The Savannah morning news., 1903-07-26

And they hardly ever give it away
to the POOR In the first place, it Is
difficult for a beggar to tackle family
living in a fiat. In the second place,
New Workers seldom encourage beg
gars in any shape or form. 1 knew a
man, however, who was shocked at
the family waste and said that all the
uneaten food must be put aside and
given to the poor. He told two or
three 'hobos' to call for it. In a week
the word had gone around that he was
an easy mark, and there was a pro-
cession of beggars up the stairs to his
fiat all day long.
THE janitor complained, and his
own servant told him that she would
leave unless he got another girl to do
nothing but answer the door. So he
had to give up his charitable scheme,
and now he sends all his waste food
down the dumb waiter like other peo-
pie.
CarEOes of Fruit Thrown Away.
"The waste of fruit in New York is
incredible. Every banana steamer
brings hundreds or thousands of
punches of fully ripe bananas, beauti-
full, yellow fruit, just ready to eat.
The trade will not handle fruit in this
condition; it wants green fruit. All
lllCoC ups bOiiNlACS are lilIONU away
"Only short time ago over a mil
lion bananas brought I'M by the British
steamship Chickahominy were wasted
for this reason. Last year l remember
an Italian steamer coming in with a
cargo of lemons. The market was glut-
ted at the time, and there was no price
for them. 1t was cheaper to buy lem
OPS here than to import them. The
whole of the cargo was given to our
department to throw away.
This sort of thing seems an awful
waste, but I can assure you it is not
at all uncommon. On smaller scale,
it is always happening at our markets.
A fruit dealer has few boxes of or
anges or tomatoes. The market is just
closing. he can't get his price, and
rather than sell them for five cents less
he hands them over to us to throw
away. That happens every day. 1t
makes a mans heart bleed to see such
immense quantities of good food
thrown away, while many people, even
in prosperous New York, haven't
enough to eat
The WastefuI Tropics.
But, in spite of this Indictment, the
student of economics must go to the
tropics to see the greatest waste of
food. Most tropical countries produce
enough to feed a hundred times their
population. Take Jamaica, for in
stance. She exports large quantities
of bananas, oranges and pineapples to
the United States, but billions of those
fruits are left to rot on the ground.
A walk through miles of plantations
show thousands of trees weighed down
by luscious fruits which have not been
picked, because the market price at
the moment did not pay for the cost
of export. Those fruits are all left to
rot
The worlds mango crop is the
greatest waste OF all The mango is
one of the finest fruits in the world,
and probably the most nourishing. II
grows in bewildering profusion In
most parts of the tropics. The ne
groes eat nothing else In the mango
season. They sit under a mango tree
and gorge themselves all day long,
until the wonder is that they do not
burst. An average tree bears over
5000 mangoes, each as big as a large
orange, and there are hundreds OF
thousands of mango trees In Jamaica
alone. The natives, with all their ap
petite, cannot eat one per cent. of the
crop, which may be conservatively es-
timated at 10000,000000 mangoes a
wear.
Unfortunately. the fruit cannot be
exported. II viii not stand "A sea voy-
, age unless il Is treated with greater
care than il profitable to give. Thus
II is that many tropical countries are
covered at certain seasons Of the year