Do We Need a Law to Force Grocery Stores to Stop Throwing Away Food

In America, you have no excuse for being hungry.

Short Answer:  Nope!

Ever once in a while, some dear lefty buddy of mine will throw a post up on Facebook about a clever way that France (why is it always France) has passed a law making it illegal for grocery stores to throw away food. It feeds the hungry and stops global warming they say, thus killing two virtual birds with one stone. It seems that decomposing food releases carbon into the air much to the dismay of environmentalists and the joy of plants everywhere who need carbon to breathe.

Well, it's true that France passed such a law back in 2016. The law made it illegal for any grocery store larger than 4000 square feet to throw away food that is getting close to its sell-by date. On the surface, it all sounds like a nifty idea and even punishes those greedy corporate grocery chains.

The law requires stores to stop tossing useful nutritious, if slightly aged food. Instead, they would have to donate it to some charitable nonprofit that would hand the food out to the deserving poor and hungry while making sure only the people getting it actually need it.

And like any good law, the mechanics of it is fraught with unintended consequences. It makes the supermarket responsible for sorting and shipping out the food which adds to the cost. There is some concern that if the poor don't buy food, the grocery store will lose money from even that small amount of lost business. Remember that of all retail, grocers operate on a very narrow margin, earning, after expenses from 1 to 3 cents on every dollar they spend.

Don't get me started on the economics of making this idea a government program. My friend Mark Milliorn has done an excellent explanation of the economic chaos caused by getting government involved in this scheme. There's one reason not to do this that Mark missed. 

AMERICANS ALREADY DO EXACTLY THIS SAME THING WITHOUT A LAW FORCING THEM TO DO IT. And we do it efficiently without wrecking the economy and we insure that no one goes hungry. The surest way to mess it all up is to make it a government program. 

I worked in East Texas for close to 4 decades, helped start 5 nonprofit organizations to fill community needs that weren't being met by government programs. One in 5 East Texans didn't have ready access to transportation. One in four were seniors or disabled adults. I helped write community collaborative grants for homeless programs and agencies. And I helped raise funds for food bank programs.

The East Texas Food Bank was a huge project. ETFB operated a large warehouse as a distribution point for the East Texas Food Bank programs in the region. Several grocery stores and chains donated food being rotated off the shelves to the food bank. It was carried to the ETFB warehouse in the store's trucks and by the food banks vehicles. Volunteers from all over come in and donate their time to sort the food onto pallets, where it is labeled and stored. 

A local church school's kids
volunteer time at the Food Bank

Across the region community organizations, nonprofits and churches set up food banks in their facilities. Sometimes several churches cooperate to set up a food bank location. They buy shelves and coolers and freezers from a company that resells and recycles store appliances.  The individual location sets up a room like a store. When someone comes in needing groceries, church secretaries or volunteers give them a basket and lets them shop for what they need. The bank staff know what's available and help to distribute it fairly.

The program was particularly successful during economic hard times. People would need food to time them over till they started work. So instead of going through the Food Stamp Offices' proctological exam, they pick up a couple of bags of groceries at the church food bank. Other ways food is distributed is through outdoor distributions in parks and public facilities, through soup kitchens, nonprofit residential facilities, and Meals on Wheels.

The upshot was that one day panicked Food Stamp officials summoned us all to a meeting where they announced that the feds were cutting $800,000 from their budget.  AND IT WAS OUR FAULT THEY CLAIMED. Apparently, we did so well with the food banks that their applications dropped significantly and DC cut their budget. They were planning to spend $150,000 on a marketing campaign, the theme of which was "Food Stamps are not part of welfare reform."

It was then that I discovered where they got the "One in five children go to bed hungry" slogan. The spokesman for the Food Stamp office let it slip out that their applications were way down. I asked if they were going to make the application process easier and was told "NO!" It was then that the I found that the 1-in-5 hunger statistic was based on the number of applications, not the number of food stamp awards. What they really wanted was more applications. 

Our little church/nonprofit-based food banks would pick up truckloads of food at the central bank. We would pay 1 cent per pound to help cover the food bank's operating costs. The system runs entirely without state or federal government assistance. The grocery stores donate to the central food bank without being coerced by government. Other independent nonprofit volunteers from organizations like Gleaners whose volunteers harvest fields gleaning potatoes, yams, carrots and other crops after the farmers do the first pass, also donate harvested produce and overflow stuff from festivals and fairs. 

The system works smoothly and doesn't get mucked up by government bureaucrats. And nobody knows who needs food like church secretaries and the field staffs of community organizations. 

So if the government can keep its grubby hands off of us, we can make sure the greatest health threat to Americans in poverty is obesity and we can do it efficiently and economically.

