Natural Blaze – by Heather Callaghan
It was a sad sorry day for vendors, the homeless and mystified onlookers who witnessed a recent wasteful and intimidating incident in New York. An order was made to take food from city vendors and hurl it into the garbage.
A witness recorded the event with a cell phone and the video was submitted to The Free Thought Project from the Facebook page of Gary Schlesinger. Police hover in the background as sanitation workers pick up large crates of fresh produce outside shops and start hurling them into the back of the trash-collecting dump truck.
What is the reason for trashing perfectly good food when there are hungry families within a short radius? Why confiscate it from business owners at all – and then trash it?
Improper display.
That’s right. Fanatical code enforcement. According to Schlesinger, NYC police ordered the removal and trashing of the produce because it was more than four feet outside the store.
If the people chucking the perfect food are indeed sanitation workers – then it appears that the city ordered the police to order the workers to collect the fresh food instead of actual garbage. What a clear waste! And an unfair thing to order workers to do whether they be from a private company or work for the city. That isnot their job. One watching the cringe-worthy footage wishes all involved had simply refused to follow such a command.
Be sure to look below the video after watching to see some pretty absurd government hypocrisy when it comes to hunger and food waste.
The infuriating video below has garnered nearly 20,000 shares on Facebook and over 15,000 comments. Unfortunately, not too many other details are known.
Matt Agorist who first broke the story notes:
In the Coalition’s latest annual survey of hunger in New York City – the most comprehensive of its kind – New York City’s emergency food providers (food pantries, soup kitchens, and brown bag programs) reported a 5 percent increase in need for their services, on top of a 7 percent increase in 2014, 10 percent in 2013, 5 percent in 2012, 12 percent in 2011, 7 percent in 2010, and 20 percent in 2009.
In spite of starving children, quite literally within blocks of this video, the NYPD is carrying out its tyrannical enforcement of city codes.
Those are shocking statistics indeed. But instead of focusing on the homeless and hungry – legitimate concerns as they are – the real question should be what kind of a country do we live in that we allow the government to outright steal business property – food, no less – and publicly destroy it? All for childish reasons – a public shaming event over a victimless code violation? Since when is total destruction and theft a legitimate response for possibly blocking a sidewalk? The answer is – it’s not. It simply isn’t a legitimate response at all. The Free Thought Project reached out to NYPD to account for this action – but is still awaiting a response.
Actually, this type of food destruction happens a lot – but usually to small-time rural farmers when no one’s watching. Government agencies have developed a reputation for dumping and destroying raw milk as a signal to farmers to stop providing real food to their communities. In one harrowing incident, tens of thousands of pounds of cheese were destroyed while agents laughed about it.
Interestingly – the government (and its accompanying NGOs) is sending mixed messages about food waste.
The last image is laughable.
In case you can’t read it – the press release says:
Today [Sept 15, 2015], Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Environmental Protection Agency Deputy Administrator Stan Meiburg announced the United States’ first-ever national food waste reduction goal, calling for a 50-percent reduction by 2030. As part of the effort, the federal government will lead a new partnership with charitable organizations, faith-based organizations, the private sector and local, state and tribal governments to reduce food loss and waste in order to improve overall food security and conserve our nation’s natural resources.
The first absurdity appears with the mention of Ag Sec Tom Vilsack, infamous for his affinity for GMO crops, pink slime and being a “buddy” to Monsanto. The former Iowa governor and designated survivor in the event of a national emergency was also chair of the Governors Biotechnology Partnership, the Governors Ethanol Coalition, chair and vice chair of the National Governors Association’s committee on Natural Resources, where he developed farm and energy policies. (source)
The press release goes on to discuss population overgrowth and how the United Nations General Assembly in New York had just taken place to address sustainable development practices, including sustainable production and consumption. See, you’re not actually a human being to the U.N., but a consumer taking up resources. The food system and environment continues to sicken under corporate interest, but we are constantly told there are just “too many people.”
A lot of our readers already know that if the government or U.N mention the word “sustainable” it’s actually a red herring that means austerity and hunger. In fact, you can learn a lot about that plan by reading Behind the Green Mask by Rosa Koire. It’s about Agenda 21 which uses crazy code enforcement like what you witnessed above in order to clamp down on the world’s citizens and reallocate them to concentrated “smart cities.” It means austerity, too. It sweeps mom and pop shops to the dust bin. It means total control over food, energy and land resources.
Again, I always need to ask:
How can the same entities trying to reduce world population be trusted to feed you?
Of course, there is nothing “sustainable” about any of this. There is nothing about this incident that serves and protects – well, it depends on who’s protecting whom?
Heather Callaghan is an independent researcher, natural health blogger and food freedom activist. She is the editor and co-founder of NaturalBlaze.com. Like at Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
“… the real question should be what kind of a country do we live in that we allow the government to outright steal business property – food, no less – and publicly destroy it?”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and take a wild guess…
… communist?