Germany’s hidden hunger: On the breadline in Europe’s richest country (2017)
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Many of the migrant kids I've met can't speak any German. Even kids that are already 10 years old. Thus I believe this situation will escalate even further in the future, as it will be very hard for these kids to get a proper education without the needed language skills.
It makes you feel really bad to see them growing up in such an environment without much chance for a better life. But ultimately this is due to their parents decision to have so many kids, even if they can't afford simple food.
Meanwhile, Sweden has no language, income, employment, or skills requirement (<http://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/B...>) for obtaining citizenship.
>Thus I believe this situation will escalate even further in the future, as it will be very hard for these kids to get a proper education without the needed language skills.
In completely unrelated news, Arabic is now the second most spoken language in Sweden (<https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_po...>).
Is it ultimately the fault of the parents, though? It's easy to place to blame on individual parents, but more interesting to study the misses/wrongdoings of the educational system. Schools tend to cast immigrants children on the side very early on, and not even try to teach them anything (their future as low-wage workers for the industry has already been decided), at least it is so here in France and your suggestion that 10 years old children can't speak properly the language used by everyone around them seems to indicate the situation is the same in Germany.
If anything, it's a sign of deep social disintegration on a broader scale, probably due to a mix of institutional racism/classism and public policies aiming to dismantle public services.
Seems like lack of enforcement by some authorities.
Sure not all of them are going into a Tafel, still...
However in the past decades, the government's attack on home schooling has coincided with the introduction of more and more nationalist/racist doctrine in public schools.
Don't get me wrong, i'm strongly in favor of public education, as long as it's in the interest of the children (for example Montessori methods) but public schools in much of the world are the exact opposite of that.
Not everyone born to a land shares the same culture. There are huge cultural shifts between faiths and political sides, for example, and it's not a problem. A society that is not multicultural has a settler's mentality which is profoundly racist.
For example here in France, at the same time the colonial process aimed to destroy local cultures in the colonies in Algeria/Indochine/etc, public schools were used as a weapon to destroy the local cultures and languages in Bretagne, Alsace, Occitanie, etc... A few generations of beating children who spoke their native tongue, suggesting that french was a somehow superior language (and assimulation was a requirement), was enough to annihilate most local cultures.
EDIT: I also don't understand why "reliance on safety net" would be a bad thing. There's a reason such mechanisms are in place, and one's contribution to society can hardly be measured in purely economic terms.
It’s the combination of failing to respect the local culture and refusing to contribute and extract benefits without giving back.
You wouldn’t like if I moved into your house, didn’t respect your way of life and just ate your food.
Assimilation and respect are not the same. If anything, there's strong incentives for immigrants to respect the local culture and to assimilate. I dare bet there's more respect for the flag and symbols of a nation from immigrants than from natives themselves, in proportion.
I've often found myself in situations where immigrants despite facing very rude situations were telling me all the great things about France, and praising Napoléon's conquests. And it's required of them as part of the legally-mandated racist assimilation process (in France at least). Many french people i know spit on the national flag and despise Napoléon for being a bloody tyrant and colonizer.
> extract benefits without giving back
Source? Even if you do have stats, they would be skewed by the fact illegals are often unaccounted, and that most immigrants (students, asylum seekers) are not allowed by law to work and declare income. Also, measuring in purely economical terms fails to account for participation in society outside of work: school trips, local associations, arts, militant activities...
> You wouldn’t like if I moved into your house, didn’t respect your way of life and just ate your food.
Of course not, but my house is my house and i don't appreciate anyone dictating me how it should be run, not even the State. Outside of my house, there's an abundance of food and housing and other resources. Who am i to dictate how other people should live? Who gets to decide what's "respect" or not? There's not a single way of life that's fairer than others, and even within a same ethnic group / region you'll find plenty of different ways of life and cultures.
It doesn't make sense to be taking care of refugees in Germany when they could take care of themselves for a fraction of the price in their regional homeland.
As long as these groups have food, they will continue to multiply, until the generous capacity of the host population is extinguished. Its classic R vs K reproduction strategy:
It's not and never been that people were incapable of integrating. Usually it's that they're refused the opportunity by being recognisably other and easy to discriminate against in various more or less overt ways.
