California Throws Away Enough Food to Fill 35 Stadiums Per Year
May 22nd, 2010Over at Technofascism Blog, Tony writes, “Keep this story in mind next time you hear that nonsense from people like Bill Gates insisting we need GM crops to feed a hungry world.”
Besides Atomic Audit, this represents just about the clearest proof that the depth of our society’s madness is infinite.
Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
Farmers, restaurants and supermarkets throw away millions of tons of edible food each year at a time when a growing number of Californians struggle to put food on the table.
More than 6 million tons of food products are dumped annually, enough to fill the Staples Center in Los Angeles 35 times over, state studies have found. Food is the largest single source of waste in California, making up 15.5 percent of the state’s waste stream, according to the California Integrated Waste Management Board.
An examination by California Watch and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California found shortcomings along California’s food distribution chain that allow vast amounts of food to go to waste in landfills, despite incentives that encourage food donations.
I believe the percentage of food wasted is actually even higher in India and some other developing countries, largely due to lack of refrigeration and sanitary storage.
Grapes of Wrath
http://tinyurl.com/39jul7f
The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men
who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people
eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby
their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hands over the State like a great sorrow.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price,
and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The
people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at
twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt
kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to
take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene spayed over the golden
mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump
potatoes in the river and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing
them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.