Marxist Calorie Rations: Food For Everyone

Marxist Calorie Rations: Food For Everyone

So I had this crazy idea. What if, in a communist/socialist society*, we rationed food with a calorie system? Your daily calorie allowance would be determined with a chart:

There could be more categories too, like for very active people and such. This was the easiest chart to copy. Every member of a household would have a daily caloric allowance. All those daily allowances would be added up, and then multiplied by 365. That would provide for a yearly caloric allowance. Every household would be issued a calorie debit card (extra copies are of course allowed). The total calorie allowance would only be released 1/12th or one month at a time, to prevent people from splurging then going hungry. Unused calories wouldn't expire from month to month. Maybe they might at the end of the year, but I haven't really decided that just yet. That could be put to vote, perhaps.

So for example, a "typical" family of four; mother (35), father (37), girl (12), and boy (8), all with a moderate activity level; (yes I know, I'm being horribly stereotypical, but bear with me for the sake of the example) would have a respective daily caloric allowance of 2000 cal, 2600 cal, 2000 cal, and 1600 cal, for a total of 8200 daily household calories. Multiplied by 365, that's an annual household caloric allowance of 2,993,000 calories. As the calories would be released monthly, the family would get 249,417 calories added to the debit card every month. The family would then be free to spend or save those calories however they choose. Healthier, lower-calorie food would be a more efficient use of the calorie allowance, however that does not preclude the family from choosing less healthy, higher-calorie food. They just don't get as much food when doing that, providing an incentive, but not an outright mandate, to eat healthier.

This would drastically cut health costs for the society. A healthier society (from eating better) would have less health costs. Obesity would be practically eliminated (barring health conditions). The only way to get more food than your allotted calories would be to become more active, and the health benefits of exercise are well-published. You could also have a generous friend, willing to host dinner, but that is likely to result in your having to host dinner at a later date. Applications for increased caloric limits could potentially be filed and reviewed on a case-by case basis. Nobody would starve while waiting for an expanded limit, since nobody will starve on 1500+ calories (but maybe feel a little hungry). After the first year of implementation, a popular vote could be taken to assess if this really is enough food.

In this system, I could still buy a bottle of truffle oil. I might want to buy a smaller bottle, since oil is high-caloric and I don't use a lot of truffle oil. However, truffle oil is in fairly short supply and is not cheap or especially easy to produce (I could be wrong and truffle oil is expensive for completely overblown reasons- I don't claim to be a truffle oil expert. This is just an example of something that's fairly expensive and really unnecessary, but delicious). So for every expensive item, like truffle oil, (or maybe every item, if that proves to be a good idea) a limit would be set. If there are 120 cal in 1 Tbsp (serving) of truffle oil, and each serving of truffle oil is about $1 in the current economy, truffle oil is freaking expensive. An (arbitrary) annual limit would have to be set. Say the governing body determines that 15 servings of truffle oil is the absolute maximum. But 10 servings is even better, just because it's so expensive. That's a limit of 1200 truffle oil calories per year (10 servings). I could go nuts and use that all in the first week of the year, or I could space that out. Or I could say I don't really care about truffle oil and not get any. But if I really like truffle oil that much, then I could get an extra five servings, for a total of 15. But my extra 5 servings would cost double the calories. So If I got all 15 servings of truffle oil, I would spend 2400 calories altogether. Which is more than an entire day's worth of food for me. Still expensive, but now it is at least accessible to everyone.

The nitty gritty details of this food rationing plan would have to be hashed out by a government committee, then put to popular vote as a final plan, to accept or revise. It would take many years of research and planning and possibly also experimentation before such a drastic plan could ever be implemented. But I am reveling in my self-perceived genius moment for hatching it. People say capitalism is the best system we have. But I disagree. I think that if you really work on it, everyone everywhere, a better system can arise. I'm probably not the first person to think of something like this. Or maybe I am. I don't know. Burgeoning Marxist societies: feel free to steal this idea from me. Just maybe put my name somewhere in the footnotes. This is only one of the many many pieces in the great puzzle that is putting together a better society. And it might not be perfect. There are a lot of other things that go into this. But I believe it is better.


*Yes, I'm a Marxist. More on this later.