You never hear people talking about ‘the food system’. Why is that? Because there isn’t one. I mean, we have the USDA, which mostly exists to make it harder for smaller producers of food to compete with larger producers of food. But there is no Secretary of Food, no Commissioner of Food, no Food Czar, and so on.
And why is this? Because the production and distribution of food is driven by two things: (1) Some people want it, and are willing to pay for it, and (2) other people are able to make a profit providing it. That’s it. There’s no need for a ‘system’.
In fact, it’s precisely because there’s no system that it works. Consumers are able to make their wishes known by bidding up the prices of the things they want; and producers react to those wishes by increasing the supply of those things, which brings the prices back down — often lower than they were to begin with.
It works so well, in fact, that we have an obesity problem — in part because food is so plentiful, and so inexpensive, that most people can easily afford to consume more of it than they need.
If we want to fix our ‘education system’, the very first thing we need to do is stop thinking of it as a system, and start thinking of it as (1) some people who want education, and are willing to pay for it, and (2) other people who are able to make a profit providing it.
If we did that, we’d find out what the educational equivalent of obesity looks like.
Alternatively, if we want to cure obesity, let’s just set up a ‘public feeding system’ and run it the same way we run our ‘public education system’, and that should take care of the problem.