I've a bunch of french journal clippings about first diaspora italians, they read exactly like your ilk. But once they speak french it’s pretty hard to differentiate an italian from a southern french or corsican.
I don't think this is true. There's nothing inherently natural about this. One could even argue that cooperation, not competition, is what brought us this far. Of course i'm all ears for counter-arguments but usually this stance is just misinformed "common knowledge" among people coming from imperialist cultures who tend to see the rest of the world in the same way.
> white people (...) get discriminated against by black people living in Martinique, La Réunion
That's not exactly comparable. There's a deep history of colonization, massacres and exploitation which leads to resentment (which is not the same as racism in my view, and is definitely not the same as a superiority complex). If you think that's over, just look at who owns land and industry on those islands you'll see it's all white people most of whom inherited their wealth from pillaging the local population.
Cooperation with the in-group, sure. Outside of that, most humans will at some point compete with the out-group for resources. That's thus far the history of humanity, for the vast majority of people that lived.
> That's not exactly comparable. There's a deep history of colonization, massacres and exploitation which leads to resentment (which is not the same as racism in my view, and is definitely not the same as a superiority complex).
Most of the people currently here have nothing to do with that history though.
> If you think that's over, just look at who owns land and industry on those islands you'll see it's all white people most of whom inherited their wealth from pillaging the local population.
Sure, they may be white but they're mostly filthy rich. Changing a class struggle in a race struggle is divide to reign 101, and it seems to be working.
Source?
> for the vast majority of people that lived
That's the history of civilizations maybe, but not every group/culture turns into an imperialist civilization. See also anticiv critiques.
> Most of the people currently here have nothing to do with that history though.
I would argue otherwise. They are not responsible for the actions of their ancestors, but everyone has a possibility and responsibility to correct unfair situations.
> Sure, they may be white but they're mostly filthy rich. Changing a class struggle in a race struggle is divide to reign 101
These are two different aspects of the same situation. How some nations and people became filthy rich is historically tied to a history of hierarchy of races and cultures, and this cannot be ignored. Studying class/race without the other is doomed to failure.
Race reductionism is just as dangerous as class reductionism. It's often brought up in leftist circles that bringing up racism in political analysis is "dividing left-unity". However, historically (at least here in France), immigrants had to form their own unions (Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée, Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes) because they were discriminated in the mainstream anticapitalist movement. Now we're facing a second trend of economically-privileged liberals over-emphasizing racial issues while downplaying class struggles, and that's equally misjudging.
See also intersectionality as a field of study in social sciences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality
Why is it that the people themselves never have any responsibility for integrating themselves?
Britain has three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (<http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain.
That is not what is happening right now. I'm not sure of the causes, but things have changed.
Edit: as some other people mentionned, work might make a big difference. The grandfather of a friend was a bus driver all his life, and that friend and his father are well integrated. If you can't access a job like that it's going to be hard to fit into society.
No, a second or third-generation french of italian origins is not recognisably non-french at a glance. At best they can be recognised as "not from the area" (which in some places is still a concern, but nowhere near the same).
> is a bit like when people say asian people look all the same.
It really is not.
A second or third-generation french of african or middle-eastern or asian origin can generally be recognised at a glance.
> Also, immigrants in France 50 years ago made more sacrifices to intergrate themselves (be it Italians, North Africans or Asians). […] That is not what is happening right now. I'm not sure of the causes, but things have changed.
https://i.redd.it/7easdur0x7i51.jpg
That's from 140 years ago. It might as well be from yesterday, with the nations of origin changed.
And it's hilarious that you're now using north african immigrants as a model minority alongside asians as a cudgel to hit others.
> The immigration was also more limited at the time, which allowed some people from North Africa, especially young women, to get away from their traditions and have a better place in society.
Hundreds of thousands of italians moved to france during the first diaspora: the italian population in france went from 63000 in 1850 to 330000 in 1901 (this does not include seasonal worker). The country was barely 40 million people. And over a million non-pieds-noirs immigrated from northern africa between the 50s and 70s.
I thought we were talking about first generation immigrants. I agree with you that second or third generation immigrants from Italy are hard/impossible to recognize, but that's not the case for others.
> That's from 140 years ago. It might as well be from yesterday, with the nations of origin changed.
