my broccoli was frozen last night, so i just made some eggs. groceries came in this morning, but my ground bison meat was thawed out by this evening, so i made the quesadillas first.

this is half a leftovers meal, although i also bought some things for it. i thought it was tasty. but it was also not how i intended, and it was pretty filling. i made three and could only eat one.

the bison was a food bank gift that has been in my freezer since the summer. the food available at the food bank was in fact often a little exotic. i guess the bison didn't sell well. bison meat was at one point a staple of people on this continent. this time, i found it was indiscernible from hamburger, and i couldn't have told you it was something different.

this was how i made the quesadillas:

- put the bacon on first. three slices in olive oil.

- put 300 g of ground bison in a larger pan and wait until it's brown. i had a taco mix the superstore was handing out a while back that i used once it was done. i added cumin, oregano, paprika and frank's.

- the bison should cook fast. reduce heat and let simmer. 

- just dump the pan of bacon, with grease, in the bison meat and continue to let simmer. 

- i am using the last 3 greek pitas from the pizzas

- slice each one in half

- i was intending on putting items on one side of each pita and putting the other side back on before baking, but these quesadillas are too loaded for that

- it may be useful to use a separate pan for each pita you cook

- make a separate bowl of salsa for each pita

- you may of course reuse the bowls

- salsa ingredients: one avocado, one clove of garlic 1/3 red pepper, 1/3 tomato*

*i had three pitas, remember

- for each pita,

- on one side of the pita, put mozzarella cheese all over the pita and cover with the bison/bacon chili mix on  the stove

- put salsa on top of chili, and also put salsa on other side of pita

- put cheese over salsa on second side of pita

- put some jalapenos on both sides

- bake

while baking, open a container of sour cream and add chopped chives, dill to the sour cream

after taking out of the oven, put sour cream on quesadillas. eat with fork.

one of the best ways to identify between a real leftist, a socialist, and a fake left progressive/conservative is to determine if they are arguing using data or using appeals to emotions.

conservatives love to blame everything on "human nature". the idea that food is expensive due to greedy ceos is logically equivalent to the reductio ad human nature fallacy that defines practically all small-c conservative argumentation.

socialists, on the other hand, following marxist concepts of historical materialism and "scientific socialism", want everything to have a cause in economics. they will tend to avoid appeals to emotion and present arguments in empirical data and logical deduction. 

the idea that things are expensive because ceos are greedy would not sit well with any actual socialist; a socialist would want a naturalistic explanation rooted in economic data, whereas a conservative would seek some failing in moral behaviour as the cause of an undesirable outcome. socialists want to tell you why things are how they are using some appeal to science; conservatives think everything is made good by god and want to blame anything that goes wrong on somebody's impropriety or corruption.

i'd actually like to see the greens address this properly by addressing the energy issue and arguing for decentralized production.

all the immigrants love the public grocery store plan because it promises to spread out the public subsidies they get and increase their purchasing power, even though it won't work.

...except the ukrainian refugees. they don't like this.

for some reason.

why is that, do you think?.

conversely, donald trump's plan to reduce food prices is to increase the supply of oil, and thereby decrease the price of oil.

while this doesn't address the underlying energy crisis, and it will further harm the planet, it has a higher chance of success in reducing inflation than nationalizing food distribution networks, as it gets closer to the problem.

i find this extremely frustrating, even if it's easy enough to understand why this is happening.

i made an attempt to deconstruct this when it came up in new york. is it going to work in toronto? i haven't seen data, but my best guess is that it worked in new york due to the very high immigration level in that city. there's a comparison between toronto and new york, but let's try to understand what that means from a socialist perspective and from a working class perspective, rather than an immigrant perspective.

the ndp's message here is very clear:

- small businesses keep costs down for comparable products

- big businesses make things more expensive for comparable products

why is that? because big business is greedy.

now, maybe that's true, although the data suggests it isn't, but what is the ndp's message here? is promoting small business over big business a socialist message, about the proletariat taking control of the means of production? or is it actually a small-c conservative message about the bourgeois small-business class taking more profit for itself by reducing labour costs?

i can't speak much about green bean supply chains in ontario, but apple supply chains are well known in ontario, and i can make an educated guess that is admittedly a priori about why the apples are more expensive at loblaws, which has to do with transportation costs. the small business is more likely to source locally, from a local apple grower, of which there are many in canada, whereas loblaws is likely to source from large suppliers that bring the apples to a centralized distributor and then transport them around. it follows that the apples are cheaper at the small business because you're not paying unionized workers union wages to buy gas to truck them over larger distances and that may very well be true enough, but loblaws has to stock thousands of stores and feed millions of people and so it requires larger distribution networks that seek to scale up production to economies of scale in ways that cannot currently be sustained strictly by local production. 

socialism is not about sourcing local produce. socialism is about superproduction via economies of scale.

not only are the bourgeois class small business owners not paying working class unionized workers to distribute the product, but they are not paying fair wages to farm the product, either. this actually results in a much larger profit margin to the bourgeois small business owners at the end of the day. it is far more profitable, per apple sold, to import mexican slaves to pick enough apples in an orchard down the street to stock a couple of bins than it is to hire unionized workers to run a large scale, country-wide or province-wide distribution network.

the message from the ndp is that the profits of the bourgeoisie are more important than maintaining a union work force, so long as it keeps commodity prices down, in the end; that it's ok to undercut unionized wages by hiring slaves, so long as the result is lower prices. this small-c conservative messaging might elect a few power-hungry ndp mps, but it will only harm workers and only harm socialist organizing in canada. this is exactly the race to the bottom that underpinned nafta and that the last generation of new democrats was explicitly opposed to.

will publicly run grocery stores address any of this? they might succeed in breaking the market by presenting lower prices on the shelf if the store is mandated to do that, but it would have to be at the cost of higher taxes to offset it. a public distribution network would maybe be more efficient if it eliminated the deadweight loss that is generated by competition in supply chains and replaced it with a cartel system, but that waste due to competition is already minimal in this industry, and it would certainly generate higher wages because it would create more union jobs. it would either lead to higher prices to pay the higher wages or it would lead to higher taxes to create the illusion of lower prices.

you'd might as well just hand out gst rebates, instead.

the actual cause of high food prices is a serious problem and it requires a more serious solution than blaming greedy ceos that includes addressing the following:

- we transport too much food. we need to grow more food locally. we need to decentralize food production.

- we use too many oil-based pesticides and fertilizers, which makes the cost of food reliant on the cost of oil

- tariffs on canadian fertilizer that is not oil-based entering the united states will hit canadian consumers in the end, on goods that don't currently have substitutes made in canada (and have low elasticity in demand). eliminating the american farmers from the supply chain may help reduced costs in those scenarios.

these are issues that have to do with how we use energy first and foremost. blaming the issue on greedy ceos is easy but it's ignorant and it also completely undoes marxist theory, which is all about organizing in larger groups to stop small business owners from accumulating profit by exploiting workers. that small business owner selling apples picked by mexican slaves at a higher profit margin, per apple, than loblaws and passing on the savings in labour costs to a small consumer base (probably in an upscale neighbourhood) is a piss-poor argument for a socialist party to make, that's for sure.

if this kind of conservative populism helps the ndp win a few seats, it will be at the expense of socialist organizing and will only help the liberals maintain power. ironically, it's actually the liberals that have the better plan to address the energy crisis that is creating high food prices that is more likely to actually work in getting costs down.