Why Some People Hate America (Secular Version)

Last weekend, I was in a large grocery store picking up a couple of items.  This store had its own public cafeteria area, and a worker was just removing leftover food from a breakfast buffet it had set out.

I stood and watched as she took a tray filled with more than a dozen doughnuts from the buffet, brought them behind the counter, and scraped them into the garbage.  I didn't hang around, but there's little doubt this same garbage can would become the final resting place for all of the other leftover buffet food.

Multiply the leftovers from this small buffet by the thousands of others across America, over thousands of days, and I'm guessing you'd have enough to feed a small impoverished country for an entire meal.  Add in every other food item that restaurants toss daily, and maybe it's enough to feed that country for an entire day.

This is what we routinely throw into the garbage in America.  Yet, even some of America's own citizens go hungry.

I get it, it isn't the store's fault.  We have rules about food disposal and safety in our country.  The problem is, those rules aren't entirely written for the protection of the consumer; they're also written for the protection of the merchant, to avoid a lawsuit.  In other words, we throw away food to protect us from ourselves.

I also get that it's a distribution problem.  There's so reasonable way to transport perishable food thousands of miles.  But is it so hard to think it couldn't be put to some better use locally?

For full disclosure, I have to consider my own contribution to American food wastefulness last weekend.  I stopped at a convenience store on a road trip, where you could get 'any size' fountain drink up to 52-ounces for a dollar.  So of course, I got the 52-ouncer.  Why get only 20-ounces when you could get more than twice that for the same price and just throw away what you don't want?  And sadly, that's what I did.

I've been thinking more about American excess in general lately, ever since a trip to Las Vegas.  There, it isn't just food and beverages -- it's excess in every way, from the gambling all the way up to the imported Italian marble floor tiles.

We know that some people hate America based upon their own warped religious beliefs.  They are crazy idiots.  If there's anything to hate on us for, it would be our lack of humility in how much we waste.