Millions of Americans are going hungry and perfectly good food is being thrown out.
It turns out that the food was ordered disposed because the food stand owner could provide a license. It’s well known that NYC government makes it extremely difficult a license to sell food. The person involved is a typical hardworking immigrant:
There is outrage and disbelief in the Bronx after video showed sanitation workers throwing carton after carton of fresh produce from a local vendor into garbage trucks.
The video shows sanitation crews throwing box after box of fresh fruit and vegetables into a garbage truck from a stand on Pelham Parkway, with an angry crowd protesting the move.
Food waste is a worldwide problem:
Globally, about one-third of food is wasted: 1.6 billion tons of produce a year, with a value of about $1 trillion. If this wasted food were stacked in 20-cubic metre dumpsters, it would fill 80 million of them, enough to reach all the way to the moon, and encircle it once. Taking action to tackle this is not impossible, as countries like Denmark have shown.
We can’t afford to waste food with so many people going hungry:
- Pre-pandemic, an estimated 2 billion people around the world were struggling to put food on their tables. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that up to 132 million more people will struggle to feed themselves and their families in 2020 due to the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
- Pre-pandemic, more than 35 million Americans struggled with hunger. Due to the pandemic, that number has skyrocketed with more than 50 million Americans, or 1 in 6, projected to face hunger in 20205.
- Pre-pandemic, more than 10 million American children struggled with hunger. Due to the pandemic, more than 17 million children, or nearly 1 in 4, were projected to face hunger in 20206.
- 1 in 3 people who are food insecure are unlikely to qualify for most federal nutrition programs.
- 40% of those visiting emergency food suppliers during COVID-19 had never sought food assistance before.
- The vast majority of people who grow, pick and process our food live in poverty and cannot afford to buy adequate healthy food. 86% of jobs in the food system offer very low wages at the poverty level and below the poverty level.
The 99 Percenters 