Yeah.
Posted on 02/01/2017 9:32:02 AM PST by Cronos
..America’s food-insecure population is also low-income and trapped in food deserts, where they lack fresh, healthy, affordable eating options. Residents of food deserts make up almost 18% of the population, or about 54.4 million people, who live more than half a mile away from the nearest supermarket in urban areas or more than 10 miles away in rural areas.
“It’s just ridiculous in a country that is as resource-rich as we are,” says 30-year-old Anu Samarajiva, a graduate student at Washington University in St Louis. “The issue isn’t a lack of food or a lack of resources, but of distribution, pickup and logistics.”
Keen to make a change, Samarajiva and her classmates Irum Javed and Lanxi Zhang came up with a proposal to tackle the issue – by harnessing another service in a predicament of its own.
If the problem is distribution, they thought, then who better able to handle it than the king of delivery: the United States Postal Service (USPS)? The post office department has long been entrenched in America’s neighbourhoods, with more than 30,000 physical branches across the country – but with the rise of digital communications, it’s in decline.
The team’s proposal, which won the Urban SOS: Fair Share competition in January, envisages using the vast postal system network to improve food security in the US. Grocery stores and markets with surplus perishable foods would use the USPS app to schedule pickups, and USPS trucks that are either refrigerated or equipped with refrigerated bags would then deliver those pickups to hunger-relief organisations around the region. USPS offices, 17% of which have shuttered since 1971, could also be reconfigured as food-recovery storage and shopping centres.
...The nation’s declining post offices, then, could well be the food-security centres of the future.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
There will be certain neighborhoods where such a delivery plan works very well, smooth and easy. Everyone will be pleasantly surprised and delighted!
There will be other neighborhoods where not even a Papa John’s Pizza man would deliver, because you take a chance of your employee getting robbed, shot, stabbed, propositioned, having your foods stolen, your company vehicle stolen, keyed or damaged.
Protective measures and even armed guards could be put into place as needed, but that would make the costs necessarily skyrocket. Not feasible for a non-profit business model.
As for rural areas, most have access to land, seeds, and garden implements. Rural residents of any race used to know how to preserve meats, fruits, and vegetables. And the home grown food would be as good as, if not better than, highly processed foods, which many believe are a cause of obesity.
US postage is an incredible deal. Imagine you can send an envelope cross country for 50 cents.
Yes, I understand that it was a better deal at 23 cents and 27 cents and 34 cents and 45 cents.
Part of the ability to execute that service with very small numbers of service failures is the ability to make those deliveries at “loose” times during the day.
Part of that ability is, sometimes you get a piece of mail from 2000 miles away in 2 days, sometimes 3 days sometimes 4 days.
The USPS doesn’t have to keep the mail heated nor cooled.
US postage for package sized parcels is distinctly not as good a deal, in fact it has become pretty expensive of late.
So to think that a meal, that needs to be kept upright in most cases, that needs to be delivered within certain time constraints and controlled in temperature, that may not be packaged in sub-containers that can withstand the G-forces involved in general package handling...at reasonable cost....
is wrong.
And we think we have to worry about mail carriers throwing out mail.
Wait’ll the postman gets hungry...
First, the question must be asked, “Why are these places ‘food deserts’ in the first place?”
Much of the time, the answer will be for the same reason that take out food delivery has “redlined” them as unsafe. Even the USPS refuses to do home delivery to homes or apartments there, instead either providing drop boxes and keys, or requiring residents to pick up their mail at the post office.
In the worst of such places, police are forbidden to be alone there, must work in teams, and whenever the ‘natives’ are restless, and/or their local government will not support the police, even the dispatchers do not bother to send officers when they get emergency calls.
Major retailers won’t move there, and even ‘mom & pop’ stores quit after being robbed repeatedly in between angry shoplifting by “gimmee dats”.
Call it a tax and it'll sail right through.
Get the gub’mint out of charity.
__________________________________
If only this WAS charity. This is Welfare. Worse than that, it is a double waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars by giving free food away to million of non-productive takers AND using the wasteful resources of the USPS to deliver it.
The headline says “Needy”. Hardly.
Yes send that kale and scallops through the USPS that’s the ticket.
The Salvation Army in Detroit has terrific Bed & Bread trucks that go to the neighborhoods and feed people.
Yeah.
So, now all the welfare kings and queens won’t even have to walk a 1/2 mile to get food?
RIDICULOUS!
Now, if they have to pay for delivery, I’m up with that.
No.
We’ve lived here for 50+ years and it’s 20 miles to the grocery store. Before that, the family lived 40 miles from a grocery store. No public transportation but no problems.
As for USPS? Ha! Mail is supposed to be delivered around noon. Most times it doesn’t show up until 5 pm. Sometimes is isn’t delivered or picked up at all. Then there’s the mail that is delivered to the wrong address. UPS isn’t any better. They hid packages by tossing them in the bushes or sliding them under vehicles. The last food item they delivered to the neighbor, they sneaked it to the door because it was leaking and ruined. The guy parked away from the door. We were sitting by the door with the windows open and didn’t see him.
Do you want service like that for your meals? I don’t.
Do you want more taxes going to this? I don’t.
The EBT crowd and get off the couch, catch a bus and do their own shopping. I don’t get front door grocery delivery so I shouldn’t have to pay for them to get this super duper extra special pampering.
if the post office gets involved, the food will be delivered to the wrong address anyhow.
Yeah, you are correct. I should have put “charity” in quotation marks. This is a case of double indemnity on taxpayers.
Yes, this “food desert” BS is just that—BS.
Whoever said all your food needs to be available within a half mile? Those who are poor in the US get all kinds of subsidies, and most localities have volunteer and/or government programs to help the poor.
These “food deserts” that we are supposed to be so upset about are inner-city neighborhoods that have robust bus and subway services, etc.
And our postal service needs to go—we can more effectively competitively bid and contract to third-party providers rather than government employees who have grown inefficient under union protection that never should have been allowed near government employees anyway.
Yes, and there will be a lawsuit or two should the wrong sort of food be delivered to the wrong customer.
Thoughts?
1. cradle to grave evolves to stove to door service.
2. put it out for bid with
a. FED EX
b. UPS
C. Uber
And poor black neighborhoods have plenty of public transportation anyway—while the walk would do most of them good.
Food deserts, eh?
Guess that’s why the population of those “food deserts” is vastly overweight.
Count on the Guardian to come up with the wrong solution to the wrong problem every time.
I’m pretty sure I’m 10 miles from the nearest supermarket—didn’t know I was in a ‘food desert’. But, the only time the mail carrier’s truck is refrigerated is when the temps are below 30 (they drive with the windows down). Why would the postal service even have “refrigerated trucks”? The three students with odd-sounding names, must not get out much.
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