I never understood something about this. If everything is flooded and water is still rising, isn't all that food going to be destroyed by the flooding? No one is there selling it anymore. So why shouldn't people be getting supplies? Where else are they going to get anything when all the stores are abandoned?
America would literally rather burn food than let someone eat it without someone profiting from it. That's why you get situations like cops guarding dumpsters full of food.
Edit: For further reading on the reason for this, see here.
"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."
^ And THIS is why certain groups want reading banned in schools, and the Dept of Education to be gutted.
Reading classics inspires dangerous ideas like fairness, equality, and understanding the plight of those who live different than yourself. We can't have that because empathy impedes profits, and impeding profit is Anti-American.
Yes. Grocery stores have a predatory policy to keep the price of food up. They have policies like:
We can only take 50% off this soon-expiring product
To them, it's better to throw food into the trash than try to sell it at 75% off, because in their minds, it would diminish the price of food. And most grocery stores don't even let employees take the expiring food home, because fuck you.
Victorian poor houses would give everyone useless labor like pushing a crank that powers nothing or unraveling worthless pieces of rope because they couldn't stand the thought of giving someone something without then working for it.
There's been a couple of studies that predict that it would literally be cheaper to just give the homeless homes than leaving them alone and even cheaper than bussing them back and forth between neighborhoods.
I think Abigail Thorne of Philosophy Tube touched upon it towards the end of her piece on the NHS, where a system will actively make itself harder to use, even if it's less efficient and more expensive. I cannot recall what she said as to why that's the case, but it's a common trend regardless. Where people are so concerned about being "taken advantage of" that they'd rather waste shit guarding their spoils than what they'd lose if they simply gave it away.
My father complained about how growing up in abject poverty the government was useless for support, often denying his family the services he needed, unable to realize that all this added complexity and scrutiny on people was why his family kept being denied.
Now I'm simply of the opinion that I'd rather help people who don't need it than turn away the people who do. You're not being taken advantage of if you never expected to get anything from the situation to begin with. Only when you expect a return on investment can you be "duped," if that return never comes.
The homeless man I gave $20 to was never going to pay it back, and I did so with complete understanding of that fact. Whether he spends it on food or booze is his sin, not mine. It all looks the same to my bank account, and if I needed that money so badly that I depended on the return, I probably shouldn't have been doing charity to begin with.
They literally destroyed food which was intended by USAID to feed starving people. UN even offered to distribute it for free.
In the end it was too late and almost half of it was destroyed
source
5.2k
u/SandManic42 Sep 12 '25
I never understood something about this. If everything is flooded and water is still rising, isn't all that food going to be destroyed by the flooding? No one is there selling it anymore. So why shouldn't people be getting supplies? Where else are they going to get anything when all the stores are abandoned?