OPINIONS & COMMENTARY

How Many Hands Have Touched Your Food?

The inflation spreading through the country is hitting everyone really hard where it hurts the mostgroceries. I usually stick to store brands and I still get sticker shock. However, it’s not surprising.

Think, for a minute, about how many people are involved in getting food to your table.

Now let’s think about how much money each of those people are making.

Let’s start with something simple, like apples. Starting on the farm, I imagine that only the owners and a few supervisors are making a living wage. People getting their hands dirty might not be. A lot of them are probably undocumented or migrant workers. There are cases of children working in farms and factories, even in the U.S., so I wouldn’t be surprised if something you ate in the last week was harvested by a 12-year-old. Not to mention the literal slave labor that takes place around the world.

The apples might be bagged up by the pound. The bags were created by someone, and the oil industry brings us the plastic. Someone also had to design the logo and lettering on the bag.

Food inspectors are probably (hopefully) involved at some point. I had a friend who used to work at a lab where she would take something like a potato chip and run it through tests to determine if the ingredient label was telling the truth.

Then, the apples have to be loaded on a truck and driven to a distribution center.

The distributor then sends it to your grocery store. That involves drivers. And mechanics. It also includes gas station workers and the entire oil industry (again). Then, a grocery store clerk puts them out on display for you to buy.

This doesn’t include all the people involved in logistics, inventory, and accounting –the behind the scenes stuff. Those apples went through dozens of hands before reaching your table (that’s why you should always wash your produce!).

How many dollars were spent? How many people were paid?

When you think of it that way, it’s amazing that apples are $2-3 a pound. The only way for everyone involved in the process to actually make money is to sell a huge quantity of it.

And all of this for apples. Now, imagine if the apple is an ingredient in something, like cereal. Then, there are even more workers for each ingredient.

You might not know this, but a lot of grocery stores hire predominantly part time workers. That way, they don’t have to pay health insurance (because in this country, the only people who have health insurance are those with full time jobs).

Grocery stores also hire merchandisers. I did that job for a bit, when my daughter was a baby. We were a separate company, and would drive out to grocery stores all over New Jersey for a week or so at a time. We would take everything off the shelf, (sometimes) clean the shelf, (sometimes) check

Letters To The Editor

Letters To The Editor

energy options are being crammed down the throats of the American public.

The letter in your May 13, 2023 edition (“GOP Spread Lies About Offshore Wind To Protect Big Oil Companies”) from a long list made up mostly of never before heard from faceless supposedly organizations is an example of how many available

Accordingly, let’s examine just a could have the known reasons that encourage care and research into the proposed alternative pushed by this letter … offshore wind power.

The New Jersey coastline provides a major route for birds, fish and marine mammals for their semi-annual migrations.

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We are aware that over 300 dead whales have been found in the New York bight in a fairly short period of time.

What effects have construction involving offshore wind had on those whales and dolphins? Little research has been done and cross checked on these biological events.

What about proofs received about other offshore wind projects around the work, and many on land too, that have shown that birds of many species do not fare well when they have to fly through huge blades of wind machines set several hundred feet above the water?

Then we have the economic costs of offshore wind. Due in no small part, the salt air environment above the ocean is no place for heavy duty equipment.

Those of you who have a shore property or keep a boat at the shore are well aware of the incredibly corrosive effects of salt expiration dates, and stock the products in a new location. And the biggest scam was that if no grocery store hired us that week, we filed for unemployment for that time period!

Some companies have their delivery people do merchandising for their own products. Companies buy space on a shelf, sometimes entire sections, to display only their products.

Customers want low prices. Obviously. So the grocery store has to figure out the sweet spot to be able to pay for the product, their own employees, utilities and taxes and everything else while still making it cheap enough for you to buy.

When the prices of everything started going up, it was not a surprise to me. There are so many people involved in making a pound of apples that I’m amazed they are so cheap. During those early times of COVID, the system broke down and we started to realize just how important the supply chain really is.

There are dozens of people involved in producing something as simple as produce – and most of them are not making a living wage. Some of these companies are starting to realize the value of their supply chain, so they are paying better salaries.

While everyone else was up in arms about the increase in food costs, I shrugged my shoulders and said “It was good while it lasted.”

Chris Lundy News Editor

infused air and water.

Those corrosive effects and the fact that when men work in and around the ocean, miles from shore, costs rise exponentially. Nowhere in that letter do the writers take those dramatically higher costs into account.

But you will get stuck, readers, you will get stuck. Right in the pocketbook just the way elitists normally stick it to you!

Other offshore wind projects have proved out the fact that offshore wind generates far more than electricity when there is sufficient wind but not too much.

What else could the offshore wind mills generate other than electricity?

Far larger electrical bills for the poor souls living around that particular offshore wind facility and that would mean customers of PSEG, Atlantic City Electric, Jersey Central and, possibly, Long Island since PSEG operates Long Island Power. If you read the backs of your electricity bills you will see the rates per kilowatt hour broken out to show the costs of generating the electricity and the costs of transmitting the power to you. My latest PSEG bill shows the generation costs are $0.04 per kilowatt hour. That charge is a good deal less than charged by other utilities around the country. Why might that be, you might ask. The answer is simple. In PSEG territory over 85% of power is generated in nuclear generating plants and the rest are mostly natural gas fired plants of one type or another.

Now compare the generation costs for offshore wind with your current sources. Offshore wind averages $0.40 per KWh not the $0.04 that I am paying today. THAT’S 10 TIMES MORE!

Maybe offshore wind is too environmentally risky and too expensive to be considered at this time.

There are thousands of other scientists who are not convinced that there are unusual environmental effects occurring at this time. Many point out that there are over 900 confirmed cycles that Earth is involved in at this time and none of those cycles suggest a quick end to our Earth. In fact, after Al Gore thumped his political drum years ago with dire threats of doom he called the risks “global warming” only to discover some years later that Earth is currently in a cooling cycle so the Worriers quickly checked out of “global warming” and climbed in bed with “climate change” instead. Remember that?

But, heck, we’ve had climate change for millennia. Summer, fall, winter and spring.

We have enough to face at this time without throwing Trillions of Dollars at what just might be a phantom!

Capt. Lindsay Fuller Medford