#779 Observant Waste

A couple of food-related moral stories.
First, an interesting statistic. I’m not sure how they came up with it, I don’t remember participating in the survey, but it looks impressive.
Americans throw out 27% of the 350 million pounds of food they buy every year. The factoid comes from the New York Times.
27% of 350 million is 94.5 million pounds. I kid you not.
94.5...sounds like a radio frequency.
But really, that’s a whole hell of a lot of food. What’s more worrisome is that we apparently didn’t pay attention to our parents at all. All those evenings at the dinner table picking at our putrid peas and our moms telling us about all the starving children in China and what do we do?
Throw out more than a quarter-pound for every pound we purchase.
One thing worries me about this statistic though. There are 301 million people in the US. Granted, they don’t all buy food. Let’s say half of them are either children or farmers. That’s still 150 million people buying 350 million pounds of food. That means I buy 2.33 pounds of food a year. If I throw out 27%, that means I’m living on 1.7 pounds of food.
Lose weight with statistics!
The other food moral story is this. A meatpacking plant in Postville Iowa was busted by the immigration service, where they arrested 389 illegal aliens.
Wow. All the way from Mexico to Iowa.
The odd thing is, Hasidic Jews founded this plant to make kosher foods. I wonder if kosher foods are allowed to contain large amounts of irony.
Because kosher foods are made for observant Jews who wish to adhere to the dietary guidelines set forth, they believe, by their creator. The Laws. They abide by the strict laws of their scriptures to the point of making it really difficult to buy food sometimes.
And yet they break the immigration laws to have kosher food made cheaper. Illegally kosher. It just sounds weird.
I guess they never signed on to that “Render unto Caesar” thing, they were more concerned with how to render beef.
I hope they don’t waste any.
America, ya gotta love it.