Honestly, I gnash my teeth a lot when reading food journalism (or rather, “storytelling” as it now tends to be framed).

Here’s one from Ambrook (“Data-driven storytelling for modern agriculture”) breaking the news that “Farmers don’t want to throw away food.”

“At the height of the pandemic,” writes Emma Glassman-Hughes, “farmers were forced to dump millions of pounds of perfectly edible produce. Four years later, they still need help with their surpluses.”

Four years later? Apparently Glassman-Hughes has no inkling that farmers have needed help with this for well over a century, or that “breadlines knee-deep in wheat” were making the paradoxical presence of agricultural surpluses and widespread hunger screamingly obvious to more people as early as the 1930s.

Americans tend to forget all about this again once an economic crisis calms back down, though. So on we go, reinforcing the idea that we could solve the problem by rescuing and redistributing the surplus when in fact that does nothing to get at the root causes of either overproduction or food insecurity. <big sigh>