Food Banks, Farmers, & Government

countrynaturals 4/14/2020, 10:04 am

CNN wrote:"As you are aware, food banks are under tremendous pressure to meet the skyrocketing demand," Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, Feeding America CEO, and Zippy Duval, President of the American Farm Bureau, wrote in a letter addressed to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue on Friday. "At the same time, however, we are seeing literally tons of agricultural goods being discarded because of the shutdown of so much of the economy."

Wouldn't it be amazing if the government would actually step up and do something productive?

OhioGardener 4/14/2020, 10:16 am

On a positive note, I saw an article about a milk truck driver in Wisconsin that heard about farmers dumping milk, and he decided to do something about it. Instead of them dumping the milk, he got it trucked to cheese plants and then bought the cheese to donate to food banks. He started a fund raiser to get funds to pay for making the cheese and distributing it, and got overwhelming support for his project. It is always good to see people stepping up to fill a need.

markqz 4/14/2020, 11:30 am

countrynaturals wrote:Wouldn't it be amazing if the government would actually step up and do something productive?

This is what the original food stamps program was meant to do. The government would buy up surplus production and then give it to people who were going hungry. During the Nixon years, more products were commoditized, making over-production less of a problem. By the 80s, you heard less about people going hungry and more about people becoming obese.

Distributing perishable food isn't easy, and by the 1980s most states had decided it was easier to administer food stamps as actual funds rather than goods. Apparently under the current administration a lot of restrictions and requirements have been added to the (renamed) SNAP program, reducing participation.

So the government did help. Then changed the help. Then it stopped helping. Now it needs to help again.

countrynaturals 4/14/2020, 1:22 pm

OhioGardener wrote:On a positive note, I saw an article about a milk truck driver in Wisconsin that heard about farmers dumping milk, and he decided to do something about it. Instead of them dumping the milk, he got it trucked to cheese plants and then bought the cheese to donate to food banks. He started a fund raiser to get funds to pay for making the cheese and distributing it, and got overwhelming support for his project. It is always good to see people stepping up to fill a need.

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Food Banks, Farmers, & Government

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