Today in Kroger, corn was on sale, six ears for $2. As I pulled the silk away from the ears, I discovered fungus. Black and ugly, the stuff renders the corn inedible.
A stockboy (actually a beyond-middle-aged man), who was putting cauliflower on the shelf, told me to toss the bad corn into the trash can where I was tossing husks.
Then he went on to tell me he fears we'll all be in trouble this winter. His manager is constantly turning away trucks filled with vegetables that have rotted by the time they've reached the store. The produce is suffering from the extremes in the weather in the west and mid-west. First drought, then too much rain, then too much heat.
Being a nosy reporter, I asked if he thought we might have a famine. Could be, he said. Things are a lot worse than anyone knows.
The USDA says that the food supply is fine. Of course, it also says prices for this year will only rise two or three percent. I guess that must be an average and we're in the high end, because I've only seen prices going up. And then again, it's a government briefing, and I have been unable to believe anything the government says for a very long time.
This report says that fresh vegetable prices will increase about 4 percent; fruits, 3.5 percent, processed fruits and veggies 3.7 percent, sugar 2.5 percent, cereals 3 percent; you get the idea.
Trouble is, I don't see too many people's paychecks increasing to match that. Where, I wonder, is the money going?
I'm paying $3.59 for a bag of salad that used to cost $1.49, for example. I just turned down a beef roast that was $17, choosing instead to buy the $9 pork roast at the same weight. Crackers that once cost 89 cents are now $1.19.
Beef prices are expected to fall at the wholesale level. This is bad news for us, since we raise beef cattle, but it would be easier to take if we saw a similar decline in the meat prices at the store. I don't see that reflected at the cash register, though.
The folks who run the local food pantry told me a year ago that the numbers are up. They're serving more working class people who aren't able to make ends meet. When it's a choice between making the house payment and food, what do you do? Toss a coin and decide if this month it's a roof over your head or food in your belly?
This is the reality for some folks, and it's happening here. In my county, on my street. It's next door, but it still seems to be a big secret.
I look for things to get much worse. I worry that a lot of people will be eating stone soup come winter.
"I see said the blind man to the deaf mute." Our country isn't paying attention to what is happening around us. Thus we are up a creek with out a paddle.
ReplyDeleteYou might also check into the new distribution system Kroger company - a truly vile corporation - switched to during the last year or 2.
ReplyDeleteApparently this system was implemented so they could screw a few more employees out of benefits, and has resulted in the delivery of much spoiled food to their empire of stores nationwide.
Agribusiness and the grocery store chains are of endless interest to me. Big chain grocery stores are run an awfully lot like the mafia, demanding vendor fees from companies to get their products on the shelves, etc. And we thought payola was illegal.
Kroger is a terrible company. Did you know they have urban and rural lines of products? Yep. They put poor quality products out in rural markets because they can get away with it. Rural sold salmon, say, is dyed and treated with an assortment of chemicals while in the urban stores it is just plain old wild caught, untampered with aside from the mercury and other pollutants in our food supply.
They have been using the expansion of walmart into the grocery bus as an excuse to cut back employee benefits, though if you look at the fortune 500 they are always in the top of the list. WalMart obviously does not hurt their profitability. All these greedy, insane, totalitarian corporations resent paying workers though. They appear to want to bring back feudalism, though on a world scale, though they don't show as much concern for the serfs because they aren't nearly as connected to them as the lords were.
By the way, did you read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser? It isn't about fast food exactly. I bet you'd like it.
Kroger's been putting its better food in the areas where the rich folks live since at least the 1960s. We've always known if we drove to the other side of the city the produce is better.
ReplyDeleteI dislike Kroger but my choices are Kroger or Walmart. Thank goodness I have a garden and grow a lot of my own food.