it a hundred times over. Complain all you want about greed in the market–government is near infinitely greedier.
Alright friend, OP certainly never implied “giving government ubiquitous control over the food supply” by any means, so at least this is clearly a simple case of strawman fallacy.
edit: like if you think about it for literally more than two seconds, you’ll realize that OP’s idea involved building capacity amongst the general population for horticulture, something which fundamentally opposes the idea of giving government ubiquitous control.
Our local school opened up one of these programs during the pandemic. It’s a blessing but it only is for kids and only lasts 8 weeks during the summer
Lol. Welcome to ‘growing seasons’
The school cafeterias could remain open 24/7 for everyone. Sure, taxes would go up about 50% or so, but free sloppy joes would be well worth it, amirite?
Our society lacks sufficient trust to have something work like this.
Also, there certainly going to be negative externalities when mixing kids with the poor.
I doubt anyone would sign on this security wise. Schools are already border line prison conditions in the US.
A) is just rediculous, the space required to feed even a suburban block is orders of magnitude more than a greenhouse onsite could provide. It may be able to grow enough herbs, but that’s about it.
I’m fine with the rest of the idea.
or source through a local network.
I just replied to your other comment, but even a local network can’t feed a city. Let’s do some more math.
Los Angeles has about 18 million people, and on average they take about 2 acres of land to feed (it can be less for vegetarians, but lets assume they are just normal people here)
That’s 36 million acres needed, which is about 56,000 square miles, which is an area of 280 miles by 200 miles of nothing but farmland.
You quite literally can’t even feed Los Angles with a 100 mile diet, even if it was surrounded by nothing but farms (which it isn’t)
In fact, California only has about 25 million acres of farmland in total (8 million irrigated, and the rest for animal grazing)
Source local food sounds good, but we import food for a reason. Cities require a ridiculous amount of farm land to feed.
What you said:
typical grocery store
What I said:
IMO every city should have public cafeterias
We’re not talking about the same thing. You’re arguing with yourself.
I’ve never been to a cafeteria with a bigger footprint than the average grocery store.
Ground floor is the community grocery, and the next 3-5 floors are a hydroponics farm. It’s really not that ridiculous.
You could have 5 floors, and it still wouldn’t be enough. You could have 30 floors and it wouldn’t be enough.
I don’t think you understand the scale of farming to human. Even if you’re entirely vegetarian it’s on the order of 0.5-1 acre per person to grow the required food. That’s 20,000-40,000 square feet. Even if hydroponics were involved and cut that by a factor of 10, you’d still be at 2000 square feet per person. A typical grocery store is 25-50,000 square feet, so let’s go with the most generous and say 5 floors of 50,000 square feet you could produce enough food for… 125 people.
The math doesn’t math. No reasonable amount of food growth is ever going to be possible inside a city.
What you said:
typical grocery store
What I said:
IMO every city should have public cafeterias
We’re not talking about the same thing. You’re arguing with yourself.
Replace grocery store with cafeteria, do you have an actual argument or are you just nitpicking?
No I have an idea to fix food bank shortages, while creating jobs and teaching practical skills. The shortage that occurred collectively in your brains I have nothing for.
Look, I’m all for making the world a better place. So here’s my 2c, from somebody who’s tried and done it in a small manner. You’ll need allies, partners. You’ll face a lot of doubt and questions. If you meet it all with outright hostility, you’re never going to get very far. Sure, we’re all online randos, but if you can’t muster a decent argument with all the time in the world, you’re going to have a hard time persuading anybody in the real world.
My vision is
Ground floor: Cafeteria / service kitchen
2nd Floor: Production Kitchen / food packaging
3rd Floor : Aquaponics & fertigation
4+ : greenhouse.
It’s a nice utopian idea, but it just doesn’t do anything. The aquaponics and greenhouse are just a bad utilization of such prime real estate space, the amount of food produced would be so low as to be a rounding error for the food they would still need to import and you could use that same floor space to house hundreds of more people.
Go look at my comment from a few minutes ago showing the production math for 5 stories of hydroponics.
