Nourishing Humanity Through Capitalism
You will no longer recognize the fruit by its taste or its shape.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Self-deception is not limited to individuals; states, social systems, and epochs are also prone to it. The commodity-producing system of modernity holds the world record in this respect. It considers itself the pinnacle of human history that cannot be surpassed. There is a very simple way to judge the true quality of an era. The state of nutrition is the best indicator. Food and drink provide the most reliable information about how people fared. After all, it is in this area that a culture demonstrates its most basic ability to meet needs. Naturally, modernity also sees itself at the forefront of progress in the history of nutrition. Only the wonderful market economy has satisfactorily solved the problems of providing sufficient food and improving its quality. However, this image is a mockery of reality. At the end of the 1970s, economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein and his team at the State University of New York published studies on the history of agricultural production and nutrition. Their findings revealed that: “In the long term, the prosperity of the world system and the entirety of the world’s labor force is declining — contrary to a very widespread assumption, it is not increasing.” This statement flies in the face of the prevailing free-market ideology and is well documented. This assertion seems completely implausible only because the official view is limited in three ways: first, to the short period of relative worldwide prosperity after World War II; second, to the few fully industrialized Western countries; and third, to the narrow social stratum of the respective market economy winners. However, if one considers the entire period of the history of modernization since the 16th century, then it is easy to prove that modernity as a whole has produced the greatest historical surge of a socially induced shortage of decent food and in this even far surpasses the oriental despotisms. Clearly, the unleashed market economy is dramatically tightening food restrictions once again at the end of the 20th century, leaving almost 6 billion people globally hungry, either permanently or temporarily. This is by no means an exaggeration. After the global food supply temporarily improved in the 1960s and 1970s, hunger and malnutrition increased again at the end of the 1980s. Africa is not the only region providing new horror stories. The specter of hunger is reappearing in places where it seemed to have been banished forever. Today, miners and their families in Ukraine or Siberia, pensioners in Moscow, and street children throughout Eastern Europe are starving, as are large sections of the population in Latin America and South Asia. According to a UNICEF report, more than seven million children worldwide die of malnutrition every year. The greatest neoliberal “success model” is the widespread adoption of soup kitchens. Hunger has even returned to industrial centers in the West. In the U.S., even if at least one family member has a job, 30 million people are “food insecure” due to “starvation wages.” Twenty-six million of these people rely on public or private food handouts each month. More than four million adults go hungry permanently or intermittently. Eleven million children are malnourished, and nearly one million households often go days without food. These are not atrocity propaganda claims, but rather data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and charities such as Second Harvest. Productivity has risen much faster than population growth this century. If it were only a question of productive potential, twice the number of people alive today could easily be fed well and abundantly. The social limit to the production and distribution of food is not determined by a lack of agricultural yields in relation to the number of people, but by the economic form of the modern commodity-producing system. The logic of economic profitability enforces an irrational restriction of resources, which is particularly evident at the most basic level of nutrition. In principle, people only have access to food if their labor can be used profitably. If this criterion cannot be met because a “too high” level of productivity has made their labor superfluous, they are put on starvation rations, even though the capacity to produce food has increased. While a bumper harvest promised at least temporary abundance for all in pre-modern societies, it appears as a disaster for agribusiness’s economic calculations because “oversupply” depresses prices. Therefore, it is normal for businesses in a market economy to destroy agricultural products on a massive scale or dispose of them through denaturation when natural yields are exceptionally high. Thus, hunger becomes the product of abundance itself. However, this same economic rationality creates mass hunger and depresses food quality. Even those who seem to have enough to eat suffer from a lack of vital nutrients. This is because cost-cutting logic means the food industry removes essential ingredients from its outwardly dazzling products to make them more convenient. Large food production corporations and medium-sized suppliers do not hesitate to deceive consumers in order to maximize economic profit. For example, pale pink shrimp in the freezer are often not made from crab meat but from cheap meat waste disguised with dye and pressed into shrimp shapes. In Italy, carcinogenic substances were found in pasta from the packaging materials. Half of the chickens sold in the European Union are contaminated with bacteria. Overall, the number of diseases and epidemics caused by denatured food is increasing. Even if the ingredients in food are not poisonous or harmful, their quality is steadily declining. This begins with a decline in flavor diversity because transcontinental distribution only allows for a narrow spectrum of standardized products bred according to packaging standards. Thousands of fruit and vegetable varieties and hundreds of farm animal breeds are dying out because they are “superfluous” according to abstract cost calculations. With legal approval, more and more agricultural raw materials are being broken down by new technologies in order to be enriched, colored, and preserved with additives. For example, beer can contain powdered animal hooves, and chocolate can contain dried blood. Food can be produced much more cheaply with synthetic “flavor components” than with real fruit. Denatured, tasteless biomasses are “inoculated” with flavorings. Capitalist man is also being dispossessed of his ability to taste. It is of little consolation that functionalist elites are largely responsible for the impoverishment of eating habits. Postmodern managers create eating on the run and breakfast in the car as fashionable trends. They consume substances that a medieval farmer wouldn’t even give to his pigs. Who could doubt that the market economy has led us to the glorious “end of history”?
First published on medico.de on 04/01/1999
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