Incongruities

By Alan Caruba

A new supermarket opened in my town. The Garden of Eden is part of a chain that specializes in providing every kind of fresh and exotic food one could want to satisfy a discriminating palate.

On opening day shoppers were wandering from aisle to aisle examining all manner of spices, mustards, vegetables, fruits, breads, and selections of prepared foods from all around the Earth. I came upon a canister of Café du Monde, a special blend of coffee that I formerly could not purchase except from New Orleans, its home.

I stopped in front of a display of freshly cooked brisket; its red center suggesting it had been done to perfection. Would I like a taste? Yes, indeed! And then I ordered two slices, cut to just the width I wanted. The display of cheeses was dazzling. I bought a wedge of Jarlsberg and made a mental note to get some brie the next time. In the end I just wandered around the place in a happy daze.

My late Mother, Rebecca, was a famed teacher of haute cuisine, a gourmet who authored several cookbooks. Every night my late Father, Robert, and I would sit down to meals that rivaled the best restaurants in the world. An expert on wines, she was the first woman to become a member of the board of the Sommelier Society of America. We drank wine like most Americans drink soda. When she passed away, those freshly baked breads and other gastronomic delights passed with her.

Here then is the incongruity.

In the midst of this splendorous, ostentatious display of foods of every description, I had a thought about the one billion people who share this planet with me who live on a dollar a day. Then I thought about the speculation concerning wheat, soy, rice and other grains that has caused prices, from 2005 to today, to rise 80% according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

To date, at least fourteen nations have had food-related riots and violence.

Now, weather has had, as always, some role in shortages, but all this is happening mostly because some idiots decided to require that billions of gallons of ethanol be added to gasoline.

Since ethanol is made from corn, soy and other food products, it started a cascade of shortages. Even wheat farmers planted less in order to grow corn to cash in on the subsidized bonanza of ethanol. Without this legislated environmental “solution” to the reduction of “greenhouse gases” there would not be rising food prices worldwide.

The irony is that the Earth is cooling these days, not warming. It has warmed quite naturally from the end of the last mini-ice age around 1850 to the tune of one degree Fahrenheit. Since 1998, scientists say there is a perceptible cooling occurring worldwide, including the oceans that trap and hold 80-90% of the world’s heat.

What kind of idiots would buy into the junk-science of global warming? The answer is almost the entire Congress of the U.S. with the exception of a few who have courageously and vociferously spoken against it, the House and Senate Majority leaders, all three of the candidates currently hoping to be the next President, and the idiot we have currently in the Oval Office.

A lot of people colluded to create this mess. Beyond Congress and the White House has been an international and national grotesquery of environmental organizations that have fought against the introduction and use of genetically modified food crops to feed the six billion-plus people of the world. They continue to do everything they can to thwart the access and use of all manner of energy sources from coal to natural gas and oil.

Population and consumption are the targets of the Green movement. The odds are that a large part of the world’s population will be victimized and die from their efforts to bring about these imbalances and shortages of food. The speculators are no less to blame.

A classroom of fifth graders could have told you that burning food crops to make a useless fuel additive was a stupid thing to do.

Meanwhile, I will wander the aisles of the Garden of Eden and, because I can afford to, ask myself if I want to purchase that tray of pork tenderloin in a rice wrap? Yes, I think I do.