Aquaponics also has an issue with nutrient density so you would need more volume than traditional soil growing methods to create the same volume of nutrition.
https://www.edengreen.com/blog-collection/vertical-farming-crop-yield-per-acre
We’re talking about 2 different things. I have zero interest in debunking all your strawmans and assumptions about a completely different concept.
Your article says it’s 40:1 instead of the 10:1 I assumed, but that’s still far too little to matter.
Your two floors of farming would still feed less than a hundred people full time, even if they hit those lofty idea targets.
You’re the one inserting the assumption that this has to become the only source of food for people.
I said:
or source through a local network.
If you can’t read those words and comprehend them than why would I consider anything you have to say?
It’s tough. Co-ops I’ve checked out are all about organic, which is cool but they’re more expensive. I’ve looked at farm stands and Saturday markets but they’re are more expensive too.
Not to mention that a farmer’s market vendors can just lie about the origin of their products.
I think people have to realize that capitalism has made us search for cheap over quality and nutrition when it comes to food.
Food is literally one of two things that keep us alive and thriving yet we balk at food that is slightly more expensive but much more nutritious, lasts much longer and requires less volume to feed one’s self due to this nutrient density vs. Commercially grown food, that has been transported thousands of kilometers to your local store.
You can’t afford the increase in price to buy quality food? That has nothing to do with the food, what or costs or what you should be buying or eating. It’s capitalism keeping you part of the slave class and making you think grocery store prices are normal.
They have the same nutrients as commercially grown. They have a higher density because theyre smaller and have way lower production. The neutrient declaine is going to happen regardless of you using high or low yield it just a matter of scale and time. All of this started exactly how you believe we should be doing it now. The problem is that doesnt make enough food for everyone and it only takes one bad year and a LOT of people dont get anything. So we selected for traits to stop that. The problem is that now we have to choose more land and resources (fertilizer and energy) to maintain heirloom strains and grow them at scale and transport them around faster and farther than theyre designed to last. Or less quality per yield but far more yield and much longer sheld life. Without forcing everyone to live within a certain radius of an heirloom farm there is only so much you can do before logistics and shelf life simply dont cut it anymore.
And commercially grown vegetables are also lacking in nutrient density and quality due to poor farming practices.
I have found that my local co-op has some great prices for some items and others that are more expensive but it depends on what I need to purchase. Their bulk teas are such a good deal and really the only place I can buy bulk teas. Their bulk goods are a good deal as well. Some of the fruit and vegetables are a good deal unless its not in season. Their bread (freshly made from a local bakery) tastes amazing and a great deal as well.
That being said I don’t love their meat selection (smaller selection, more expensive but has a few gems), nor do I like to buy their boxed standard goods. Broths, snacks, canned goods or anything like that is more expensive and doesn’t seem worth it for the quality difference. The key is to find a few anchors that get you there. I don’t go as often to my co-op compared to my local trader joes.
This is partly because there is no good supply chain or real wholesale market for mid priced consumer packaged goods. It’s essentially completely owned by the ogilopolies.
There is for produce and meats which share the supply chain with restaurants.
Makes complete sense to me. Its also lots of work to create some of those goods at home. I refuse to make my own broth despite everyone saying its easy and delicious. I don’t have the time nor do I want to store it
What we need are co-ops. Unfortunately it’s hard to run one of those. They tend to not make so much money.
Maybe as a nation, we shouldn’t be letting profits get in the way of feeding people? Just a wild suggestion.
Who’s afraid of a little competition?
Landlords, mostly.
Galen Weston
How would this change the price?
The bloat is in the middle of the supply chain so unless these people avoid the middle man such as people who control the meat processing… There is limited impact having the retail handled by the state
in the middle? you mean the middle who also owns the start and the end supply of almost everything?
They don’t own the start, the farmer does and they get fucked by the middle man too.
Essentially guy doing logistics and processing internalize all of the value within the chain via monopoly powers.
Ever heard of a co-op? They usually deal directly with the providers. No middlemen.
I’ve worked with co-ops both on the retail grocery side and ag aggregator side, and the traditional supply chain is similar. The ag co-ops serve as a middleman, and the retail grocery will usually deal with a distributor.
