Bread

I watched a very interesting TV programme on the history of bread in the UK (part of the Timeshift series).

There is a subtle interplay of science and monetary economics. The technical developments in bread production enabled far greater volumes of bread to be produced more cheaply, thus enabling poorer people to obtain it. But there was little hesitation by the bakers interviewed or in the developments depicted about the benefit in financial terms to the bakers and corporations.

The primary purpose of food should be to deliver nutrition. In the early days of the period covered by the programme,  British wheat with low nutritional quality was used to make a bread which was unpalatable and hard to eat by people with poor teeth (a feature of poor hygiene and nutrition). So white bread, even though it is nutritionally inferior in theory, through being more palatable and softer, could yet have been more nutritionally valuable, but that the labour costs of refining the flour rendered it costly and therefore sought after as a sort of delicacy.

It's well known that people's diet during the second world war was on the whole very good. What people should/could eat had been studied from a nutritional point of view. Whilst there is no reason that people shouldn't enjoy bread from an aesthetic point of view, at a planetary level, the number one priority for food is its nutritional function, not its aesthetic, nor its ability to produce financial gain for its producers. The defence of current free-market capitalism that it can produce benefits through the profit motive would have a problem for me even if the evidence of millions starving didn't undermine the claim. If you want to adequately nutrify a population, you have a technical problem to directly be addressed. Why construct a complex free market system (using) some of society's best minds to produce a secondary funcion of nutrifying the world's inhabitants? Is there a theistic belief in the free market capitalist system such that anything society wants done must be (or claimed to be) contingent on it? Or is it just a distraction from the task in hand, critcisms of which are deflected or met by the claim that it can deliver social goals?