Food and the market
[Iain Murray  03/07 02:26 PM]

I am coming late, very late, to this discussion, having been in Brussels and London after which I had a virtual mountain of work to plough through on my return. Nevertheless, I hope to be able to contribute a small amount to the discussion.

One of my central concerns with Rod's thesis is that the market isn't what he says it is. It is a reflection of society, a manifestation of information, not something "designed" or manipulating society as he seems to think. The area of food is just one example of this. Check out Theodore Dalrymple's essay on "The Starving Criminal" from Autumn 2002. About half-way through he comes to the phenomenon of "food deserts," and the supposed inability of the urban British working class to get affordable fresh food, which the Blairite government had blamed on evil supermarkets foregoing their social duty. Not so, as Dalrymple explains, with reference to the plenitude of good food available to Indian immigrants. The market has merely reflected, not caused, the turning-away from traditional meals and cooking embraced by the British. He concludes:

The liberal intelligentsia has several reasons for failing to see or admit the cultural dimension of malnutrition in the midst of plenty-in failing to see its connection with an entire way of life-and in throwing the blame instead onto the supermarket chains. One reason is to avoid confronting the human consequences of the changes in morals, manners, and social policy that it has consistently advocated. The second is to avoid all appearance of blaming people whose lives are poor and unenviable. That this approach leads it to view those same people as helpless automata, in the grip of forces that they cannot influence, let alone control-and therefore as not full members of the human race-does not worry the intelligentsia in the least. On the contrary, it increases the importance of the elite's own providential role in society. To blame the supermarket chains is implicitly to demand that the liberal and bureaucratic elite should have yet more control over society.

This is how the British government's current Food Poverty Eradication Bill should be interpreted. By attempting to tackle the sources of supply rather than those of demand, it will sidestep the question of an entire way of life-a problem that it would take genuine moral courage to tackle-and aim at an easy target instead. The government will increase bureaucracy and regulation without reducing malnutrition.