Floris Visser is the founder of Public Food, an organisation that fights for food justice through public debate and concrete action. What we eat is currently determined by agro-industrial multinationals, whose only aim is to maximise their profits. As long as this system remains untouched, it is unfair to place the responsibility for healthy and ecological food choices with the individual consumer. Read why food should be a public basic provision.
Last year, in collaboration with Flevo Campus, I set up a first prototype of the Volkskantine in Almere. The Volkskantine is a new basic facility for affordable good food, comparable to public transport, social housing, or the library. For a year, the Volkskantine operated in the center of Almere between Burger King and KFC as a city restaurant where residents could put together an organic meal from a buffet of 15 home-made dishes with vegetables in the leading role for snack bar prices. With the lessons learned from this pilot, the plan is to open two new locations in 2023, with the aim of developing local projects into a national basic facility.
This essay is not only a plea for such an institution that ties in with the discussion on universal basic services, but is also a plea to approach the reform of the food system as an ideological issue. In the current debate, it is mainly about policy, numbers and what is sustainable or healthy, but too little is this linked to a different kind of economy. What underlies this other economy, I argue, is the principle that good food is a public good, and that a public food sector is the way to organize this. The essay is too short to go into detail about the different forms of organization of such a public food sector – from economic democratization, common ownership, municipalization, to public non-profit enterprises, or a 'food board' with a democratic governance modeled after the water board – but what it should lead to in short is that healthy and sustainable becomes the easiest and most affordable choice, regenerative production is rewarded, harmful products are restricted by law and regulations, and above all that it is no longer possible for private parties to extract value from the market but that value continues to circulate within society. What I want to do from this perspective is to make an analysis of what is needed to mobilize a critical mass of eaters beyond the left-wing professional bubble that brings the step from free market to public sector closer, and how a basic provision for affordable good food can play a role in this.
But first, the current food system. While food, even more than education and healthcare, is a basic need for every human being, the global food industry has been largely privatized and commodified across the entire breadth of production, distribution and consumption. While a public sector has often been set up for other basic needs such as water, transport and energy, which can guarantee equal access, what we eat and how we eat largely depends on a small number of private corporations and trading houses. For this agro-industrial complex, the general interest is not leading, but profit maximization, and it is facilitated in this by transnational trade agreements and (inter)national policy1I have explained the historical causes of the lack of a public food sector in an earlier article2. For this argument it is important to emphasize that the problems surrounding unhealthy consumption, harmful production and inequalities are inherent to capitalism.
Public money such as agricultural subsidies is skimmed off by private corporations such as seed breeders, land speculators, fertilizer and pesticide companies and animal feed companies, some of which are among the richest and most polluting companies in the world3. The food environment in poor neighborhoods is less healthy than in rich neighborhoods. Food advertising is 80% about products that fall outside the food pyramid – after all, there is more money to be made on our passions. Organic is more expensive than intensively grown food. A half liter of energy drink is cheaper than a glass of fresh orange juice. Not only is it for a growing vulnerable class financial difficult to live healthily - let alone sustainably - anyone who is burdened with stress every day due to existential uncertainty has no chance at all mental headspace for long term decisions or world problems.
The point I want to make here is that the necessary collective transition to a healthy and sustainable diet will not happen through consumerism. That is, by moralizing food choices, by giving the farmer a face or vegetables a story, or by fair prices in which harmful 'externalities' are made transparent. All this does is shift the responsibility from politics to consumers. Not only is this unjust, it is also ineffective. As a sticker on the traffic light aptly put it: 'ecology without class struggle is just gardening'. Signed, Chico Mendes, the Brazilian union leader and environmental activist. You could read it as a response to an advertising poster in a bus shelter a little further on, in which a new plant-based burger is promoted with the caption 100% meatless, 100% McDonalds.
Exactly that. As a good consumer, you can stop eating meat or start growing vegetables in your own garden, but as long as the prevailing power structure remains intact and the food industry serves private interests, climate, public health and equality are subordinate.
For this reason, the reform of the food system must start from a different starting point: good food is a public good. Where 'good' refers to the health of people and the planet, and 'public good' means that no one can be excluded from consumption because they cannot pay for it. This means that health, climate and equality cannot be seen separately as is the case in the free market, and that the step towards a fair, healthy and liveable world must first and foremost be seen as a power struggle between private and public interests.
Let us elaborate on this power struggle. Because the step from private to public is a big one. Especially since the interests of the established agrofood market parties are anchored in all layers of the parliamentary system. To break through this, political dominance is necessary and to achieve that, a critical mass is needed that largely comes from below. The underclass. Precisely the group that is being screwed the hardest by capitalism, that has been abandoned by the left, has partly dropped out and has partly been hijacked by the right, which shifts the cause to minorities and migrants. If we want to take this group seriously, mainstream a healthy and sustainable diet among all layers of the population, and make the public interest directly tangible, then a basic provision could perhaps be a first step. How exactly, I will come back to that later. First, a number of insights from a year at Volkskantine.
