|
A new supermarket opened in my town. The Garden of Eden is part of a
chain that specializes in providing every kind of fresh and exotic food
one could want to satisfy a discriminating palate.
On opening
day shoppers were wandering from aisle to aisle examining all manner of
spices, mustards, vegetables, fruits, breads, selections of prepared
foods from all around the Earth. I came upon a canister of Café du
Monde, a special blend of coffee that I formally could not purchase
except from New Orleans, its home.
I stopped in front of a
display of freshly cooked brisket; its red center suggesting it had
been done to perfection. Would I like a taste? Yes, indeed! And then I
ordered two slices, cut to just the width I wanted. The display of
cheeses was dazzling. I bought a wedge of Jarlsberg and made a mental
note to get some brie the next time. In the end I just wandered around
the place in a happy daze.
My late Mother, Rebecca, was a famed
teacher of haute cuisine, a gourmet who authored several cookbooks.
Every night my late Father, Robert, and I would sit down to meals that
rivaled the best restaurants in the world. An expert on wines, she was
the first woman to become a member of the board of the Sommelier
Society of America. We drank wine like most Americans drink soda. When
she passed away, those freshly baked breads and other gastronomic
delights passed with her.
Here then is the incongruity.
In
the midst of this splendorous, ostentatious display of foods of every
description, I had a thought about the one billion people who share
this planet with me who live on a dollar a day. Then I thought about
the speculation concerning wheat, soy, rice and other grains that has
caused prices, from 2005 to today, to rise 80% according to the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
To date, at least fourteen nations have had food-related riots and violence.
Now,
weather has had, as always, some role in shortages, but all this is
happening mostly because some idiots decided to require that billions
of gallons of ethanol be added to gasoline.
Since ethanol is
made from corn, soy and other food products, it started a cascade of
shortages. Even wheat farmers planted less in order to grow corn to
cash in on the subsidized bonanza of ethanol. Without this legislated
environmental “solution” to the reduction of “greenhouse gases” there
would not be rising food prices worldwide.
The irony is that the
Earth is cooling these days, not warming. It has warmed quite naturally
from the end of the last mini-ice age around 1850 to the tune of one
degree Fahrenheit. Since 1998, scientists say there is a perceptible
cooling occurring worldwide, including the oceans that trap and hold
80-90% of the world’s heat.
What kind of idiots would buy into
the junk-science of global warming? The answer is almost the entire
Congress of the U.S. with the exception of a few who have courageously
and vociferously spoken against it, the House and Senate Majority
leaders, all three of the candidates currently hoping to be the next
President, and the idiot we have currently in the Oval Office.
A
lot of people colluded to create this mess. Beyond Congress and the
White House has been an international and national grotesquery of
environmental organizations that have fought against the introduction
and use of genetically modified food crops to feed the six billion-plus
people of the world. They continue to do everything they can to thwart
the access and use of all manner of energy sources from coal to natural
gas and oil.
Population and consumption are the targets of the
Green movement. The odds are that a large part of the world’s
population will be victimized and die from their efforts to bring about
these imbalances and shortages of food. The speculators are no less to
blame.
A classroom of fifth graders could have told you that
burning food crops to make a useless fuel additive was a stupid thing
to do.
Meanwhile, I will wander the aisles of the Garden of Eden
and, because I can afford to, ask myself if I want to purchase that
tray of pork tenderloin sushi? Yes, I think I do. Source
|