The Complete Patient

In business schools, students are taught that “the system is the solution.” I was reminded of that refrain while reading Dave Milano’s incisive comments (accompanying my “Musings of a Raw Milk Outlaw” posting a couple days ago) about the problem being the system rather than the factory food.

It’s the combination of rapid expansion and centralization that creates problems, he argues, and there’s lots of compelling evidence to back him up. I would add that there’s another component that creates problems: the need to squeeze ever-increasing profits out of these systems.

Thus, our national park system, and even our national highway system, are decent systems, in part because they are publicly-run and based on serving people, rather than shareholders. The stability of our public systems, including the highway system, isn’t guaranteed, though. An article in the current Mother Jones describes a move afoot to place the nation’s toll roads under private management. It’s already happened with the Indiana Toll Road, and more are in the works, with some investors fantasizing about placing the entire highway system under the rule of investment banks and foreign corporations that know how to collect tolls.

I found this article very disturbing in part because, when a system shifts from public to private management, the goals change, as in prices go up and maintenance gets cut back, so as to maximize profits. Also, it just reinforces the trend toward privatization and systematization.

The food industry depends heavily on processing to justify the system. And the profits associated with processing increase based on increasing volume and decreasing costs of raw materials. Thus, the dairy industry depends on a few companies dominating the processing, or pasteurization, with declining prices paid to farmers. One of the reasons raw milk is such a threat to this system is that, without pasteurization, the entire system is called into question, because then, who needs the processors?

Same with the nutritional supplement/pharma system, as several readers pointed out in my posting about Life Extension a few days ago. The system’s goal is to push as many pills as possible, even if the pill pushing is at the expense of raw foods that might do the job better than the pills.

Viewed through this prism, the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) even calls itself a “system,” and the idea once again is to centralize and commoditize, for the benefit of a few major processors. As for the lofty goals Milano concludes with, I couldn’t have said it any better.