There's rarely mentions of nations of origins in the news these days, journalists mostly talk about "young people", probably because pointing out the countries of origin would be racist, and also because sometimes the people mentionned have been in the country for a few generations.
> And it's hilarious that you're now using north african immigrants as a model minority alongside asians as a cudgel to hit others.
I wasn't hitting other minorities, I mentionned how some acted differently before. These days having to sacrifice your culture to integrate yourself in a country is seen as a bad thing. Before it was the obvious thing to do. I'm not passing judgment on any of those views, but highlighting that the mentalities have changed.
> Hundreds of thousands of italians moved to france during the first diaspora: the italian population in france went from 63000 in 1850 to 330000 in 1901 (this does not include seasonal worker). The country was barely 40 million people. And over a million non-pieds-noirs immigrated from northern africa between the 50s and 70s.
We have around ~150k people going in the country every year (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_en_France#Solde_mi...), with ~100k people becoming French each year. Considering the population didn't double since 1850, we now have more immigration in terms of percentage of the population compared to the two events you mentionned.
Again, I'm not passing judgment on anyone. I'm trying to understand why people felt that there was way more cohension in the 70s-90s (when my parents grew), and if their sentiment is true.
300 years ago we had no job agencies, there was no need for them. You just went to the local bar and asked the bartender. They would be quick to point out the unemployed guy with the biggest tab and his friends would push him forwards.
Learning a language in school just doesn't work. You have to go to the pub and talk with the [drunk] strangers. Its the only way to learn (and preserve) the local dialect.
Migrants come here and wonder where the f the public places are? Some are quick to build a Mosk. Learning dutch there is somewhat of a challenge to put it mildly.
So the problem [in my view] is that to much effort was put in shutting down public gatherings. We use to have Neighborhood Associations all over. People went there to chat with their neighbors/organize things. It was all shut down from the top down to boost exploitation and dictate the narrative.
Correct. And yet, they integrated.
Also see: Asians in the US. Especially those that migrated before WWII. (Or Italians or Irish, of course)
Because within a generation they were impossible to tell apart.
> Also see: Asians in the US. Especially those that migrated before WWII.
Tell me you have no idea about asian american integration without telling me you have no idea about asian american integration.
I don't think that's a correct interpretation. I would rather say the conservative blamers found other scapegoats to blame, for example with other immigration waves
As someone who works as a volunteer at a refugee center and supports a syrian family i can tell you thats not the case. We have two kinds of "refugees" in germany.
1) Real Refugees, that fear for their life 2) Migrants, that use the opportunity and the political climate to come to germany.
The second ones are the ones causing problems. A lot of them are aggressive, dealing drugs, using multiple identities to get more money. They miss their (provided) german classes and in one center they ripped out all ceramic toilets and sinks MULTIPLE TIMES. The amount of times i had to call the cops because one of them was drunk and drew a knife is just crazy.
So maybe they are refused integration because they are "recognisably other and easy to discriminate against" ... maybe its just because they behave like assholes.
That can be expected from people who went through various forms of traumas and insecurities. The same is usually said of people from poor neighborhoods, with the same kind of disdain.
Social problems are not solved by repression. 60 years ago, there were just as many racist comments pointing out how polish/spanish/italian immigrants were dangerous and not integrating in society. But 60 years ago, the economy was booming and the industry couldn't afford to discard workers; as a consequence, noone was forced a life of insecurity and most people had general faith in the system that if they worked hard enough they could enjoy their life.
Today it's much harder to find a job, especially without a recognized diploma (even janitors and cashiers are expected to have diplomas nowadays) and working very hard every day is not guaranteed to get you out of misery. "Migrants" as you call them, or most of them any way, are very much looking for a job and denied the opportunity. I know quite a lot of illegal immigrants here in france (sans-papiers) and they're always looking for an opportunity to work (they don't have the same social benefits french people and asylum seekers do) and it's very often, either they work very hard for little pay on construction sites or in kitchens (think 10h works 60€ pay) or the boss won't even pay them after weeks of work (that is VERY common in the restauration industry).
