When I was home visiting Michigan back in August, I read something in the newspaper about the large number of cherries in the north. There was such a surplus that many farmers were required to let them rot instead of taking them to market to sell. This is an economic problem. If there's too many cherries in the market, the price for them goes down, and when that happens, none of the cherry farmers make any money, so nobody grows any cherries the next year. The quantity produced next year depends on the expected price, so in order to regulate the price, quantities available now are regulated.

Considering the food shortages in other parts of the world, this sounds crazy...letting an abundance of food just spoil and rot, unconsumed, while other goes hungry. If we need to get rid of the food, and other people other places in the world need it, then putting it to good use is a problem of logistics. Here's an idea for a charity: coordinate the transport of the surpluses of food away from the markets in the United States and give it to those who need it elsewhere.

This couldn't be done profitably, and it's probably a whole lot cheaper to buy food for people starving in other countries from sources located closer to those people, but c'mon, there has to be a better way to deal with too much food than just dumping it on the side of the road for the flies.