If we can't figure out a way as a society to honestly tell people what food is being sold in restaurants, maybe we shouldn't be starting new restaurants until we figure that out.

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ssl-3 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Knowing the sources of the food we eat is a very popular thing right now.

Isn't the capitalist way to help with this to build new restaurants that do openly provide the lineage for the food that they sell?

All of the consumers who are motivated by this information will then be free to reward these eateries with their business.

After that: Other restaurateurs will surely notice how unspeakably profitable these loyal consumers are and will begin to mimic the effort to try to capture a slice of the pie.

Ultimately, this snowballs into information being the norm instead of the rare exception. Everyone wins!

(Or, more likely: We'll broadly forget that we cared about any of this a few months from now, just as we have always done in the past, and the idea will die at the invisible hand of the free market.)

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saghm a day ago | parent [-]

> Isn't the capitalist way to help with this to build new restaurants that do openly provide the lineage for the food that they sell?

Some people think that certain things that are not profitable are still worthwhile to society. For example, libraries and fire departments are not designed to be profitable at all, but they're established because at least some of us think they're beneficial to have despite that. A more fitting example might be the regulation on food production introduced early on in the 20th century; by your logic, a more capitalist way of solving the problem would have been to start different food companies that produced food in the way that the regulations required. I don't have any confidence that this would have ended up making much of a difference though, and I think the century since then has shown that the economy didn't fall over because of the lost profits from the regulation.

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ssl-3 a day ago | parent [-]

Please understand that I wrote the previous comment with a heavy dose of devil's advocacy. :)

In reality, I'm a huge fan of enabling people to find reliable information (if they want it) so they can do things like make what they feel are informed decisions (if they choose to do that).

This can happen with capitalism and food. I've known a nice lady for a very long time who has run a little food truck that serves only local, organic food.

She buys what she can directly from farmers and even the mass-produced products she uses are local-enough that she can ring up the owner on the phone and get good answers to whatever questions she has. If one of her customers wants to know where she gets her salad greens or the excellent sausage that she serves, she'll just tell them. There's no secrets in that kitchen.

It works for her in her tiny little market segment, and her usual clientele appreciate her efforts enough that this has been her sole occupation for over a decade.

But doing what she does in the way that she does it is a ton of work. And it apparently doesn't scale in a way that capitalism, alone, can support.

And by that, I mean: If the Arby's down the road from my house had enough interest in being informative in this way, then capitalist tenets suggest that they'd be doing it already. They are not.

But if they should then that means scary words like regulation come into play, and that never happens without a cost.

I'm OK with helping to pay for information to be available even though I myself don't necessarily care at all on any normal day what factory my chicken sandwich was raised in, or which particular farms that this batch of lettuce was sourced from.

And I'm OK with paying more for this because some people do care about stuff like that.

Except: Every now and then, like when there's a cyclospora outbreak, I care quite a lot about it myself. I love the cold, liquidy crunch of lettuce on a sandwich and I do miss it when it's gone.

And since shit happens (sometimes, literally) we'd collectively have a far easier time of adjusting our supply chains when it happens if tracking them was more of built-in function of food distribution. Since capitalism has so far not accomplished that, then perhaps it is time to move on to other methods.

Count me in.

	▲	saghm 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I guess I don't find the argument "capitalism is inherently something praiseworthy, regulation is something inherently to be avoided" compelling. I care about the outcome, not the label, so if the strongest argument against something is that it has the wrong label, that's evidence in favor of the idea for me.

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dyauspitr a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Look, you want to encourage new businesses at all times and reduce barrier to entry as much as possible. Regulation should only touch things that are absolutely necessary which in the case of the food industry is hygiene and sanitation. That’s it. Everything else is nice to have. What’s necessary for every industry varies and you need to have solid heads in charge of this so you’re balancing the ease of starting a business and consumer rights at the same time.

	▲	saghm 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're stating your personal dogma as if it's an objective fact. I don't agree with it, and simply restating what I disagree with is not particularly convincing.