Americans are good people by nature; Christians are under orders to be good people. We give more money to charity, to third world countries and the poor than the US government does.

© 2023 by Tom King                                                 

 

 

Giving by the Rich Declines Under Redistribution

(Except for a Recent Surge in Funding for the Arts)

 

According to a Pew study, between 2009 and 2011 the wealthiest 7% got wealthier by a big 28% and the rest of us got poorer by 4%.  Oh, dear. That was during the time Obama had the presidency and the Democrats had both the House and Senate. How could that be?  Oh and another shock. Charitable giving by the wealthiest 7% of Americans declined and is only slightly recovered.

The good news according to The Nonprofit Quarterly, is that giving for the arts has risen. In other words, Mrs. Frumpyfeller's favorite opera company, The Bedford-Stuyvesant Companie' de Opera, is in danger of closing so Mrs. F orders Mr. F to give them something since she simply cannot live without seeing "Carmen" again this fall, performed in the ornate Lititia Frumpyfeller Auditorium de' Opera. And Mrs. Von Stuffypompous is concerned that there won't be enough paintings of tastefully naked people in the Stuffypompous Gallery over at the Uppity Museum of Fine Art so she pushes through a nice fat grant for the museum from their tax write-off foundation. The Uppity gives Mrs. Von Stuffypompous their Humanitarian of the Year Award.

The left is really struggling to understand why, that when they jacked up the taxes on the wealthiest among us, the wealthiest among us stopped giving to charities in nearly direct proportion to the additional tax bite they endured under the Obama soak-the-rich policy. Weren't they just supposed to just accept becoming poorer in the name of redistribution of wealth and keep on giving just as much? That's what pundits like Rick Cohen over at Nonprofit Quarterly were assuring us when he was singing the praises of jacking up taxes on the rich for humanitarian reasons.

Turns out, the rich weren't prepared to take a pay cut after all. "Shame on them!" cries NPQ. I mean, the filthy rich should at least be grateful that the administration left all their favorite tax loopholes in place. They did, after all, keep getting richer under this Democrat administration, despite all the "soak the rich" rhetoric.

© 2014 by Tom King

Is it a Christian's Duty to Help Expand Government Charity?

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Jimmy Carter is probably quite honest in his opinion (left), although he seems frighteningly deficient in his understanding of the American system of government and the Scriptures' advice on the subject.  Scripture does say, "Render unto Caesar, the things that are Caesar's and even did a miracle to help Peter pay his taxes. The moneylenders were the crony capitalists of Jesus' day and He did not approve of their activities at all. Jesus said if the government asks you to carry a burden one mile carry it two. Jesus was talking about a government ruled by kings and emperors. He was not talking about a government of the people, by the people and for the people. If He were He would have very likely had some things to say about our responsibility not to let our government drag people out of their beds and make them carry heavy loads for the Army.

Because our American government derives its power and its mission from the people, we are charged with responsibility for what it does. That is why we vote - to guide our leaders and to tell them what we want them to do.  And in that process, yes, we may have to pay our taxes to support things we do not like, but that enough of our citizens voted to do anyway. Thanks, however, to our constitution, we are not required to shut up and give tacit approval to those things the government does that we think are wrong or even misguided by our silence. It is our responsibility in a democratic republic to provide guidance to our government's representatives as to how we want to run things.

If we see that government doesn't do a thing very well, it ought to be our responsibility to require that our government representatives step aside and stop interfering with those who do perform those tasks well. After all, it is our government. Our congress, senate, judiciary and administration were not seen by our founders as infinite law generating machines. At some point, if you keep adding laws and systems to a government, eventually it collapses of its own weight. I do believe that, unless we can get a few congresses that abolish more laws than they make, we are not far from that collapse now.

Jesus never said we could buy freedom from guilt or our responsibility to the poor at a discount by making our neighbors pay "their share". Charity by taxation is a way for wealthy people to not have to pay as much to fulfill our Christian duty to the poor. That's one powerful reason for some wealthy people to favor charity through government taxation. It costs them less and they don't have to feel guilty because they can tell themselves, "It's the government's responsibility, not mine."

Charity to the poor, the widows and orphans has always been a duty Christians are expected to perform regardless of what "everybody else" does. We are not relieved of that duty simply because the government demands we pay a high tax rate so it can give help to the poor. We can't shuffle off our responsibilities that way. It is not allowed. We are commanded to give real help to the poor, to set them on their feet and help them become strong and independent - to set them free. The type of help the government gives is not help at all, but a subtle enslavement of those it purports to help. It serves the interests of the wealthy and powerful because it creates a large dependent class who will reliably vote for those who pay them their pittance. That is all.

