What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it?
This is a question you just have to undermine since its presumption is that there is a common starting point for people who answer it, but that is far from the truth, even if we take the fact the cost of food makes choice of any kind not only unaffordable but impossible even for children in poverty in the UK. For many in the world the unavailability of food is a real thing, where the cost of food is not even a consideration whilst the few in their oligarchic governments gorge thereon, having creamed the resources of the countries for their use only.
And the issue of ‘was it worth it’ too hides the fact that value is not simple. Marx distinguished between use value, the value of the thing in its simplest use, in the energy and life it affords in the case of food and exchange value set by relations of supply and demand, themselves complicated by the relatively greater power of the demand capacity of the rich few over the many, setting standards that might be inappropriate.
And then value is divided by the forces of demand creation in advertising and other manipulations of the supposed need or desire we have for the thing demanded. Fashion and style are part of this and are not created innocently of the purpose of exploitation of resources unequally distributed. Class sets up appearances and the penchant for those Spartan tasting menus is often a triumph of the appetite of the eyes, or even envy of what others say that they see here over actual substance. Beluga caviar is a good that sometimes appeals because of who we think it is intended for and who we might in the process imagine ourselves to be. Thus top ‘Bolly’ champagne in the comedy Absolutely Fabulous.
We eat appearances and may starve in the process. As Wallace Simpson was reputed to say of her aspiration to aristocracy and royalty, “One can never be too rich or too thin”. What I spend on food may be a way of boasting of one’s superior spending capacity or searching for another’s shame. Sometimes food is about status as in the scene in Madame Bovary where Flaubert shows us peasants leaning into the windows to see the rich aristocracy and privileged bourgeoisie feasting with the local gentry.
When I worked as a social worker, food banks were rare and I was thought unusual in using them to supplement the diet of those on financial distress and in manufactured poverty. Now they are part of what our corrupt government thinks of as it’s social services. Yet they mop up the waste created by capitalism where food is sometimes artificially lifted in price as over the capacity of the poor, whatever it’s actual production cost.
That wondrous Victorian sage John Ruskin in Unto This Last defined the making of value as the transformation of the labour, so much life not lived, put into it. Food gave life at the cost of so much death for its manufacture in lost time, energy and life-force of an artisan. He had a point that people miss which is also implied by Marx’s Labour theory of Value.
So ask me not what my spending power is and how I estimate the value of goods and appearances of what is good I have consumed, even wasted. It makes me sick to my very stomach.
But all love, prompt setters. As Christ said, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do’.
Steve
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