Cheap food is not cheap to produce, and easy to throw away

By Ben Pittman-Polletta, The Oregonian 

July 9, 2010, The Oregonian

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2010/07/cheap_food_is_not_cheap_to_pro.html

"Bananas everywhere," John Campaine says as he steers his
white van to the back door of a Northwest Portland
restaurant. "There's way too much bread and too many bananas
in this world."

Every morning before most people roll out of bed, Campaine
picks up what he calls "heinous quantities" of still-edible
but imperfect food for Urban Gleaners, a nonprofit that each
month gathers some 40,000 pounds of discarded food from the
city's restaurants, grocery stores, cafeterias and caterers
and delivers it to the hungry.

It's only a trickle in the swelling river of U.S. food waste.

A new study from the National Institutes of Health says that
a whopping 40 percent of what farmers grow ends up in the
garbage. That number has increased, too: in 1974, just 30
percent ended up as food waste.

This stinking overabundance, says the study, damages our
planet and our health.

To read the rest of this article, go to 
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2010/07/cheap_food_is_not_cheap_to_pro.html

_____________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest
to people on the left that will help them to
interpret the world and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]
Submit via the Web: portside.org/submit
Frequently asked questions: portside.org/faq
Subscribe: portside.org/subscribe
Unsubscribe: portside.org/unsubscribe
Account assistance: portside.org/contact
Search the archives: portside.org/archive