Food and its Rightful Place
In the midst of growing speculation about food shortages comes the story about the federal government doling out $50 million to help pig farmers destroy their herds.
The cull aims to decrease the number of swine by 10 per cent because the market value is ‘virtually nothing,” says Michael Rice, Executive Director of the Canadian Pork Council. Low prices, higher feed costs and that nasty, weighty loonie are pushing the industry into collapse.
Most of the meat is going into pet food and 25 per cent will be “made available” to food banks, which probably means the food banks will have to arrange to pick up the meat. Delivery paid for by farmers isn’t likely. Nor is it likely that a food bank can afford the transportation.
Some of it will simply be disposed of, but the reports don’t explain what that actually means, but I certainly hope they don’t mean destroyed. Is that more cost effective?
In our house, food had the unflinching value of gold, no matter what the markets were doing. You never left a morsel of food on your plate. Each bite was a wonder, a marvel. You owed your life to it. Also, our means were meager, and low pay was hard-earned, so waste of any kind was punishable by tirade. [Dad, this is where you come in.]
On the other side of the coin, Miss Manners says that it’s proper to leave a bite on your plate as proof that you aren’t a glutton — a pig, as it were.
Whatever sense can be made from an economics point of view, I would have loved to hear the government put a small bite of $50 million to get as much of that food into the mouths of the needy hungry.