This is a hard reality we can't ignore if we try to understand the situation. Give people decent situation and opportunities, and you'll see they'll integrate just fine. Only people who've been denied justice turn to antisocial behavior... that's a very well studied problem in social sciences since way before this latest immigration wave started. Remember that for a very long time, the nobles of Europe claimed to be of a different species (the blue blood) and that workers were genetically programmed to be aggressive, stupid and hard-working.
> maybe its just because they behave like assholes
Take anyone and treat them bad, they'll either become ultra servile, or start behaving like assholes. The same is true with immigrants, which fall into both categories.
It is beyond me why you would give these people the right to work.
Either have proper borders around Europe, push them out instantly etc. or allow them to work. But don't complain about them dealing drugs. It is not the underlying problem here, just a logical consequence.
Side note: Just legalizing marihuana would also work.
No it doesn't. I am from NL, we have legalized the (selling to) consumer part for decades, so they'll do other stuff.
I agree it is a difficult political problem ( which we created ourselves ), but just as other 'simple' solutions are not feasible, simply allowing them to work is equally infeasible.
If we do not want them, closed Southern and Eastern EU borders or rather closed North African borders are our only courses of action. We can try to work with North Africa and Turkey to handle asylum processes over there. Of course this does brings some moral problems with it and will be opposed by the left. Children drowning is the ultimate bad publicity for your political stance. It comes down to what we are willing or feel obliqued to take responsibility for.
People, who are already here will stay anyway. That ship has sailed, we should start integrating asap.
Not before the gap has been closed, otherwise you will only attract more.
I don't doubt there is a lot of individual generosity in people. However, the assumption that social benefits are profitable and very open to immigrants to people is very wrong. Life on social benefits is hard, and immigrants don't live in luxury. Hell, a lot of immigrants have to live illegally due to racist "asylum" policies (you cannot apply for asylum as citizen of a country which is not recognized to be unsafe by your host country, or rather you can but you can be almost certain it will be refused).
I don't disagree that helping remote communities overcome their problems in an autonomous manner would help, in place of the current neocolonial theft and NGO industrial complex which creates dependency schemes instead of developing local autonomy.
But in the end, who are you to judge where someone should be allowed to live? Was someone in charge of judging whether you are allowed to reside where you live currently? Do you think it's a fair mechanism? If so, why is it only applied to people from the global south moving to the global north, and never the other way around?
Obviously they have the same demands for an explanation as society at large: they themselves are perfect (for example, these kids go to school, so they can be taught German, it just doesn't happen), so the explanation must be something else. It can't be them, themselves. It can't be the support structure. It can't be society around them (even though one just exposed himself as somewhat of a racist). So who is left? Homeowners, banks, that sort of thing if they're generous. The immigrants and their backwards ways must just cause it themselves! (and I might agree: in some cases that's true. Generally it's not)
It's like youth services. They generally blame what happens to kids ... on the kids. And if not on the kids, then on the parents. The most generous will blame the most useless blame of all "society". Never themselves. Despite research pointing out that the many "missed" kids (who stay with abusive parents) have a far better life than foster kids. In other words: even when you can prove that it is the social workers themselves CAUSING misery, they will still blame anyone else.
And in Germany, like in many other places, give a try to finding an Arabic-language German course book for cheap, through social services. Go ahead, give that a try. That doing so is so very hard, of course, has nothing to do with immigrants failing to learn.
The article is about food banks too. I am from NL, and the first food bank here was established in 2000.
Why were there no food banks in the 80s?
That's because historically this was managed through ubiquitous trade unions and collective agreements. The need for a legal minimum wage increased due to the rise in contract / temp work, and US corporations moving in (notably Amazon whose approach to labour relations has been distinctively american).
edit: replaced "official" with "state run"
AFAIK, all food banks in NL are NGOs.
edit: I wonder if the Tafel date of 1993 has anything to do with the reunification.
Historically there has been a circle of world-leading quality of exports rising the value of the Deutschmark, making it harder for Germany to compete, pushing the need for innovation and investments, creating higher payed jobs, producing world-leading exports again.
Germany had a highly educated labor-force directly integrated into corporate boards and organized in powerful unions. Germany's oldest party SPD was the political arm of those unions, a labor party. Governments where either right-wing (CDU, Angela Merkel's party) or left-wing (SPD) with a third, liberal party (FDP) switching between the two.
