Under capitalism, food isn’t produced to eat but to make profits.
A third of all food produced in the United States is wasted. A third. We could feed another 200 million people in this country if we stopped doing absolute bullshit like stocking produce and bakery shelves far above expected demand so the shelves always look full, or paying dairy farmers to pour out their milk so the price stays high.
I mean, I’m vegan, I want the dairy industry to roll over and die anyway, but the fact that lobbyists have set up a subsidy system so fundamentally broken that it pays dairy farmers to dump milk instead of sell it - so they not only torture animals for literally no benefit to anyone at all but also throw away calories while people starve - it’s just infuriating.
There’s a famous scene in The Grapes of Wrath about how, while people starved during the Great Depression, crops throughout America were burned and poisoned and destroyed so that food prices would stay high. And as crops fail with climate change and desperate refugees come to America by the millions we’re going to see those days again.
American capitalism barely survived the first Great Depression it caused. And I pray to whatever God is listening that something better than capitalism comes out of the next.
A third of all food produced in the United States is wasted. A third. We could feed another 200 million people in this country if we stopped doing absolute bullshit like stocking produce and bakery shelves far above expected demand so the shelves always look full, or paying dairy farmers to pour out their milk so the price stays high.
I mean, I’m vegan, I want the dairy industry to roll over and die anyway, but the fact that lobbyists have set up a subsidy system so fundamentally broken that it pays dairy farmers to dump milk instead of sell it - so they not only torture animals for literally no benefit to anyone at all but also throw away calories while people starve - it’s just infuriating.
There’s a famous scene in The Grapes of Wrath about how, while people starved during the Great Depression, crops throughout America were burned and poisoned and destroyed so that food prices would stay high. And as crops fail with climate change and desperate refugees come to America by the millions we’re going to see those days again.
American capitalism barely survived the first Great Depression it caused. And I pray to whatever God is listening that something better than capitalism comes out of the next.