391–400 of 473 posts
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A situation like this bring out many comments that reveal a very low understanding of basic economics (and a low rate of reading the article). Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. The company that purchased their assets is continuing to buy 24,000 tons of peaches, but the previous unsustainable business was buying a lot more. It's the excess fields that need to be repurpo…
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. Things are often more complicated than that. Del Monte was founded a long time ago and fruit trees take a long time to grow. As a result, as the originator of those trees, you're at a disadvantage because you have to pay for many years of maintenance and interest on capital before the trees bear fruit, and are then sitting on a load…
Because why pay for something when you can get someone else to pay for it?
I've worked in agtech for the last 20 years supplying CA with various equipment and there's a vast amount of food industry there. So, the unfortunate thing is, kind of need to let capitalism do its job here. Ultimately, there is a lot of opportunity and infrastructure for all kinds of crops. Either people adapt or someone will buy them out. The only time you should really worry is if anyone trys to rezone agricultura…
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> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. Things are often more complicated than that. Del Monte was founded a long time ago and fruit trees take a long time to grow. As a result, as the originator of those trees, you're at a disadvantage because you have to pay for many years of maintenance and interest on capital before the trees bear fruit, and are then sitting on a load…
> Like if destroying the trees to grow something else was more profitable than continuing to sell the produce then why does it require a government subsidy? Because why pay for something when you can get someone else to pay for it?
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Eating canned stuff seems to be going out of fashion as people realize about the Alzheimer's risk. There are basically no "new" canned food brands. People prefer frozen fruit to canned fruit, especially since frozen has gotten a lot of positive PR lately, e.g. "it's fresher than fresh produce at the supermarket!
How do canned peaches cause Alzheimer’s?
As it turned out, aluminum poisoning can cause dementia-like symptoms, but you can't get aluminum poisoning from cookware or cans.
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Actually, for me, I primarily dislike needless waste. A bunch of resources were dedicated to growing this orchard which will all go to naught. It's better to destroy the orchard than sink even more effort into it if it'll be wasted in the end but the lack of forethought and planning is concerning. It's a bit awkwardly worded but unjust isn't the word I'd specifically choose, it was inherited from the OP so maybe thei…
The waste would have been continuing to use large amounts of water to grow a crop with declining popularity.
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It's so weird for you to be fearful of something when you don't know how farming works. Every year farmers cut down a bunch of trees and plant new ones in response to costs and market demand. So what. This is routine and seldom makes the news. Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it.
> Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it. Has canned fruit actually lost popularity? Or did the grocery stores decide that the shelf space had a higher profit margin pushing something else? The last couple of times I tried to get canned fruit for a recipe I had to actively hunt for the particular cans of fruit I needed (I needed…
Do grocery stores make their own decisions about what goes on their shelves? I thought they mostly rented the shelf space to food vendors who were responsible for that.
For example, a while ago I complained on HN that a particular flavor of Triscuits was reliably out of stock whenever Safeway discounted Triscuits, and I was told that the way to address that, were I so minded, is to reach out to Nabisco on Twitter, because they - and not Safeway - make the stocking decisions.
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The new crop will be grapes of wrath
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the…
Edit: I thought you had adapted this to what's described in the TFA, but seems like it's an actual excerpt.
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As an owner of an apple tree: that's great for about two months, but I don't have commercial quantities of cold storage.
We used to have a lemon tree. When it was producing, 80% of it went to waste. When it wasn't producing, we had to buy. It was still worth it, though. It required very little maintenance (pruning once a year, replace the batteries on the auto-irrigation system a couple times a year), so it was basically free.
Asking as a person who buys about 4 lemons per year.
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Wow. That's really applicable, nearly a century later.
No, it isn't. The book was written during the Great Depression. We're not in the Great Depression now. Pretty much nobody nobody is dying of malnutrition in the US and nobody is dying of pellagra specifically, because we've invented fortifying food with vitamins. But the big difference is that the peach trees are being destroyed because nobody wants the peaches . That's the exact opposite of the quote, in which there…
Well, nobody important.
US rates of malnutrition: https://worldmetrics.org/malnutrition-in-the-united-states-s...
Increase in deaths from malnutrition: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/29/why-are-m...
> To be sure, we wouldn’t yet call it commonplace. But while it accounts for fewer than 1 in 100 deaths, its toll is rising so fast that it’s now in the same league as arterial disease, mental disorders and deaths from assault.