Home Feeders

Home Feeders

A while back, I wrote an amusing piece (well, I thought it was amusing) analogizing education to food--and imagining a society where public restaurants fed every resident, free of charge (as well as illegal aliens, of course, but not tourists just passing through). In the course of that piece, I made a reference to home schoolers that I thought would be immediately recognized as sarcasm--but at least one home schooler thought that I was seriously calling them whackos, by comparing them to people who insisted on having meals at home with their family, instead of going to the tax-funded public restaurant system.

Anyway, I was thinking more about home schoolers today, and I found myself wondering: what if, in 1870, elites of Western societies had made a concerted effort to create a tax-funded public restaurant system? How would we regard people that ate at home today?

If this seems like an absurd idea, I've read that part of why Britain started its family nutrition supplement program after the Boer War (1899-1902) was because so many young men that volunteered for military service were so badly nourished that they simply could not pass the physical. (This page seems to be acknowledging as much.) Imagine if the dominant idea of Edwardian England had been socialism, not welfare state capitalism? Today we would have a public restaurant system like I described previously.

I admit that this is a radical concept. Even the Soviet Union, to my knowledge, didn't try to abolish the concept of families preparing and eating meals together. Some socialists did float the idea--but even Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward only imagined a future where dinner was eaten in the community dining hall. Still, how would we today look at "home feeders"--those who insisted on preparing meals at home for themselves and their children?

Defenders of the public restaurant system would admit that some parents had sufficient knowledge of nutrition and food preparation to prepare adequate meals for their children. But how, without a degree in nutrition, could most parents expect to prepare properly balanced meals? Why, just look at how bad the situation was a century ago! People sickened and died of pellagra, beri-beri, and a host of other malnutrition diseases! Even today you hear of parents who let their kids go hungry, or inadequately nourished! Just think what it would be like if parents had the option of keeping their tax dollars, and were given the enormous responsibility of buying food at the store!

And without the professional training and state certification in food preparation, how could the average parent expect to consistently prepare meals without giving their children food poisoning? Look at how often people get food poisoning even in licensed restaurants that are subject to health inspections! It is just asking for trouble for most parents to try this themselves. It might work for a few weeks, but you just know that a parent is going to fail to wash his hands in between cutting up the chicken and putting the plates on the table!

A few defenders of the public restaurant system would insist that "home feeders" were just kooks who wanted to teach their children "fringe ideas" about eating which shouldn't even be allowed until the children were 21--or that "home feeders" are going to give their kids nothing but soft drinks and Twinkies for every meal--because that's what the kids want, and parents are too lazy to say no.

Because the tax structure forces you to pay for the public restaurant system, almost everyone will use it. Since most people won't know any "home feeders," all sorts of outrageous lies will be told about them, and many people won't know any better.