Christian charity as God would have it, sets free the poor, the disabled, the sick and the poor of spirit. True charity will always set people free, not just make them reliable political supporters.

© 20114 by Tom King

Meals on Wheels Fur Dogs and Cats

Only in East Texas

KETK, the Tyler Texas NBC affilliate posted this story this past week.  A new nonprofit charity has been organized in East Texas to provide food for pets belonging to elderly folk.  Dubbed "Meals Fur Pets", the organization is mostly volunteers and works with Meals on Wheels to deliver pet food to elderly folk along with their meals on wheels lunches. 


Somebody figured out that seniors with pets are healthier and live longer than those that don't.  They also figured out that some seniors were sharing their meals on wheels with their pets because they either couldn't afford pet food or couldn't get to the store to buy it.  In short order, a new program was organized and began collecting donated pet food and distributing it to seniors through Meals on Wheels.


This is a lovely idea. Meals on Wheels is already delivering food to seniors.  Throwing on a few bags of puppy kibble and kitty chow isn't a problem and the benefits for seniors is huge. This kind of projects is one of the reasons I believe that private sector charity is more humane than government charity. If this had been done by the government....

1. It never would have been done, especially in East Texas which is hard shell conservative and no friend to the folks in DC.  Our Congressman, Louis Gohmert is a perpetual thorn in the liberal side up there.
2. It would have taken an act of congress to get approved and two years to get the enabling legislation through committee.
3. There would have been a three million dollar rider attached to the bill providing funding for the Barney Frank Center for Alternative Lifestyles.
4. It would have required 300,000 new federal workers to administer and 60% of the budget would have been "admin costs".
5. There would have been 25 pounds of paperwork required to even qualify for the program.
6. You'd have had to prove you belonged to a minority, were an illegal alien, refugee, were disabled or a registered Democrat to be eligible.
7. You'd have had to be able to get into town to the Office of Companion Pet Food Distribution because the website would be beyond the average seniors capacity to locate on the Internet.
8. You would have had to wait for six hours in the waiting area at the OCPFD before a surly little man took your 25 pounds of paperwork and set an appointment for you to return in 3 weeks for an evaluation of your application.
9. The program would not be promoted or advertised for fear that the program would be flooded and the government would not have enough funds to insure that everyone approved received services.
10. Finally, you'd have had to prove your dog or cat was a registered Democrat in good standing. 
    

Instead a bunch of volunteers put the whole thing together in a few weeks, found a way to distribute the food, store the food and collect the food and just started doing it.  No permission needed.  They get tons of corporate support from local food store chains and distributors.  People buy pet food and leave it in collection barrels at stores, churches, schools and community centers.

And that's how conservatives solve a problem!  Hey, even East Texas liberals get in on the act too. We know how to work together, we Texans.  Makes me proud to be a Texan.

Tom King (c) 2013

Uncle Sam Becomes a Charity Case

Nonprofit Quarterly ran a recent article called "Weird Philanthropy: Donors Give to the National Debt".  The magazine expressed its befuddlement at the spate of donations to the federal government to help reduce the national debt. The amounts are not substantial, averaging $20-30 for the most part with the "occasional six-figure contribution. The notoriously left-leaning Quarterly wondered in its article what sort of "metrics" these donors were using to judge the effectiveness of these donations and argued that the money would just "go into the general fund" anyway.

It's fascinating how liberals say they like bigger government so long as they're hauling down nice fat grants from the fed. When their own donors start giving to Uncle Sam, though, the complaining begins, because even they realize that public philanthropies don't waste money like the government. They're likely thinking, that all that money will just get flushed down the bureaucratic crapper, when it could go to a nonprofit organization where it would actually do some good.

Recently, conservative talk show hosts, pundits and politicians have challenged pro-tax liberals saying, "If you believe the government is the best manager of welfare programs and you believe you are not being taxed enough, you can always give the amount you believe you are being under-taxed directly to the government."


Apparently, some folks are taking them up on the challenge and putting, at least a bit of their money where their mouth is. It would be bad news for nonprofits in general if the trend were to spread, but the lion's share of giving to charity seems to be coming from faith-based and conservative givers. Most of these folks, many of whom give ten percent or more of their income to charities and churches, have a less rosey view of the federal government as an efficient and effective purveyor of charitable programs and funding.

The average ten percent giver is unlikely to jump on the bandwagon on this one. The gifts to Uncle Sam up to this point appear more symbolic than substantial and given the small amounts, these folk apparently don't think they are underpaying their taxes by very much.

So, next time a pro-tax liberal tells you he is under-taxed and that he does give extra to the federal government, ask him, "How much?"

Tom King