Seems like more bureaucracy that would make it even harder for new restaurants to get set up and the paperwork they would have to maintain in order to provide that information.
Seems like more bureaucracy that would make it even harder for new restaurants to get set up and the paperwork they would have to maintain in order to provide that information.
We have enough “restaurants” that fry an egg. We can do that ourselves. Running a proper business requires such formalities to not kill your customers. If knowing about your craft is too hard - allergies is a major part of it - then you shouldn’t be in this business.
Restaurants are one of the classic immigrant paths to upward mobility. We don't want to make that too hard.
By all means, get a license, food handler permit, etc. and know and practice good food safety, and buy ingredients from legitimate wholesalers. But at some point you don't have visibility into the supply chain and it's not reasonable to expect Joe's Taco Truck to know which specific farms produced their lettuce.
How hard would it be for them to know their immediate supplier?
I've thought about this a lot as it's effectively my idea of Origin Marks (not the same as the curvy OM/GI system), that are like trade marks but they serve the consumer rather than the companies.
Anyway, all companies have lists of what they buy and who from in their accounts - and their banks and suppliers can corroborate those details.
I think I'd provide limits for micro-businesses (1-2 employees, below the VAT threshold in UK), and maybe have limited reporting for SMEs too. Only listing all suppliers, say.
But for larger businesses, they should list the goods/services they use and the origin of all inputs to a product (including energy). Down to the factory, not a trade mark, the actual inputs.
Companies already keep all this information.
Capitalism supposedly optimises markets, but it can't do anything like that without full information. I mean the psychological manipulation of 'brand marketing' also opposes the supposed optimisations of capitalism too, but that's another story.
All this information is already maintained, it's just not exposed for the public.
What farm was my chicken produced on? Then I can look at that farm to see if they bought a tonne of penicillin, or a GM feed. I can look at the farm to see if they have outside access for the birds, say.
We can also readily graph essential businesses for food security, and new companies can easily find suppliers, B2B companies can find gaps and opportunities - the whole web of production can be mapped this way.
You can also spot corruption and loss. Consumers can avoid companies that use upstream suppliers they disprove of - like if a footwear company has a factory in an area known for human rights abuses, that's now public info, I can check it out if I want.
Anyway, restaurants already have to know the origin of their goods for pubic health purposes, codifying can just mean the suppliers send them an enhanced receipt that the restaurant catenates with others and uploads to the government, that can be done as part of the same process as finance reporting.
If you're buying chicken out the back of a van in an alley then you're going to have extra work; if you're just using standard supply chains it should all work pretty seamlessly.
Such are the wages of destroying trust in the supply chain.
When you elect visibly corrupt people who promised to destroy that trust upstream, you double the burden for everyone downstream from them.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.