Food Inequality, Covid-19 and the Community Restaurant
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- Published on Saturday, 23 May 2020 01:18
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2102 ... May 23, 2020
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Food Inequality, Covid-19 and the Community Restaurant
Benjamin Selwyn
Far from the COVID-19 pandemic bringing us together, it has revealed and exacerbated existing and brutal social inequalities. The UK’s food system was intensely unequal before COVID-19, but the crisis has exacerbated these underlying trends. Looking at the UK’s socio-economic inequalities through the prism of its food -- the way it is produced, marketed, prepared and consumed -- offers us one way of thinking about what life might be like after COVID-19.
Discussions about life beyond Covid occur in a radically changed context. Some figures -- former chancellor George Osborne, in particular -- want a return to austerity. But circumstances are now so transformed that the British government may embark on large-scale increases in state spending: witness the state paying 80 per cent of wages for furloughed workers. The key question will not be that of the last ten years -- austerity vs anti-austerity -- but will rather centre around what the government deems to be worthy of investment.
It is here that the... left needs to think creatively, and to set out convincing and popular ideas and policies that can influence the agenda. Should state support be deployed to bail out firms, or to protect workers from the market forces of unemployment, poverty and low wages?
The UK’s current food system fails to deliver the goods -- neither good wages to farm workers, nor healthy and affordable food to large swathes of the population, nor a contribution to a zero-carbon future economy. A system of state-supported community restaurants, connected to regional farms and alternatives-to-meat production facilities, could begin fixing it.
Arguments for such an initiative could be part of a broader objective for the state to provide universal basic services through a Green New Deal. Such policies could be funded through a combination of re-directed agricultural subsidies and a progressive tax system. If wealth is taxed at the same rate as income in the UK, the treasury could raise an extra £174-billion a year.