Food Justice Has Arrived

“Food is one of the only base human needs where the American government lets the private market dictate its delivery to our communities.” Rush Limbaugh added to this quote from the February 21, 2012 article in the New York Times, “but not for long.” Limbaugh dedicated part of his March 6 show to Tracie McMillan, a political science major who wrote a book on nutrition entitled, “The American Way of Eating.”

McMillan decries the fact that the free market decides food delivery. She proclaims that, unless government controls food delivery and supply, food injustice will continue to dominate this country. She said, “Expensive food that took time to prepare, wasn’t for people like us,” meaning blue-collar families.

As a mom and wife, I disagree.  Food that takes time to prepare is cheaper than any boxed meals you can buy in the grocery store. Potato chips and other snacks, ounce per ounce, are also more expensive than nutritious foods prepared at home. The ingredients may seem more expensive initially, but the quantity prepared in the end is larger and feeds more people, allowing for refrigeration and freezing for later use. The price per meal is thus cheaper than any fast food or prefabricated food.

According to McMillan, average Americans are denied good and fresh food. The statement is disingenuous because poor families receive electronic food benefits cards, formerly known as food stamps. Currently, 43 million Americans are on food stamps, the highest number in any administration. Additionally, their children receive 2-3 free meals at school, which, thanks to Michelle Obama’s efforts, are quite nutritious.

There is nothing in the world that prevents any American, rich or poor, from purchasing fresh ingredients in order to prepare wholesome foods. Nobody twists their arms to buy potato chips, beer, candy, and boxed meals that are not as healthy as meals prepared at home. The average American household spends 15 percent of their income on food, one of the lowest percentages in the developed world.

The ultimate liberal goal is not a fair distribution of fresh food. The market distributes goods according to supply and demand and manufacturers distribute their products according to demand. The intent is to take away our freedoms. Food is now a variable of class struggle and a form of discrimination because “the poor and downtrodden are getting junk food while the snobs get fancy food.”

According to food police at school, your mom does not know what is best for you, your government does, following Michelle Obama’s nutrition dictates. Food and the distribution of food has become a social issue in the collectivist/socialist ideology. We must all be equal in the leftist view and the government must step in to regulate food distribution and delivery.

“Average, ordinary Americans, the 99 percent, are denied expensive food that takes time to prepare.” McMillan “stares at America’s bounty, noting that so few seem able to share in it fully and she asks: ‘What would it take for us all to eat well?’” (Rush Limbaugh)

“Food is one of the only base human needs where the American government lets the private market dictate its delivery to our communities.” Tracie McMillan is thus saying, “Capitalism and the private sector are discriminating against the average, ordinary American by not delivering him quality food.” Perhaps bringing in government food agents to check children’s boxed lunches in school as it happened in North Carolina recently would solve the quandary of proper food delivery and nutrition.

I should tell McMillan about basic economics, the price mechanism that assigns the highest prices to the goods in greatest demand and then allows individual consumers to pursue their own self-interests. Price acts as a rationing device. Available supplies are distributed to match different consumer preferences as well as possible. If a centrally planned economy, socialist or communist, rations food by distributing the same amount to everyone, then everybody ends up with less of everything, sometimes experiencing severe shortages. The price system or the capitalist system allows each consumer to set his or her own priorities. If the left wants equality, then efficiency goes out the window.

Central government planning was so bad under socialism/communism that we were issued rationing coupons and a black market emerged. Government did not know best, it created chronic shortages of food and starvation, and a depressed and gaunt population, fighting in long lines on a daily basis for the last liter of milk, loaf of bread, bones stripped of meat, pat of butter, pound of flour or sugar, liter of oil, or kilo of shriveled potatoes.

The capitalist economy allocates resources well - what to produce, how to produce it, and how to distribute the resulting goods, without any central direction from the government or concern for the public interest. Socialists/communists have predicted that such unplanned system would result in chaos. However, the socialist/communist economies degenerated into dismal failures and were rejected by the people while the capitalist economic system thrived. Even Karl Marx admitted,” Capitalism is the most powerful mode of production available.”

The price mechanism or Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” always ranks potential consumers of food in the order of the intensity of their preference for that food, as indicated by the amount they are willing to spend on it.

The logic of Economics 101 flies in the face of the left and its newest “food justice” platform. The left never lets logic deter them from their true agenda, taking away our freedoms to choose, installing social justice, environmental justice, now food justice, and completing the radical transformation of America into Fabian Socialism.