Shocking! People with money can get stuff

MY SCRAMBLED EGGS DON’T TASTE WORSE BECAUSE SOMEONE ELSE IS EATING CAVIAR.

Oh, here’s shocking news. People with more money are better able to afford fancy food than people with less. Who knew? And whatever shall we do?

If you’re wondering who apparently just hit their head in a bank or supermarket and staggered out to share the resulting insight on this hitherto unsuspected problem, it’s a pair of academics quoted by Chris Selley in Saturday’s Post. And the Globe and Mail responded with a Pavlovian headline, “Access to ‘ethical’ food often available only to the wealthy, study says,” followed by a startled, “The benefits of buying ‘ethical’ food at farmer’s markets and organic grocers often comes at the expense of equal access, according to a new report.”

There is much to be said about organic food, from Chris’ claim that, “the evidence underpinning its health benefits is basically nil,” to my own that factory farming is hazardous to the environment and human beings. Sure, they tell me the antibiotics they pump into “healthy” animals aren’t ones humans use any more, or aren’t really antibiotics, they just kill germs. But I’m still uneasy.

I would also note that North Americans spend less of their income on food than anyone in history, so we could spend a bit more. And waste less. And as Chris points out, the left-wing trope that cruel, distorting capitalism makes unhealthy processed or fast food cheaper is simply wrong. If people cut out the weekly or indeed daily trip to the burger joint they could buy healthy, happier food, including the organic kind.

The happier is important. Call me a hippie if you like. But I find, even with my limited kitchen repertoire, a satisfying Zen feeling of immersion in the moment in preparing ingredients and seeing a meal through to completion.

To say nothing of the importance to family life of shared meals. And while I’m being cranky, if widespread access to quality food concerns you, the first thing you’d want to do is get rid of Canada’s price-inflating agricultural marketing system. Which is apparently the last thing we want to do. But in a way all this is beside the point, which is not food but money.

Remember the apocryphal Fitzgerald-Hemingway exchange, “The rich are different than you and me;” “Yes, they have more money”? If it had happened, I do not think Hemingway would have had it entirely right. As Trotsky said, unless it was Mao or Lenin, “Quantity has a quality all its own.” But surely there is something a bit clueless in suddenly realizing, 169 years after the Communist Manifesto, that however else they might differ from the rest of us, the rich do indeed have more money. And reacting to this discovery by trying to do something about the price of garlic.

At the risk of scandalizing academics and journalists alike, I must mention that the rich can’t just afford better or trendier food. They also have fancier cars, houses and clothes, including diamond-encrusted watches that keep time no better than the Walmart special.

I don’t care. My scrambled eggs don’t taste worse because someone else is eating caviar, and my phone knows what time it is. I think there’s a strong element of envy in the whole complaint about inequality. The question is whether people are suffering actual deprivation and if so what to do about it. And you’d have to be some kind of nit to think the answer was to rig prices in every single market as you gape, over and over again, at the discovery that rich people can buy many nice things.

You’d have to be especially dim since a war on success demonstrably leaves you surrounded by failure. Making it impossible to sell quality products to the wealthy doesn’t make them available to the masses. Instead they disappear from store shelves followed in a downward spiral, as in Venezuela, by basic necessities like toilet paper and food of any sort.

Nor does rigging individual markets address the real problem. If people with less money have less nice stuff, from pancakes to computers, the obvious response would be to give them more money. Ideally your own, though taking from the rich seems for many leftists to be a feature not a bug. But if progressive income taxes and income supports worked, the poor would have organic kale.

If not, rigging markets one after another so money doesn’t matter just results in there being less for anyone to buy, and more inequality as privileged insiders get special access. Think Stalin’s Soviet Union and recoil in horror.

So what shall we do? Lots of things, from removing enterprise-stifling regulations to charitable giving to cooking at home. But do not faint witlessly every time you realize people with money can get stuff. It doesn’t help and it isn’t dignified.