Lucky for us that John Roberts is a conservative! /s
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 ...
[Maybe stop rioting?]
Come on now, it’s only logical to smash, burn, loot and destroy the area around where you live.
Yes, any decent businessman or businesswoman would be right to fear the crime. A lot of those folks are taking their lives in their hands in some urban areas.
US postage is an incredible deal. Imagine you can send an envelope cross country for 50 cents.
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I’ve expressed that sentiment here before and have been criticized. Surprised that you weren’t.
It’s a bargain.
What town is your HEB in?
I have a fancy new HEB with sushi bar et al and I know I’m spoiled, but went into one in Alvin, TX and was appalled.
it was 1950s meets Tijuana, and small as heck. And dirty!
“it was 1950s meets Tijuana, and small as heck. And dirty!”
Bingo! Measuring with a pencil on google maps, the Alvin store is larger than ours. Canned goods tops are dusty and have bird droppings and you have to make sure to check each one so that it’s not dented. Bought saltines the other day, checked the box but two of the sleeves were nothing but crumbs so don’t know what happened. So, meatloaf for dinner. Also, bought a bell pepper that looked ok but turned to goo 2.5 days later. They didn’t have milk that day and noticed there weren’t any tortillas. Normally, I make my own and everything from scratch because 1) budget and 2) it isn’t stocked. I’ve posted how getting fish is like making a drug buy by the back door. It’s that ridiculous. If you find an item that you use often, better stock up because you’ll never find it again. I don’t mind there isn’t a variety of brands so much but at least keep one brand on the shelf. One day I’ll buy a doohickey to post pictures of empty shelves.
They had a meal deal (there’s never the complete deal) once to get free tortillas. I asked the manager if they had any in the back. No, but the truck will bring 4 in a couple days. Ok, knowing the answer, I asked if that was 4 cases or 4 packages of 8 tortillas each. Yep, it was 4 packages. IOW, a case had probably broken and those were salvaged. Typical. Might as well be in Tijuana.
If there was ever sushi here, RUN!
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