Eat Your Peas. People in China Are Starving.

I never liked green peas. But there they were, at every Sunday lunch back in the ‘50s, alongside the pot roast and mashed potatoes. I was forced to eat them, required by the injunction that “people in China are starving.”  I made a swimming pool out of the mashed potatoes, put the peas in the gravy in the potato pool, and, reluctantly, ate them. I was not convinced that I was helping the people of China by my sacrifice. How would me eating those damn peas help anybody?

Me helping starving people in China was a nonsensical abstract idea to the twelve year old me. And it still presents a problem for me. I simply don’t think that eating what’s on my plate helps anybody. There are people all over the world starving. The images on the screen of those children in Africa wasting away to nothing are truly heartbreaking. The news stories about children in this country not having anything to eat because schools are closed make clear the problem of food insecurity. Scarcity is everywhere, and yet there is abundance. The problem of abundance and scarcity – how to solve it?

I don’t waste food, but I am not a member of the clean plate club. Certainly it is bad to waste food, but is the badness in not eating what is on my plate, or me putting more on my plate than I need? Once I have ordered or prepared the food, eating it is irrelevant. It either becomes human waste or food waste. If my mother wanted to help the starving Chinese, maybe she should have never bought the damn peas in the first place.

I am not poor; I can afford to buy as much food as I like. For me, food is abundant, and the only thing that stops me wasting it is my attitude, my thinking about it, my liberal guilt. Because of attitude, my mindset, I don’t produce a great deal of food waste, but I feel sure that I would produce a lot less if I were poor; if food were scarce for me, I wouldn’t have the privilege of “wasting” it.

Back to my peas and the clean plate club. The leftover peas or the leftover squash casserole at the restaurant are actual waste. It is the result of my eyes being bigger than my stomach. I created the waste by ordering too much food; my bad. But wait, the food was there to be ordered, often already prepared. If I or someone else didn’t order it, it would become food waste wouldn’t it? The problem is not what I do with the food, but that there is too much food in the system. (Now you will say that there is too much food in the system because of demand created by me ordering it; I get that.)

The system, the growing and distribution of food, produces food waste. My habits, and your habits, of buying and consuming or not consuming are, I believe, close to being inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. It is all very complicated, but two facts are clear and indisputable: there is a great deal of food waste, and there is a great deal of hunger.

One answer seems obvious to me. Instead of thinking of this excess food as “waste,” let’s think of it as a food resource, and get it to the hungry. Send the peas to the Chinese. From a business perspective, we have the product, the materials, at zero cost. It is just landfill material. All we have to do is set up a distribution system.

Hunger in America is a social problem, and it needs a social solution. This is what Patrick was talking about. Government action can, contrary to Mr. Reagan, be the solution, and given the scope of this problem, should be the solution. This is not the dreaded socialism, but even if you call it that, it is a good thing. Why should addressing this problem be left to charitable organizations like Second Harvest food banks and good hearted people like Betty Mae and her friends? Would not Kroger benefit if all of the food “waste” it produced could be sold to the Excess Food Distribution Agency (EFDA) and disposed of without cost? Would not restaurants benefit from a reduced waste disposal expense? Would not local governments benefit from reduced solid waste disposal costs? Would not our environment benefit from fewer landfills? It would cost a little money, but very little relative to its benefits. And it would make a better, more just, society. One F-35 fighter costs $100 million dollars. Let’s not buy one or two, and put that money toward helping the least among us.

We should recognize that hunger in America is a national shame, and that food “waste” is a resource available to address it. People are starving in the richest country in the world. There is abundance that can be shared to address this scarcity. 

I came across the blog post below regarding the Mindset of Abundance and the Mindset of Scarcity. It’s about how our mindsets affect our actions. Shifting mindsets may be key to solving the problem of abundance and scarcity. Here is a quote relevant for this class: How can we fully embrace abundance in a world where abundance on one side of the scale threatens scarcity on another—for example, does our abundant, consumerist world not create a situation where our environment is so routinely polluted?

https://www.shanebreslin.com/essays/scarcity-mindset-abundant-tension/

Weekly Participation Summary

09/22 This essay

09/18 Posted They’re Made of Meat, + 

09/21 Posted comment on Up@Dawn Machiavelli, Hobbes, Draper, Dinah...

09/22 Posted comment on Kathryn’s Post Public Transport DQ

09/24 Posted comment on Betty Mae’s Should We Freak Out

09/24 Posted comment on Green, the symbol of hope

Week Five Point Total – 5

Five Week Cumulative Point Total – 25