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 ...
As long as they can find language in the Constitution for this, I’m all for it.
somebody tell TheDonald to sell the USPS ,,
please.
Seriously. What SFB’s thinks up this BS??
If this were a meals on wheels program. For the elderly. Then yeah. Maybe.
It’s bad enough we taxpayers waste money on free stuff for most welfare recipients, but now they want the Post Office to deliver it too?
Grrrr.
My first thought is that, if a plan involving the USPS to deliver food/meals moves forward, it will be designed in a way to take more money from the average taxpayer or needlessly reallocate some tax revenue we are already financing.
My second thought is that, a Trump administration would not allow this to go forward, unless it is done in a way that benefits the average taxpayer.
JMHO
One look at how skinny people are around me makes me wonder where these food deserts are. Or was that desserts?
Perhaps so many people would not be in poverty if there were not so many people coming out of colleges trying to come up with ways to spend money to fix problems that do not exist?
We have very bad postal service where we live. Packages lost, damaged, misdelivered. God knows what they’d do with food deliveries.
This is so stupid that it will never be proposed in any committee of Congress.
The USPS would promptly contract this out to UPS and FedEX. OnTrac might even get a piece.
Seriously. What SFB’s thinks up this BS??
Ahh. I see the answer to my question in the article...
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.
Well the reason they are in a food desert is because of the chronic shoplifting and occasional looting of the stores. If they address that issue plenty of vendors will come back.
Its not enough to get free food now they want it delivered.
Food deserts? Maybe stop rioting?
Funniest thing I've read in a while.
Do you really want to subject your parents or loved ones to Post Office Food?
Yes. Amazon may wind up being the USPS’s salvation. In fact, maybe they will just buy USPS and train them in the use of delivery drones.
Get the gub’mint out of charity.
whoa there....this is the US Congress we're talking about.
NO and HELL NO, Abolish the Food Stamp program entirely and set up SOUP LINES WHEREVER NEEDED as many as necessary. Bring the DEMOCRAT POLICIES out front and center for the World to see.
Food that is about to go rotten being delivered by a service that routinely is slow and misplaces things. What can go wrong? And are 90% of the country’s “needy” so homebound that they can’t walk down to the Salvation Army or another soup kitchen?
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