in the middle? you mean the middle who also owns the start and the end supply of almost everything?

Farmers markets?

They don’t own the start, the farmer does and they get fucked by the middle man too.

Essentially guy doing logistics and processing internalize all of the value within the chain via monopoly powers.

IMO every city should have public cafeterias that:

A) Grow / process ingredients onsite (greenhouse), or source through a local network.

B) Provide nutritional food free of charge

C) Create entry level jobs that teach practical skills such as cooking and horticulture.

D) Increase food security. Global agriculture supply chains are about to be completely disrupted by climate change.

Lol… That’s a place where affluent people feel “authentic”

They are hardly cheap and that’s the point

Modern farmers market is yuppie exercise

AFAIK the retail side in Canada is also making significant profits. Those could be removed or significantly reduced from the prices of a public grocery store. This would decrease prices in the short term. The oligopoly could then increase their distribution side profit margins, forcing the public stores to increase prices. This would make a very strong case for the comprehensive public solution that also tackles distribution. If you tackle just distribution, there’s nothing discouraging the retail side of the oligopoly from cranking up their profit margins immediately. In effect, retail prices wouldn’t increase, but the oligopolies would absorb the decreased distribution price difference. Then they’d get their politicians to say - see gov’t wasted billions on this scheme and nothing changed, time to scrap the public distribution company. Ideally a public option should tackle both retail and distribution in one go in order to realize lower prices curbing the oligopoly’s ability to prevent that via the distribution or retail sides.

E: I guess the oligopoly could instantly increase distribution margins in the first scenario too. Independent grocers would probably scream, but I don’t know if that would be a significant impediment. I think it would be more difficult for the oligopoly to instantly stop any price decrease due to retail profit elimination, but I’m not certain lower prices would hold long enough for the public to take notice and oppose the inevitable calls for dismantling public distribution. So yeah, a public option would most likely have to have public distribution to succeed.

Sorry, we’d rather keep paving over farmland to make unaffordable mcmansions because our leaders cannot fathom a country that is self sufficient where values aren’t constantly increasing

B-bbut where will we put all the over priced shoeboxes for better offs from out of town to party in?

A) is just rediculous, the space required to feed even a suburban block is orders of magnitude more than a greenhouse onsite could provide. It may be able to grow enough herbs, but that’s about it.

I’m fine with the rest of the idea.

or source through a local network.

Ground floor is the community grocery, and the next 3-5 floors are a hydroponics farm. It’s really not that ridiculous.

My vision is

Ground floor: Cafeteria / service kitchen

2nd Floor: Production Kitchen / food packaging

3rd Floor : Aquaponics & fertigation

4+ : greenhouse.

You could have 5 floors, and it still wouldn’t be enough. You could have 30 floors and it wouldn’t be enough.

I don’t think you understand the scale of farming to human. Even if you’re entirely vegetarian it’s on the order of 0.5-1 acre per person to grow the required food. That’s 20,000-40,000 square feet. Even if hydroponics were involved and cut that by a factor of 10, you’d still be at 2000 square feet per person. A typical grocery store is 25-50,000 square feet, so let’s go with the most generous and say 5 floors of 50,000 square feet you could produce enough food for… 125 people.

The math doesn’t math. No reasonable amount of food growth is ever going to be possible inside a city.

It’s a nice utopian idea, but it just doesn’t do anything. The aquaponics and greenhouse are just a bad utilization of such prime real estate space, the amount of food produced would be so low as to be a rounding error for the food they would still need to import and you could use that same floor space to house hundreds of more people.

Go look at my comment from a few minutes ago showing the production math for 5 stories of hydroponics.

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We’re talking about 2 different things. I have zero interest in debunking all your strawmans and assumptions about a completely different concept.

I just replied to your other comment, but even a local network can’t feed a city. Let’s do some more math.

Los Angeles has about 18 million people, and on average they take about 2 acres of land to feed (it can be less for vegetarians, but lets assume they are just normal people here)

That’s 36 million acres needed, which is about 56,000 square miles, which is an area of 280 miles by 200 miles of nothing but farmland.

You quite literally can’t even feed Los Angles with a 100 mile diet, even if it was surrounded by nothing but farms (which it isn’t)

In fact, California only has about 25 million acres of farmland in total (8 million irrigated, and the rest for animal grazing)

Source local food sounds good, but we import food for a reason. Cities require a ridiculous amount of farm land to feed.

Your article says it’s 40:1 instead of the 10:1 I assumed, but that’s still far too little to matter.

Your two floors of farming would still feed less than a hundred people full time, even if they hit those lofty idea targets.

You’re the one inserting the assumption that this has to become the only source of food for people.

I said:

or source through a local network.

If you can’t read those words and comprehend them than why would I consider anything you have to say?

What the fuck does local mean? I just showed you the math that even Los Angeles alone consumes more food than you can possibly grow in California.

You’re the one fucking around with “I want a greenhouse above my grocery store” with no real proof that it would matter or be a good use of space.

What you said:

typical grocery store

What I said:

IMO every city should have public cafeterias

We’re not talking about the same thing. You’re arguing with yourself.