Comment by ssl-3

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.