The idiom of "doesn't grow on trees" as a metaphor for scarcity falls apart when you realize that food does grow on trees yet is still very scarce.
The idiom of "doesn't grow on trees" as a metaphor for scarcity falls apart when you realize that food does grow on trees yet is still very scarce.
Extremely not-fun fact: collectively, humanity currently produces more than enough food for every person. But a huge part of it is either wasted or inaccessible by people that need them, which usually results in them not going to anyone and being wasted, which is why we still have food scarcity.
Food isn't scarce. It's just poorly distributed.
Food isn’t even poorly distributed. Almost everybody eats, and the only places people don’t eat it’s from other people with weapons actively preventing them from getting food, and actively preventing others from bringing it to them.
I’ve been homeless in America, twice. Both times I had all the food I could eat, as soon as I was willing to accept it.
The first time I relied on strangers and I ate like a king. The people of Cambridge MA just straight up gave me more food than I could eat when I asked.
The second time I stayed in a shelter in Denver. I had three square meals a day available to me, though I only ate dinner since my job didn’t permit me to attend the other meals. It was good food, donated and prepared by volunteers.
I am sick of people trying to perpetuate the myth that we have starvation in America. It’s one area we succeed in beyond the wildest dreams of anyone even 50 years ago, but haters just can’t stop hating on our society.
We feed people. We feed them extremely well.
Yeah, hard to truck food when the roads are in bad shape, especially since food can go bad easily.
Logistics are harder than many people think.
There are unmet food needs in our world. Too much so. But I’m not sure I would say, overall, “food is very scarce.”
Under capitalism, food isn’t produced to eat but to make profits. When it’s not profitable to sell, they will rather dump foods, starving the people rather than to plainly donate.
We produce enough foods to feed the entire population. But the sole purpose of food is to not feed the people, but to feed the greed of the producers, the farmers, the corporates.
Capitalism created an artificial scarcity of food where we produce too much food for the obese and throw the rest away to rot in front of the poor.
In general yeah, but let's not blame the farmers. They're shit on from so many directions it's wild - they're often locked into deals with specific companies with contracts that can sometimes cost them more money than they make. Tyson is especially notorious for this, requiring the farmers to build specific chicken houses that the farmer pays for, on land that the farmer pays for to raise chickens they're only allowed to sell to Tyson, all while Tyson can and regularly does choose not to buy the chickens if they're not selling enough. Farmers have managed to find themselves indentured servants on their own land.
It's not really scarce. If you know the amount that's thrown away
And where and exactly when
What ?
Food is far from scarce in the developed world. There's so much food that people can easily become obese, and millions of tons of food are destroyed each year.
Uhhh, yeah, no idea where the "food is scarce" came from, we've got so much food in developed countries that we could easily feed the whole world with it.
There's a lot to be said for encouraging self sufficiency. See the damage done to African textile industries from a glut of charity clothing.
Of course, in an industrial age "encouraging self sufficiency" also means making competition, and a lot of dummies start talking about bootstraps instead of supporting education and investment.
Not easily, nor safely. Most food waste is from retail and Healthcare. It's very hard to repurpose that already consumed scrap for others to eat. Let alone ship it across the world.
Food grows on trees if your ancestors planted and cared for those trees. An apple tree that's been uncared-for for fifty years may produce nothing but nasty bug-ridden rotting inedible fruit.
Literally the first thing that came to my mind after reading the post title.
If this wasn't linked within the first hour of this post, I would have been amazed. Such an awesome show!
obligatory grapes of wrath quote
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Upon learning American dollars are made from cotton:
"Money doesn't grow on trees!"
"No, but it grows on a bush!"
Turn of phrase DESTROYED by FACTS and LOGIC
More crops go to feed in animal agriculture, than crops to humans. And farmers tend to monocrop instead of utilising all the possible crops that would do well in that environment. (Retooling, investment, skills, time, industry experts, ...)