By Matthew Abely
Thank you Caleb Patterson for writing in last week. It is good to see others with an opinion regarding The Commons debacle. Unfortunately, I am inclined to disagree with your opinion. If I am reading you right, you are either all for eliminating the rule that says students living on campus have to buy a meal plan and so eat at least some of their food through Bon Appétit. Or, you support the University ending its exclusive contract with Bon Appétit and opening the campus up to some sort of free market on the basis that the regulation of a governing body on a profession is bad. I am sorry to say that it is not.
We in America, and by extension the University of Portland, do not live in the wild. We live in society. We have government to ensure and protect certain inalienable rights so we personally do not have to. One of those rights is the right to life, which means the right to be fit and healthy and have access to not only abundant but high quality food. By mandating that all on-campus students have a meal plan and by making the only food sold on campus Bon Appétit's, the Administration of the University is both ensuring and protecting we the students' right to live healthy fit lives here on campus (read: they are doing their job as government).
Is the campus government doing its job in the best way? Well, it certainly would be nicer if they explained to us as freshmen why they were forcing us to get a meal plan and that other sources of food are right off campus, but still, they are doing their job to protect our health right.
They are not the U.S. government, which is currently doing its job wrong. I wrote in my last submission regarding the reason fast food, a very expensive food to make, has such a cheap price tag because of misplaced subsidies and related laws.
I bring it up again because Caleb brought it up last week in what I think was a conceit about how much better Burgerville was as an institution for being willing to compete in a "free market."
Agriculture and food are not free markets, not in America anyway. All fast food and related food products exist because our government spends our taxes propping them up. They do not do this directly.
The government began subsidizing commodity crops like corn and soy, along with large-scale factory farms and meals of distribution in an effort to end hunger in America. Unfortunately, in their attempt to protect everyone's right quantity of food they forgot about quality. Today this entire broken, societal-damaging, global-warming-inducing system is kept on life support because now agribusiness people, fast food profiteers and their cohorts, have so much profit invested in keeping people unhealthy that they essentially force the government to keep subsidizing them.
If you are going to be upset about food in America, do not blame the people with the food with the expensive price tags who are doing their job right. No, we should all be very angry with the corporate scumbags and the politicians serving them who have taken away our right life on a societal level so that they can make money off of our pain.
