What happened to produce stands in America?
I passed through Chinatown this afternoon and passed countless produce stands selling fresh vegetables and fruit. A while ago I read in the New York Times that many stands there have a separate supply chain for their fresh produce that’s grown relatively locally independent of the supply chain for other grocery stores or farmers markets in the city.
While Chinatown is full of produce stands, the rest of New York City has almost none. In fact, people constantly treat my buying fresh as privileged and a luxury. New York City is full of corner delis and bodegas, which are full of soda, beer, chips, and other doof, almost no food. These stores don’t stay open magically. People near them are buying those products of zero nutritional value and unhealthy. Somehow people have performed the mental gymnastics they need to see buying soda as not a luxury.
What happened to the produce stands in the rest of the city and nation? The question is rhetorical because we know the answer. Our culture has come to see shopping for food, preparing it, and sitting down to eat it as lost time that could be productive. It doesn’t ask: productive for what?
It would answer: economic growth. More trade means more good. Since everyone chooses to trade, they must be improving their lives in trading. But if it reflected on that answer, it would see that that answer is wrong. Our markets have enough coercion (in the form of pollution and depletion, for example, as well as marketing, especially toward children), deception and fraud (in advertising, for example), and corruption (regulatory capture, for example), the that market isn’t free.
Some of the results: our economic market creates sickness instead of health in what we put in our mouths (doof largely replacing food), drives families and communities apart, depletes soils, pollutes the environment, and more.
I’m working to restore markets without coercion, fraud, deception, and corruption. Then we’ll see produce stands return, replacing doof-laden delis and bodegas, plus doof-laden markets like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s whose business models are based in pollution, depletion, and addiction.
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