Food and the Socialist Revolution

The dysfunctional relationship between the American people and food is routinely lamented and ridiculed in the media and academia. Unfortunately it has never been explained at all what is the root of this dysfunction. Marxism explains that circumstances determine consciousness. Our physical and social environment greatly influences the choices we make by severely limiting the choices made available to us.

For many Americans, decisions about food are based on income, time, availability, marketing, and societal norms of the community and each other. These social and cultural norms are also conditioned by material conditions and the possibilities of personal choice. If cheap, fast food — scientifically engineered to satisfy our biological cravings for fat, salt, and carbohydrates — is all that most people can access, know, and can afford, then what else will they?” choose"? But this dysfunction is clearly more than just that.

The United States (US) is the richest country in the world but 49 million Americans—including 15.9 million children—are categorized as "food insecure". The US Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as “the limited or uncertain availability of sufficiently nutritious and safe foods or the lack of certainty about the ability to obtain acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways”. The 4.8 million adults in the US who are “food insecure” have to choose between medicine, heating and food—so many are forced to survive on cat food. Cooking magazines, books, television shows, and various “food porn” looks on Instagram are becoming more and more popular but on the other hand, due to lack of time, money, cooking skills, and knowledge,

The indiscriminate and indiscriminate use of chemicals and pesticides has poisoned the environment and food supply. As much as 80% of antibiotics used in the US are used on farms and have increased the danger of antibiotic-resistant “superbacteria”. However, the harvest rate of "conventional" food is 20% to 25% higher than "organic" food which is free of chemicals and antibiotics. The capitalists operate their business not to produce food but to produce commodities to be sold in the market. It doesn't matter what kind of food is produced, their goal is still to maximize profit and profit. It is this pursuit of profit and profit that undermines the chain of relations from farm to table, not the scale of food production itself.

Not only how much can be produced but also how efficiently the food that has been produced is consumed. It is estimated that as much as 40% of food in the US is wasted, spoils, or is thrown out of food warehouses, restaurants, grocery stores, and home refrigerators. Instead of developing unlimited, renewable sources of energy such as wind, solar, and plasma, as much as 40% of corn grown in the US is used for ethanol fuel—which is massively subsidized by billions of dollars of public funds for giant corporations. who collude with the government for profit and profit.

Humanity actually grows and harvests enough food to feed 10 billion people, and in fact, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN) estimates that nearly 870 million of the 7.1 billion people in the world suffer from severe malnutrition. As many as 100 million children in poor countries suffer from malnutrition; as many as one in four children suffer from developmental delays; 3.1 million die each year due to malnutrition. When in fact it only takes $3.2 billion to feed the 66 million children in developing countries who go to school hungry—only 1/24 of the net income of “great philanthropist” and world's richest man, Bill Gates.a silent holocaust against the millions of people who are killed every year due to the disgusting logic of capitalism.

More than 7,500 years ago, the neolithic agricultural revolution represented a decisive turning point in human history. This occurred for the first time in a world where enough food was produced to support people who did not need to forage, freeing them to become specialists in one field or another, and encouraging the emergence of classes and nations. Despite enormous historical advances in social organization and productivity, for thousands of years agriculture remained prey to bad weather, pests and disease. If we look to the not-too-distant past, human beings have starved to death because they couldn't get food or because of crop failure. Today, in fact, farmers are paid to destroy food—or not grow it. Millions of tons of food are stockpiled in warehouses to drive up prices. Hunger today is not the result of an inability to grow or harvest food but is a structural and political condition.

At a time when technological advances made it possible for a small proportion of the world's working population to stably feed the rest of the world, as many as 1.5 billion people had their lives wasted scavenging unproductive patches of land in order to survive. live—and most of them also remain hungry. Food riots are still common in many parts of the world—not because there isn't enough food but because hundreds of millions of people cannot afford it. After decades of opportunities to prove the opposite, the verdict is clear: capitalism cannot feed everyone on earth. The absurdity is that this has nothing to do with the productive potential of man, but with self-created structures.

Indeed advances in the nutritional and agricultural sciences have made it possible for us to produce abundant, healthy, safe and delicious food for everyone. Humanity can produce a wide variety of foods, both to ensure food security against pests, disease outbreaks, and climate change through agricultural diversity, but also to keep foods attractive. The infrastructure is in place to develop a wide network of people's eateries serving affordable, delicious and attractive food. Home cooking and meals can be transformed into pleasurable social activities instead of manual manual labor for billions of people today. In short, there is knowledge, technology, and the collective potential to completely change the way the world eats.

Many people want to do something related to food and problems that are closely related to the environment. But the reality is that all the proposals that are out there are limited to simply tinkering with the existing system or calling for reason and conscience from the rich and powerful. This is clearly utopian. In a system driven and defined by commodity production and money, what matters to the capitalists is not the quality of food or human health, but maximizing profits and profits. The solution to the disconnect between potential and actuality is not to be found in blaming people for their "personal choices," or in changing this or that aspect of the status quo.