The grocery co-op had way more direct accounts (hundreds) than a traditional grocery, but that was mostly for smaller company specialty goods. The vast majority of the product moving off the shelves was bought from one of two big distributors.
Not sure why you got down voted buts the current supply chain.
Not sure how it would change since they are already taxing people on food but it would need to be cheaper than the grocery store.
AFAIK the retail side in Canada is also making significant profits. Those could be removed or significantly reduced from the prices of a public grocery store. This would decrease prices in the short term. The oligopoly could then increase their distribution side profit margins, forcing the public stores to increase prices. This would make a very strong case for the comprehensive public solution that also tackles distribution. If you tackle just distribution, there’s nothing discouraging the retail side of the oligopoly from cranking up their profit margins immediately. In effect, retail prices wouldn’t increase, but the oligopolies would absorb the decreased distribution price difference. Then they’d get their politicians to say - see gov’t wasted billions on this scheme and nothing changed, time to scrap the public distribution company. Ideally a public option should tackle both retail and distribution in one go in order to realize lower prices curbing the oligopoly’s ability to prevent that via the distribution or retail sides.
E: I guess the oligopoly could instantly increase distribution margins in the first scenario too. Independent grocers would probably scream, but I don’t know if that would be a significant impediment. I think it would be more difficult for the oligopoly to instantly stop any price decrease due to retail profit elimination, but I’m not certain lower prices would hold long enough for the public to take notice and oppose the inevitable calls for dismantling public distribution. So yeah, a public option would most likely have to have public distribution to succeed.
Seriously. Owning the logistics and distribution would do more, probably. And even then not for everything. You have to assume for anything manufactured the cost would get shifted around.
Frankly, the biggest difference I see around me is living in a place where the producers get direct access to customers AND where foot traffic is king. I’ve gone back and forth from rural to urban living spaces and here in the rural area I am now the big game changer is you walk up to a market and buy from fishmongers that bought fresh fish directly at auction and grocers that got a lot of the produce directly from the producer/farmer. And then there’s enough people around in a small enough space that you can go to a supermarket for the packaged product and to a market/grocer for the fresh or specialty product.
The model where people drive to a shop and expect to find everything in the same place is a nightmare for pricing on both ends of things.
Farmers markets?
Lol… That’s a place where affluent people feel “authentic”
They are hardly cheap and that’s the point
Modern farmers market is yuppie exercise
That’s not the case everywhere, sucks to live In a sucky place, don’t project your issues on the rest of world. The farmers markets in Canada are farmer selling their produce, it’s cheaper than big box stores, and they take all the profit themselves other than rent for a stall.
How do they work in your country?
There are proper farmers markets in Cali and some other locales where it is price competitive vis-a-vis grocery in season … but they are not wide spread and it is very much an exception to the rule on quality produce access year around.
How do Canadian markets operate in the winter?
Indoors?
Lots of vertical farming as well.
Honestly where I live, farmers markets are often the same price, sometimes a bit more and actually sometimes a bit less than a lot of grocery stores. All our groceries have to be shipped on a boat so it actually often is cheaper to grow and buy local.
Either way I prefer to give my money to the “yuppies” than to fuckhead billionaires like Galen Weston and Jim Pattison. I acknowledge that’s a privelege but I also won’t shit on people who make the same choice or who can’t afford to make that choice. The problem is not any of us, it’s the price-fixing ballsacks.
… farmers markets don’t work without local farms…. Lmfao what a take.
They will also also have cheap seasonal food, if you want out of season, it’s always going to be expensive. Sounds like people here don’t understand how farmers market actually work and expect them to have the same options as the big box stores…
How did you even glean that from what I said? Yeah, of course they have cheap seasonal food that’s exactly my point. That’s exactly why they’re not overpriced yuppie shit as the person I was replying to claimed. People claim they’re overpriced anyway because they’re comparing them to the grocery store chains that sell less quality food and not local food for cheaper and underpay their workers. I’m not comparing apples to organes here I’m literally saying people would rather pay $4 for a pound pf California strawberries than $7 for a pound of local seasonal strawberries.
They don’t work in places without local farms, that’s fine then figure out something else for that area, but my point is no need to shit on farmers markets or on buying local.
