Okay, we’ve been watching the news for the last several days, and all this hype about food shortages and food riots and rising food prices and blah blah blah . . . I mean, c’mon people. Once our corn farmers figure out that they can make much more money planting wheat, or spinach, or legumes (or anything besides low-grade, industrial corn!), then that’s what they’ll plant, and corn-based ethanol, along with its food devouring biofuel cousins, will simply fade away like an embarrassing fad (pet rocks, anyone?). It’s as if no one has ever heard of the concept of adaptation.
But back to the media hype — has anyone noticed that the illustrative video clips being endlessly replayed on the networks are of food riots in poor third world countries, where they ALWAYS have food shortages and ugly fights over scare resources? It’s as if some news editor said, “Hey, we need a video clip to punctuate our new scare-quote headline story of the month about rumors of people coming to blows over boxes of Rice-A-Roni in the aisles of Costco. I know, let’s use this footage of angry, hungry people in the Congo!”
Perhaps the best thing I’ve read recently that cuts through the food-shortage hype is this blog entry from The Zen of Unemployment — “Quick, buy lots of rice!”: “The other day, I bought 40 pounds of rice. Not because I need 40 pounds of rice, but because everyone else was. It is the cool thing to do . . . Maybe it was for the challenge of it all, or maybe it was just to spite those people that thought they were going to die if they weren’t able to fill a semi-truck with rice to get them by for the next few days, but I went on the hunt for the elusive bag of rice . . . You would have thought we were unloading bricks of gold from Fort Knox by the way people were looking at us. Keep looking pal, but when you are stuck eating old cans of spaghettios, I will have a big old bowl of rice… You can have your fillet Mignon, but will you have rice? I will.”
It’s like the news story I saw this morning where a gas station had announced it would sell gas for $0.79 cents a gallon for one hour starting at noon, so people began lining up at the place HOURS ahead of time to reserve their place in line for cheap gas. Never mind that sitting in a line for four hours in front of a gas station is stunningly inconvenient and only shows how little some people actually value their own time, especially when you consider the fact that there’s no actual gas shortage, it’s just more expensive than it used to be.
But by god, they were going to score a tank full of cheap gas! And then they’ll boast to all their friends about it — “I got a tank full of gas for $0.79 cents a gallon. How much did YOU pay?” They’ll puff up their chests, swagger around the office/store/restaurant/kitchen/factory/warehouse/cosmetics counter and smirk with the satisfaction that only a successful hunter can feel. They brought down the fearsome Gas Beast! For one hour! Yes they did!
It’s days like this when I am absolutely convinced that the human race evolving from single cell organisms occurred only about, say, ten years ago.
