Tuesday, March 5, 2013

It's Also About Preventing 40% of Our Food Wealth Going to Waste

Certainly #postscarcity is eventually about nano-assembled, Star Trek replicator, instant-on-demand, horse-meat-free meatballs for 9 billion; but on the way to that golden future, it's immediately about improving the effective circulation of resources on hand.

Last August, TheAtlantic's Brian Fung explained, far too politely, in our estimate, How 40% of Our Food Goes to Waste.

Brian wrote, "In a country where overeating is basically a national pastime, the fact that the United States grows more than its citizens can eat, drink, or trade away is remarkable." We not only consider such a remarkably infamous feat utterly unconscionable, we find it an equally deplorable and all too apt as analogy for the way America  produces, hoards, and wastes wealth of all kinds. Call it a Cash Hoarding Obesity epidemic, the direct result of an insatiably self-indulgent, obliviously obstinate culture that congratulates itself for attaining the loftiest pinnacles of industrial efficiency and machine intelligence while completing, cluelessly failing to achieve -- in the alleged most advance economy in the world -- even the most rudimentary standards of human decency articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 25:
  • (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Here's what America's Cash Hoarding Obesity looks like in more accessible visual terms (looking past the pointlessly pejorative interlinear mischaracterization of #socialism, which is another needless distortion we'll continue to take up in other entries.)

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