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The first farms were subsistence farms. Families grew enough to sustain themselves, and made planting decisions based on their projected needs for the coming year. They used draft animals, compost, manure, and manual tools to cultivate their plots, and rotated crops to preserve the soil’s nutrients.

Only in the last hundred years have grocery stores existed.  They arose from general stores and trading posts — a natural place of exchange along trade routes.

But the food trade in this country has become gluttonous:

Americans spend a smaller share of their disposable income on food than citizens of any other country and choose from an average of 50,000 different food products on a typical outing to the supermarket. In 1994, the food supply provided an estimated 3,800 calories per person per day, enough to supply every American with more than one and a half times their average daily energy needs. (USDA)

Our system has become so efficient that industry now provides a gross excess of food. We throw away almost 1/4th of the food we buy, despite eating more than we need to and exercising less than we ought to.

Perhaps Ayn Rand was right, when in Atlas Shrugged, she suggested that the ideal society operated on pure capitalism, where producers of value bartered for goods and services they needed. Fiscal wealth was so insignificant that in her novel, a solid gold sculpture was the central fixture in her utopia.

What if the supermarket were more like the romanticized Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter films? Or even the true markets of London hundreds of years ago, complete with mixed-use development? Producers of value — craft — produced and sold goods locally in their shops (above which they dwelled), while farmers brought the excess produce of their toil into the city for exchange.

A system like this is limiting. It suggests a diet devoid of bananas, oranges, halibut, and saffron. But can we not grow spices in our windowsills? Can we not catch fish in our own state lakes and ponds? Do not fruit trees flower in Kansas?

It is radical to suggest that we should all survive on subsistence farming, or local agriculture, or barter systems. But more radical is my belief that maybe we could.