Progressive Futurism 1: Grow-cery Stores
Tags: Global Warming, Economics, Future, Ecology, Agriculture

The common consensus on progressive philosophy is that it’s pro-government. I would argue that the metric we do, or should, would be progress. Markets are good at certain things but not others. So this series of essays on progressive futurism will be to anticipate needs of the future and offer possible solutions- not with the idea of pursuing a single course- but all courses until one is of clearly the best avenue for the political meta (to borrow an MTG term).

A few problems I’ve contemplated that we might have to deal with is food left to rot on the vine from immigration raids, I will never taste the best types of banana, and the fuel use of transporting food. Eventually two of these problems collided in my mind and raised the questions: Do we need immigrants to pick food? Do we need to transport food?

Uh oh that doesn’t sound progressive… Again this is about dealing with the reality on the ground not the goal of driving out immigrants. Also we are currently at a net zero illegal immigration situation. If Mexico’s economy begins to out pace us we might find ourselves in a scenario where we are in a net loss. Also we already had food rotting on the vine when Obama was deporter in chief so this is not a purely hypothetical.

The obvious solution to the food transport problem is to eat locally. But farmers markets are sort of a niche right now and I’m not sure on their scalability. Then it hit me when I added the immigration component. We wouldn’t need to pay people to pick strawberries if we buy the strawberries off the vine. Grocery stores are warehouses of food and purchase points but we could start seeing Grow-cery stores where the aisles are rows of hydroponic plants or growrooms where we take them off the vine instead of off the shelf.

I half ass my garden, which has been completely over taken by mint, so I am far from an expert. But again this is about brain storming. But the more people who are experts make this a reality the more we’re going to perfect the technology and the lower the hurdles will get.

One area that I’m interested will be with pesticides. Growing in doors doesn’t eliminate pests (especially if a lot of people are coming in and out all the time, though butterfly houses manage) but by moving the food crops and spraying in doors we might see a decrease in the impact on good insects.

Obviously we won’t be able to completely localize all food but the more we can whittle down emissions the better and when we get established grow-cery stores that have been in business more than a decade that’s when things get really interesting because that will be when we get to the point where stores can differentiate themselves with having different trees than their competitors.

Which brings me back to bananas. In 2006 or so I found out that my life is a lie and that we only get the worst tasting bananas in the world because monoculture farming caused the extinction of our grandparents bananas and the remaining tastiest bananas don’t ship well. So the only way we will ever get our taste buds on them without a passport is if people figure out how to grow them here.

Around the same time I heard about a farmer who bought land in Arizona that he couldn’t use the way he wanted because it had hot springs in it. I was yelling at the radio “trap that steam to grow my ‘nanners!” but he didn’t listen and had already started an alligator farm. The next time I thought about this was after a local Libertarian candidate used bananas as an example of something you wouldn’t want to subsidize growing here in America because it takes so much unneeded effort, showing how little he knows about our terrible bananas.

Bringing it back around to the topic at hand having a culture around localized food is that one of the ways Grow-cery stores can compete in a current market with industry driven grocery chains is by offering a sort of food tourism for fruits that are not being grown anywhere else.

With climate change shifting regions which different crops can survive (chocolate might go extinct from that problem) and an increase of people who work with hydroponics- we’re going to start seeing a lot of innovations in how we grow food which means we should also start thinking about how we buy food in a different way.

Next time I am going to write about how to structure debates when there’s over a dozen candidates, hit me up on social media to let me know what you thought about this topic and if I should revisit it later. Also do all the things to maximize visibility