I want to jump on the public-grocery bandwagon. I really do. And I love Civil Eats and the work of Raj Patel and Errol Schweitzer. They’re among the most cogent and illuminating voices on food system issues today.

But I’m really hung up on both the price thing and the scale thing.

In their recent op-ed, Patel and Schweitzer point to the U.S. military’s gigantic grocery system as a model for a public option. They note that it can operate at the same huge scale as supermarkets and sell food for just slightly above cost because it doesn’t have to return a profit to shareholders or pay employees (they’re part of the military’s own labor structure). And these stores deliver, too!

But selling food at that scale can’t be done without the kinds of heavily-industrialized supply chains that nearly all grocery stores draw from. And that means sticking with the kinds of labor and production practices that give us factory farms, undervalued and exploited workers, heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, yada yada yada. 

Public groceries could demand something better, of course. But anything you can do to make food more ethical or ecologically responsible or nutritious or less dominated by very large economic actors is also pretty much guaranteed to make it more expensive. 

So if you’re envisioning a truly public kind of grocery that underwrites the full cost of good food for everyone, you’re talking about a massive public investment and massive civic infrastructures that seem very unlikely to get traction even in the bluest of US states and cities.

I’m not opposed to the idea of public grocery stores. But I reject the premise that they would have to stay wedded to the underpinnings of the system as it currently exists.

Bigness isn’t always a problem. But where it is, it needs to be tackled as such and not further supported with what amounts to yet more public subsidy for business as usual.