I don't think the farmers were sitting at home watching television. While some fields lay fallow, others were producing needed crops. Maybe they were able to get an extra hour's sleep.
As a farmers daughter, I saw the dreadful predicament my father landed in when his beautiful crop of cabbages were ploughed back into the fields because the market price dropped down to 3c a cabbage. All the fertilizer, wages for the tractor driver, seed from the co-op, was wasted money. The cost of carting them to market was out of the question. Giving them away to needy charities would have been a good thing but they also don't have spare cash to drive out to the countryside to collect free food.
In those days the farmers had not come up with the idea of "Pick Your Own". Strawberries are an attraction or any fruit one can eat while picking.......I can't see a cabbage rush
As a farmers daughter, I saw the dreadful predicament my father landed in when his beautiful crop of cabbages were ploughed back into the fields because the market price dropped down to 3c a cabbage. All the fertilizer, wages for the tractor driver, seed from the co-op, was wasted money. The cost of carting them to market was out of the question. Giving them away to needy charities would have been a good thing but they also don't have spare cash to drive out to the countryside to collect free food.
In those days the farmers had not come up with the idea of "Pick Your Own". Strawberries are an attraction or any fruit one can eat while picking.......I can't see a cabbage rush
I hate food waste of any type but, as you say, there was really no option there.
I'm with you on wasted food Mick! At our house NO food goes in the garbage can. What the heck do I do with plate scrapings etc. etc.??
Well let's start with them then. Into a plastic bag and into the freezer to be handed to our garden man for his dawg.
Veg peelings - compost heap or if on a day when garden man comes, they go home with him for his fowls. (In Zulu, called 'nkuku.)
Old bread - for the birds in the garden.
Left-over good food that I don't want to freeze for another meal because it's either too little or I didn't care for it that much: Packaged for my housemaid to do whatever she wants with it. She also has a dawg...
Surplus garden veg - like the bok choy!! All given away to famillies in our employ. I cart buckets of lemons and limes to our shop and the staff help themselves.
There are ways of putting perfectly good food to someones use. When my son was a very small boy of about 5 or 6, he saw me brushing the crumbs off the bread board and throwing them into the courtyard. The darling child turned to me and said something wise beyond his years " Mom, those crumbs are nothing to us but they are a gourmet meal for an ant"
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, Jonathan Swift, 1729. I'm pretty sure was in prose form. Some suspected he wasn't being completely serious either.
It's a bit beside the point, but one of the reasons (in the US anyway) for paying farmers not to farm in a time of plenty is to rest the land, prevent soil depletion and erosion, and also to provide wildlife habitat.
As a day camp director for 5 years for the Girl Scouts, I participated in the Government Commodities Program, in which we could sign up for free surplus food. (Schools also participate in this program.)
The catch was the quantities were huge (#10 cans of peanut butter, 5# blocks of butter, etc.). Also the surplus items tended to be full-fat items and not particularly healthy for our campers. AND we had to fill out a lot of paperwork to document our use of these items and the disposition of any unused quantities. More hassle than it was worth IMO. Schools tend to melt full fat butter over canned corn just to use it up. I remember school cafeteria meals as being very greasy, probably from commodity butter.
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