We know how to do this. Three companies—Ararmark, Sodexo, and Chartwells—control much of the United States’ catering sector, particularly on college campuses. These companies, while managing the impressive feat of putting out great amounts of food at scale, are not great employers. They pay minimum wage, are visiously anti union, and being a private business have incentives to cut costs to make money for executives, usually at the expense of workers, diners, and/or the environment.
Nationalize these three companies, put them to public use. As a new facet of the federal government, they’d aggressively expand into cities and suburbs and rural town centers alike, employing people along the way.
And this wouldnt just have to be dining halls, though that’d be there too. Thinking of college campuses as little countries or fiefdoms of their own akin to Monaco or disney world, they’re good models for the sort of variety and even pricing structure of a lot of this stuff—even franchised chains could be a part of it. But, in the way that the worker at your campus subway is actually employed by Sodexo, now that worker would actually be employed by the us government, with all of its protections and benefits and, in general, less bad reputation as an employer than any of these.
The cost of eating would be free, if perhaps rationed in the way that college dining plans often are (you get x meals a week, plus 17.76 USA dinerBux™ a week to spend at participating restaurants). Beyond your quota, it’d be at cost, not expensive.
It’s funny, people go on vacations to things like cruises where producing massive amounts of food at scale for everyone to eat dinner every night is routinely shown to be not only possible, but luxurious. But when they go home that imagination never spreads to, wait, we could just DO this
And this doesn’t mean the complete abolition of the home kitchen—much like nobody is forcing you to go to the library, nobody is forcing you to go here, either, every day. People like cooking and are going to keep doing it. This would just make it just so that you don’t have to, as a need.
Put me on the campaign trail and I’d campaign on this shit. I know it’s not going to pass but someone’s gotta spike the Overton window left just to make things interesting. Imagine making them have to argue against that
