>Imagine if we were talking about food. You might start out that we have no choice in the foods we eat, as it all comes through corporate structures and advertising which creates an artificial demand for tastes and products. I reply that most supermarkets have a tremendous variety of foods, including frozen dinners, ice creams of varying quality, Middle Eastern grains like couscous, baking mixes, candies, fruits and vegetables from all around the world (and we can enjoy oranges in wintertime), whole milk, breads and bread mixes, every kind of meat (even from free-range, grain-fed animals), and much, much more.
I don't know where you live, but here in Australia that simply isn't true. We are fortunate that chemical-free free range beef and lamb is readily available, because that is how these animals are farmed here. But free range poultry is completely unavailable. There is a huge difference in quality between chicken and duck that is factory farmed and that which is grown to maturity free range. The former is grown so fast (using hormones etc) and killed at such a young age that it is completely tasteless and little more than fat. Personally, I really enjoy duck, so I have to grow my own.
And where, pray, would I go to buy a dressed goose these days I wonder?
There are many other products which are impossible buy, because it is unprofitable to produce them, or simply illegal to produce them. Take raw milk, (unpasteurised, unhomogenised) it wasn't that long ago that people could still buy raw milk from a few isolated dairies, but not anymore. Not now. Illegal to retail milk which has not been tampered with.
But even decent red meat is a problem. These days it is practically impossible to buy decent hogget (lamb which is over 12 months old) or mutton. You have to buy immature lamb which really hasn't developed a decent taste. The only thing you can buy in the supermarket is what the majority of people want. It is legal to just go out and buy a sheep from the local farmer, bring it home and dress it in your back yard for your own consumption. But you have to transport it alive. If you dress it in the farmer's killing shed and transport the carcass home to cut up, you are committing an offense.
This is all designed to re-inforce the monopoly of the licensed abbatoirs.
Same goes for beef. This is particularly galling, since it means that effectively the only way (can't fit a live steer in my car boot) is to buy a beast from the farmer, then send it to an abbatoir. But the first thing they tell you when you talk to the abbatoir is that they won't guarantee you will get back the same beast you sent there. Which is the whole point, you don't want to be stuck with a freezer full of low quality meat, you want to pick out a real prime beast. But the abbatoirs aren't bluffing, they really will send you back a different beast, I had it happen to me once. I sent them a beautiful specimen of a steer, the thing I got back was crap.
So that's a complete waste of time. There's almost no (legal) way for me to get hold of the sort of meat that I want. I have to commit a crime to be assured of good quality beef.
Nowadays it seems impossible to even get sheep brains. So that's next I suppose, all manner of offal will disappear from the market. No doubt this is due to the irresponsible capitalist farming practices which have thrown up diseases like BSE. I have heard it is impossible to buy beef with bones in the UK, so beef marrow is off the market there presumably.
Now some of these are public safety issues, but the point is that they are public safety issues because of the way farming is practised under capitalism. The economic system is gradually reducing our choices in all sorts of subtle ways.
Nowadays I can buy wallaby mince in the supermarket, sometimes even venison. But only a few years ago wallaby meat was impossible to buy. Regulations banned butchers from selling it alongside beef and lamb etc. So the only way was to go out and shoot it yourself. (Which is tedious.) Just lately a small game meat abbatoir has stared up, so it can legally be marketed again. But its tenuous, this abbatoir is mainly in the export business, brush possum (each to their own I suppose) and wallaby to Asia. If things go bad that business could easily go down and we'll be back to not being able to buy wallaby meat in Tasmania again.
There's plenty of other things I can't buy as well. Like a toaster that lasts more than 12 months. So don't give me that crap about how markets give us all this choice, so far as I can tell it does the exact opposite in practice.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas