Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: Food Waste of the Pandemic

[Formerly Once-Ler]

https://news.yahoo.com/dumped-milk-smashed-eggs-plowed-160839647.html

In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.

After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation’s largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell.

The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses.

The amount of waste is staggering. The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.

more at link

[roamer_1]

https://news.yahoo.com/dumped-milk-smashed-eggs-plowed-160839647.html

more at link

The stupidity of this lock-down is unprecedented!

[Free Vulcan]

Since we were spending the $2T anyway, I much rather would have loved to see the govt buy up all that food to send to pantries and such, rather than one of Nancy Pelosi's pet projects.

[Gemmarose]

We are sadly a nation of waste it is a shame so many families could benefit from these things SMH.

[roamer_1]

Since we were spending the $2T anyway, I much rather would have loved to see the govt buy up all that food to send to pantries and such, rather than one of Nancy Pelosi's pet projects.

That ain't it. No labor. No warehouse. No way to harvest and nowhere to distribute to.

Uncle Nanny ain't gonna go pick it in the field, put it on the truck, warehouse and distribute it. That's the problem, not that folks aren't buying. Hell, I ain't seen a gallon of milk for a month.

Kinda brings me to mind how important local produce and dairy truly are. Damn shame it ain't that way no more.