Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic (NYT)

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-destroying-food.html

Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic
With restaurants, hotels and schools closed, many of the nation’s largest farms are destroying millions of pounds of fresh goods that they can no longer sell.
By David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery
April 11, 2020, 10:13 a.m. ET

In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.

After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation’s largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell.

The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses.

The amount of waste is staggering. The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.

Many farmers say they have donated part of the surplus to food banks and Meals on Wheels programs, which have been overwhelmed with demand. But there is only so much perishable food that charities with limited numbers of refrigerators and volunteers can absorb.

And the costs of harvesting, processing and then transporting produce and milk to food banks or other areas of need would put further financial strain on farms that have seen half their paying customers disappear. Exporting much of the excess food is not feasible either, farmers say, because many international customers are also struggling through the pandemic and recent currency fluctuations make exports unprofitable.


A field of onions in Idaho waiting to be buried. Americans eat many more vegetables when meals are prepared for them in restaurants than when they cook for themselves. Joseph Haeberle for The New York Times

[liberalmuse]

1. A competent government would buy that food.

And distribute it to food banks. But we all know we don't have anything even close to a competent federal government right now.

[customerserviceguy]

4. I'm surprised

that food banks haven't figured out how to get that food. Cash donations would buy fuel that would be multiplied by the value of the food that could be obtained for just the cost of retrieving it.

[Meowmee]

10. Yep. None of this should be happening if a real gov were in place, we don't have one.

[Butterflylady]

2. Went to the store yesterday, empty shelves all over the place.

One place where there was plenty were the coolers that contained milk.

[Ohiogal]

3. This is heartbreaking

I can’t stand to see food destroyed when people are going hungry.

What liberalmuse said.

[Flaleftist]

5. Meanwhile, in San Antonio

Link to tweet

?s=20

[CaptYossarian]

6. OUR food banks are flooded. How about overseas?

First, we ask the US Territories.

Then the countries near the Sahara Desert. And so on.

We are one world--one people. The virus thinks so. Why can't we?

[msongs]

7. welfare farmers - how much of that food has ALREADY been paid for by taxpayers? nt

[Meowmee]

8. Why? We cant get eggs, milk and more regularly here. Nt

[Tennessee Hillbilly]

9. Farmers also did this during the Great Depression of the 1930s

Even though millions of people were starving.

Transportation costs were more than what would be paid for the food

[pansypoo53219]

11. distribution failure. get the army on it.

[Grammy23]

12. Russell Honore Could figure it out.

And fast. Call him ASAP.

[GulfCoast66]

13. I'm not sure even he could. Our food distribution system is extremely complicated.

There is a whole different distribution system for restaurants that most of us never see.

Potatoes are a good example. Think of all the fast food fries served in this country. They are processed, frozen and sent to the restaurant’s own distribution system. Now demand has crashed. So what to do with the potatoes? There is probably little room in the system to transfer them to grocery store for sales. And most of the food being dumped was destined for restaurants.

So we send them to be processed as planned and give them to food banks. You think most Americans can whip out the fryer and fry up a batch? And throw in location. If 20 miles outside, say Chicago maybe you could get them there. But Eastern Washington where many are grown is in the middle of nowhere.

The best thing we could do is allocate a few billion to food banks. They know where they can buy food as there is not a real shortage of it. They just aren’t given the resources to do so. That’s what I have been hearing. Food banks can get food. There is just no money to do so.

Fits with the Republican motto. Work to make us profits or starve.