In the early 2000s, SPD started a program called "Agenda 2010", liberating the labor market and shattering itself in the process, because it affected its own clientele. They did it as a consequence of Germany being called "the sick man of Europe" in the 90s, because of its economic problems following the unification.
The reforms worked in the sense, that the German economy has been running for years without significant recessions. Unemployment has been steadily declining (pre Corona). But the quality of the economy has been changed. Germany is successfully competing in low-paid areas of the economy (e.g. meat-processing), a country like Germany should not be able to compete within an open European market.
I think in the end, while having some reasonable liberations in it, Agenda 2010 just accomodated for the fact that Germans (and Northern Europe) are now being paid in a currency, that has not enough value for it's economic output.
Eligibility checks, identity cards, someone literally stamping a record card - doesn't seem very Germanic. Are so many people really going to food banks without a good reason that you need to have this authoritarianism to catch them out? If someone turns up asking for food can they not be trusted that they're probably not doing something so embarrassing for fun?
During the war (and still for a significant time after it!) you literally had to hand your personal ration booklet over to a merchant who'd stamp your "quarter pound of butter", hand you the butter and your ration book back.
It's the most German system I could think of. Everyone's grandparents used it, and everyone's parents probably heard about it. I find it baffling that you consider it baffling.
Exactly - I thought German's extreme distrust of things like credit cards, identity checks, surveillance, etc, was a strong reaction against that part of their history?
- that's how you know someone's got their knowledge about modern-day Germany from American website aimed at teenagers ;-)
As in, your bank doesn't try to push credit cards on you constantly, you have to ask in restaurants and shops if they take credit cards, etc.
Didn't they make the €500 note basically just for Germany?
Imagine if you had to show your one ID (the one with your biometric data on it) to every single company you interacted with. If that card and data leaked, you would be ruined.
I assume that some would even do it just to save some money.
Then when you take into consideration that there are organized beggars and such, I believe they would also take food and try to resell it, etc.
As you say, it doesn't seem very German, so I would bet that there probably was a reason to include the checks.
I actually wonder where it would be more relaxed.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that rich people are putting themselves through the humiliation of saying that they aren't able to support themselves in order to get free grocery basics.
2 other anecdata's :
In the US, people are converting their food stamps into soda, because soda is more tradeable ( more liquid ) than anything else. They sell it to SMBs to convert foodstamps into money.
I frequent the second hand stores which are partially aimed at the same group. They sell stuff, furniture, electronics and clothes for very low prices ( think € 3 to € 5 for a pair of pants, € 20 for a TV etc ). These shops use very very very adhesive price tags, to the point I need solvents to remove them.
I asked them about it : do people really try to switch price tags on € 3 items? Yes they do.
Why do you care?
Why are rents to high? Why are they raising? And _who_ exactly is rising them?
I can't see the economic reason why such a large chunk of income needs to go to "landlords". Rents could just as well be very low, set to extremely reasonable level (they should be negligible, maybe 10% of monthly income at most, really). If you are a land-owner, that's about the level of taxation you see. I just don't see why we accept current state of things as the way to be.
He's trying to get the allowance to do so for up to two years by now. Every plan his architect makes gets denied for different, petty reasons. Once he manages to fulfill all requirements of the bureaucracy, the true battle will begin.
Residents in the area have already said they will do everything in their power to stop this rebuilding from happening. No matter the outcome of this legal battle, that'll add another couple of years until this apartment building becomes reality.
Germany has a problem. It's becoming impossible to execute in physical space.
The market creates the price: little supply and very high demand. Fürstenfeldbruck is one of the most attractive regions in the country. Generally this is the case for the rest of the metropolitan region of Munich. Fürstenfeldbruck is a small town (< 40k people) near Munich.
It's a very progressive process, not a binary flag. See for example David Graeber's CCC talk on "Managerial feudalism and the revolt of the caring classes". All in all most of the global north appears to have strong public services and cultivate that image to please the middle classes who are happy to pay taxes for that, but they've worked hard to make them harder to reach and impossible to sustain (see also, Covid crisis and public hospitals) in order to "attract people and investors".
There's no way a society with good public services can be attractive to private investors, because good public services provide better services at a much lower price than private services. It's either one or the other, and the presence of investors and gentrification is a factor that the social fabric and public services have already been heavily damaged.