What was striking in Almere was that an accessible basic facility that offers affordable healthy meals, arouses sympathy from both the left and the right. Even the fact that the entire menu was plant-based, with a few exceptions, led to virtually no discussion. It helped that the word plant-based was not mentioned anywhere. Instead of an abstract menu or activist jargon, the buffet functioned as a friendly culinary presentation that immediately visualized the food. From regular guests with a farmer's handkerchief on their backpack, seniors with AOW benefits, families with younger children, boys from the gym and shoppers; in conversations at the checkout about the food environment, not only was there a shared need for affordable healthy options, but there was also shared surprise about the fact that such a basic facility did not already exist. Where the food bank is an emergency facility to alleviate acute crisis, social dining tables in community centers are mainly focused on participation, supermarkets at best a little nudging, policy is fixated on awareness, and lifestyle programs individualize responsibility, the message of a basic provision is that health and sustainability are not derivatives of lifestyle but of society style.
This message ties in with the recent commotion in the debate and the conversation on the street. The distressing reports of children who go to school without breakfast and food banks that can no longer meet the demand are increasingly causing widespread indignation. Not only about the inequality and poverty themselves, but also about the way in which policymakers approach and maintain this problem. The example of Tim 's Jongers about the broccoli that is used by the lifestyle coach at school to convince children to eat healthier is now well-known.4. A well-intentioned piece of advice that ignores the fact that many of the children have not eaten at all and for whom a healthy choice is not a matter of wanting to but of being able to. In the past year, it has led to a certain wake-up call among professionals about their own position and approach. Policy must be humane again, not devised on the drawing board but made by experts by experience. Finally, the cat among the pigeons. At the same time, if the criticism continues to focus on the relation between policy maker and target group or the gap between system world and life world, then the underlying ideology in which these structural inequalities are embedded remains unaffected.
But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. How can we further politicize this momentum around class and poverty to bring the step towards a public food sector closer? In the book Climate Change as Class War5 Matthew T. Huber describes how the left has consolidated since the 80s into a class of well-educated professionals with an average income and excellent social and cultural capital, who from this position increasingly alienated themselves from the underclass. The left-wing agenda of, for example, the environmental movement or the food movement, was therefore increasingly dictated less by ideological power struggle and emancipation, but by technocratic policies aimed at correcting the failing market, consuming less, or by increasing social awareness of the seriousness of the climate crisis. The means of struggle of the professional class to reach the masses are figures and numbers: "the target of 1,5 degrees is quickly disappearing from view, rapid action is necessary", "the livestock population must be halved". As fact this is of course undeniable. But if message For those who live from paycheck to paycheck and for whom the end of the month is more important than the end of the world, graphs and numbers often lead to scorn rather than mobilization, and the weekly chicken nuggets at the snack bar are a form of solace.
To break through this and convince a critical mass that they themselves have a direct interest in a social economy on a liveable planet, Hubert argues, climate policy – and in our case food policy – must “appeal to people's basic material interests”. It must connect with daily basic needs by improving direct material conditions.
Enter the Volkskantine. A national basic facility that makes a nutritious meal accessible to everyone is not a policy of consumerism, but a society-wide approach that contributes to increasing subsistence and food justice. It is important that this is a public place where different social groups meet under one roof, just like the library, where you can borrow Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Voetbal International, but also go for your tax return and language lessons. In addition to the city restaurant, there is a public cooking workshop under the name Mealprep Café where residents around the social minimum cook a healthy weekly menu together in a professional kitchen, under the supervision of various chefs in 3 hours. In this way, culinary knowledge does not become an insulting prevention but yields something directly and everyone goes home with 15 evening meals for the rest of the week for a household of 5 people for €5.
How are those snack bar prices and that Mealprep Cafe paid for if the bill is not entirely passed on to the consumer? For now, by trickery. By high volume, commercial corporate catering, by social return on investment funds from the business community, through compensation for guiding some of the employees to work, through 'supersize your impact' – a voluntary allowance for those who can pay a little more, through funds and private donations.
Finally, for further steps towards a public food sector, organization between progressive initiatives is also important. For example, there are citizen initiatives that purchase land to lease at utility value to regenerative farmers. In Doetinchem, Zorgboerderij Slangenburg grows vegetables free of charge for 250 vulnerable families all year round, based on the principle of Community Supporthing Agriculture. Unlike Community Supported Agriculture, where a group of wealthy citizens collectively support a farm, the farmer here becomes a social producer. In various Dutch cities, work is being done on a cooperative supermarket, modeled after La Louve in Paris, or Park Slope in New York, companies that are collectively owned by thousands of members. Every month, everyone works 4 hours voluntarily in the supermarket, which means that personnel costs are zero and products are on average 30% cheaper. In short, there is movement.
I hope that this plea can be the impetus for a public food movement in which class struggle and criticism of capital come together.
