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"At Schenectady County Community College, any student can visit up to three times a month and select three days' worth of food such as canned beans, tuna, spaghetti sauce and pasta -- for free.
What do you think of the idea?"
"Any dumpster diver can tell you: Grocery stores throw away a lot of food. But food discarded off the shelf is just one way that grub gets trashed. There's other waste along a grocery store's supply chain Ββrejected crops at farms, for example Ββ that's often overlooked. So The Center for Biological Diversity and The "Ugly" Fruit and Veg Campaign recently asked the 10 largest U.S. supermarkets how they handle food waste, and gave each store's efforts a letter grade."
"Scores for each store appeared in the report, "Supermarkets Fail to Make the Grade in Reducing Food Waste," released Monday. Letter grades took three overarching categories into account: how much public information a store shared about food waste, what it was doing to prevent food waste, and where its discarded food went. No store got an A. Walmart ranked highest with a B. Kroger, Albertsons and Ahold Delhaize, the parent company that owns Food Lion and Stop & Shop, all got Cs. Costco, Publix, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Target all got Ds, and the German-based discount grocer ALDI got an F."
"Organic farmers may use pesticides, so long as they choose from a list of approved options. The USDA organic program does not disallow all pesticides, just βsyntheticβ ones. (By the way, the term βpesticidesβ includes both bug sprays and weed killers.)"
"So what remains on our vegetables? The USDA periodically tests produce for pesticide residues; this is the Pesticide Data Program. (The EWG repurposes this data to create their Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists.) But the USDA does not test for the presence of organic-allowed pesticides. So the EWG is reporting the stuff on conventional crops without considering whatβs present on organic crops."
"So, will you lower your pesticide exposure by switching to organic? We donβt know, but the answer may very well be no. Even looking at the synthetic, non-organic pesticides in the USDAβs tests, conventional crops donβt always have the lowest amounts. Take strawberries, for example, the βdirtiestβ item on the 2018 list: 75 percent of organic strawberries, and 76 percent of conventional strawberries, had pesticide levels that were under 5 percent of the allowable levels. "
I can still taste the smell of the raw processed chicken on my lips in Keyser, West Virgina the one day I stopped there. The pungent smell is a little hard to describe it actually.
Food stamps were originally designed not only to help the food insecure but also farmers. But it does a bad job at both of those things, mainly because food processors and retailers take a big chunk out of the limited food dollars.
I think food stamps should be restructured to incentivize direct farmer-to-consumer purchases, cutting out the middle-man and off-farm processor so farms get to keep more of the profits.
Moreover, food stamps should at least in part be replaced with government-subsidized community-supported agricultural (CSA) memberships, and things like direct to door delivery of fresh milk and farm produce from local farms. Expanding SNAP accessibility at farmers markets also would help, and making SNAP dollars go further at farmers markets then grocery stores. Maybe a $1 in SNAP at a grocery store could be subsidized so it buys $2 in SNAP at a farmer market or a farm stand.
Many low-income people live a long ways from grocery stores. There are many parts of New York State where you have to drive a half hour to get to a grocery store with a full-selection of quality, affordable foods. Many low-income people lack transportation or funds to get to these bigger stores. Many are elderly, disabled, or have young children.
Farmer delivery of SNAP purchased foods is a good idea. Maybe farmers could get together to deliver a wide variety of local foods to the food insecure, like maple syrup, milk, beef, pork, sweet corn, potatoes, apples, peaches, blueberries and many other crops grown in-state.
Maybe it could be combined with returnable milk bottles and boxes, and a compost-service, that would make it a zero waste SNAP program. SNAP recipients would get healthy food delivered each week, and get their food scraps, empty milk bottles, and other green waste brought back to the farm for use as animal feed and composting for fertilizer. This further would reduce costs -- billions are wasted each year in discarded packaging and food waste with the current SNAP program.
For too long in our country, we have been stuck with outdated ideas. Home food delivery of fresh local produce to SNAP recipients, to replace part of the SNAP benefit, is one good idea that I our country should move forward on.
President Donald Trump is a good conversation starter, even if his ideas don't go far enough to jump start our economy and make our public programs more successful.