That doesn’t scale, and it’s sometimes even illegal. We /used/ to deal with market failure and make sure basic services were met by creating crown corporations. Imagine that the Westons had to compete with a public company that got basic food goods from the farms to stores at industrial scale and at break-even costs. Heck, it could even lose money in remote areas where people can’t currently access healthy food as the healthcare savings would be a great investment. It wouldn’t have to be fancy, and it wouldn’t have to include anything highly processed -just basic, healthy grocery goods that meet our needs. The capitalists would do fine, but would have to either actually be more efficient than the publicly owned system, or rely on premium goods for their profits (which they already mostly do anyway).

The Lufa model needs to spread across the country. They have a handful of urban greenhouses in Montreal, so a lot of the produce I buy is actually grown in the city, and everything else that they can’t grow themselves is procured directly from the producers/farms, not from a re-seller.

(although, fuck their labour practices, I very much wish they had competition in the city so they would be pressured to clean up their act in that regard, I hate that I feel like I have to compromise my values in some way in order to buy local and direct)

For some industries you can’t do this because of regulatory capture.

For example dairy. Dairy farmers are not allowed to sell to anyone except the cooperative, who does all the processing and then sells to stores. Since the dairy cartel is in bed with the grocery cartel, good luck breaking in.

Also fo meat, any meat sold in Canada must be inspected at a federal abbatoire. Guess who owns the abbatoires? The big guys, and they’re not going to sell to you because the beef cartel is in bed with the grocery cartel.