According to the US Health Department, approximately 25% of the food Americans buy goes to waste. That’s about one pound of food, per citizen, per day that ends up lining the trash bins. How much of that food waste actually gets composted? Probably a fraction of a percent. This is alarming for a number of reasons, including those economical. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of food has gone up about 8% in the past year – with that number only expected to climb, with crops being affected by global warming, or food crops being replaced by corn props purposed for ethanol (another really bad idea, by the way.)
Check out this incredible and scary visual graph that the the New York Times published. It gives a striking visual representation of this shocking waste, and gives us another number to feel ashamed of: 96.4 billion pounds of edible food was wasted by retailers, food service business and consumers – and folks, this information is over ten years old. There are estimates that this number has doubled since 1995.
February 28th, 2009 at 7:44 am
I became homeless in 1979. It was hard back then. But Reagan and his trickle down economics filled the dumpsters of local grocers and restaurants with enough edible food to feed the third world. It helped me greatly over the next so many years as I lived on the streets but I never liked what they were doing. It wasn’t just food either they were throwing away either, or I mean it isn’t just food because it still goes on today. And you’re right, it is happening more and more over the years even though the economy is struggling where the people who are hired to throw the food away can’t afford to buy it themselves but no consideration is given to let workers have it.
Make no mistake about it, almost all food thrown away in grocers and restaurants was available for sale just minutes before it was thrown away. It is not as if it is rotten. It is fine. It’s thrown away either because a new truck comes in, expiration dates pass, which only means it would not have the home shelf life as expected by consumers, or food prepared in restaurants is not fresh enough to meet the company standard but could be refrigerated, frozen , or consumed by employees.
Reagan economics brought on a booming economy that requires many useful recourses to be brought to landfills and murdered. It has to be done this way for tax breaks to businesses. You see our leaders found out that if we value numbers moving around on a tax accountants balance sheet over the actual raw materials and products that the money is supposed to represent, the people at the top of the food chain get to take home more little pieces of green paper at the end of the workweek.
Basically what they have discovered is that if they throw away everything that should have trickled down to the workers who produce the actual wealth that the rich keep for themselves, they can cut to the chase of the meaning of capitalism and just keep everything that ought go to workers. So they throw away everything that gets in the way of a real trickle down process.
The only way an economy can work is for things to trickle up because once money gets to the top, it stays there because there is no incentive for them to take the time to see that it comes back down here again. For them, it is easier to just throw money away and head out to the golf course for the day than to pump it back down to the bottom of the economy.
Conservatives are calling for a revolution because Obama is trying to force them to stop throwing away our futures. They are right, there needs to be a revolution of immense proportions. But it needs to be lead by workers who are tired of being hired to throw their own futures away so a few wealthy men can sit around listening to talk radio laughing at the rest if us. We need to be in control and retrain ourselves to see the value in what we are throwing away, which is the future of freedom.