This is the one and only reason. Everything else is political smokescreen.
Expecting an increase in rates is like expecting the government to decide it's too big (and not a little bit). Good luck with that. Even very rightist parties in Europe don't even try to make that point any more.
Should some third party decide this instead? Should this apply to to every transaction, not just rents? Instead, in a free market people make decisions on their own, do they want to live close to town where it's expensive or would they prefer out of town where it's cheaper etc. Having some third party decide prices sounds reasonable at first but the freedom it removes is huge. Also price fixing always has the same impact. Reduced supply.
Gentrification is something a single owner can't achieve, and that a disorganized group of owners can't achieve. It requires a strong coordination with public authority to deploy efforts to "clean the neighborhood", "evict squats and replace them with nice-looking artistic venues" or "setup new transport connections".
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification
> Reduced supply
I'd like to see evidence of that. Despite their glaring architectural issues, many public housing programs in Europe after WWII have led to cheap housing for many people. Here in France public housing in big cities, my approximation is that public housing rents are 10-40% the private market rents.
Also, the waiting lists are long nowadays (was not already the case) because our governments are dismantling public housing programs and slowly privatizing anything.
Finally, why would "reduced supply" matter when there's already an abundance of empty apartments/houses? Without even mentioning vacant office space which is a scandal on its own, there's millions of empty living spaces in the global north. According to official french gov. statistics it's 2.6M empty apartments.
The "housing crisis" is a scam organized by landowners and public authorities to further land-based speculation. Back when there was last a real housing crisis in Europe after WWII's destructions, governments setup public/social housing programs see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLM
When the people with power and privilege actually want to fix something, they can actually do it. There's just no incentive for them to solve the housing problem when they or their friends directly benefit from driving prices upwards. Of course, in the 1940-50s the incentive was the risk of "communism", and most capitalist economies (even the USA under Roosevelt) adopted strong social measures. To give context on that for example, France's communist party had 20-30% of votes in legislative elections at that time. I'm definitely no supporter of the communist party, but i would understand how a third of the country's electorate voting for communists would put pressure on the right-wing to develop social measures and fast.
Instead look at Japan and new Zealand, their planning policy acknowledged the simple fact of supply and demand and adapted, taller building with smaller apartments allowed in sought after areas.
I don't know of statistics on that question, however an anecdote: after WII across Europe it became very common for governments and city councils to "requisition" buildings/houses and for people to squat empty dwellings, and that is part of how the housing crisis was faced (alongside public plans for more public housing).
There's even a law in France (and to my knowledge in other countries) which says if you've squatted land/house for 20 or more years and paid your local taxes duly, you automatically become owner of that piece of land.
> taller building with smaller apartments allowed in sought after areas
And then you have a strongly degrading quality of life (everyone living in a small rabbit cage) and suddenly you need to invest billions more in infrastructure. For example, for cities built on ancient mines/swamps, building higher/heavier means you need to reinforce the underground and are always at risk of collapsing buildings/streets.
Why try to centralize everything? Why push the agenda of the construction sector/mafia by pretending building anew is the only solution to all our problems? Why pretend they do it to fight homelessness, when the proportion of empty buildings keeps rising alongside the number of homeless folks and new constructions? For the rise of empty buildings, see for example:
- https://en.squat.net/2016/05/27/netherlands-housing-crisis/ : Netherlands, about empty office space rising in proportion after the squatting ban, and the criminalization of poverty - https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3572856 : France, only about housing space ; over 25 years every year, population grew by 0.4%, number of housing units by 1.0%, and number of abandoned housing units by 2.8% ; abandoned housing units is 10% globally, which does not include 6% additional percent of secondary/professional residence
Both these stats are official government statistics. Also worth considering, the environmental cost of building new stuff when there's no need. When do we stop? Where do all the materials come from (eg. sand for the concrete)? Infinite growth is madness.
Which means as long as you're happy with very basic food, you can eat for, I believe in the Netherlands it's 37 euro per month. And yes, you can buy it in any supermarket (I believe the exact rule is that if they sell bread, they have to have this option available at the government mandated price).
Of course, in practice there are mostly cheaper options available, so we even have all the parts of communist/government intervention: it mostly misses the point.