The Price They Think Is Worth It
How America and Israel Voted Against Your Right to Eat — And Why Your Local Grocery Store Proves It Every Day
“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. they are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, February 5, 1775.
Let me show you something that should fundamentally change how you view American power.
In 2021, the United Nations put a simple question to the world: Is food a human right? One hundred eighty countries said yes. Two said no. The United States of America — the self-proclaimed beacon of freedom, the supposed defender of human dignity — voted alongside Israel to reject the basic proposition that human beings deserve to eat.
This wasn’t a procedural technicality. This wasn’t buried in complex treaty language. The UN Committee approved the resolution by a recorded vote of 180 to 2. The text expressed alarm that 2.4 billion people — nearly a third of humanity — lacked access to adequate food. Between 720 and 811 million faced outright hunger. And America said no.
You need to understand what this vote reveals. Because once you see it, you’ll recognize the same logic operating in your own community, in your own grocery store, in your own life.
The Doctrine of Acceptable Death
Consider Madeleine Albright. Former UN Ambassador. First female Secretary of State. Icon of American foreign policy. In 1996, she sat for an interview on 60 Minutes to discuss US sanctions on Iraq. Correspondent Lesley Stahl presented her with a devastating fact: half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of those sanctions. More children than died in Hiroshima.
Stahl asked if the price was worth it.
Albright’s answer should haunt every American who believes their government represents human decency: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
Read that again. Half a million dead children. Worth it.
This wasn’t a gaffe. This wasn’t walking back later with apologies and clarifications. This was doctrine — spoken plainly, on camera, by the highest levels of American power. When strategic interests conflict with children’s lives, children lose.
That same doctrine walked into the UN in 2021 and voted against food as a human right. The logic is seamless. The calculation is consistent. Human suffering is a variable in an equation where profit and power always win.
The Laboratory in Your Hometown
Now let me bring this home. Because the same ideology that starves children overseas operates in your local grocery store. The scale differs. The cruelty is identical.
Walk into any small-town grocery store in America. Watch what happens. Every week, they pile up produce that’s starting to turn. They slap markdown stickers on it for a “sale.” Most of it rots anyway. The waste is staggering — and it’s not accidental.
Here’s what I’ve witnessed in my own community: A store that marks down expired products — cheese past its date, meat turning gray — but when you check your receipt at home, you paid full price. They’re selling spoiled food at premium prices to people who can’t drive thirty miles to the next town for alternatives.
This isn’t incompetence. This is predation.
Small towns get hit hardest because there’s no competition. One store. One supplier. Captive customers. They leave expired products on shelves for weeks. They know people need to eat. They know there’s nowhere else to go. So they extract every dollar possible from food that should have been pulled days ago.
The grocery store managers aren’t making these decisions in isolation. They’re executing corporate playbooks designed in boardrooms a thousand miles away. Mark down old stock just enough to move some inventory, but never enough to actually help people. Keep staple prices high. Make the poor pay more for less.
America’s Mountain of Wasted Food
The numbers expose the obscenity of this system.
America throws away 80 billion pounds of food annually — roughly 40% of our entire food supply. That’s 219 pounds per person, per year, straight into the garbage. Meanwhile, 34 million Americans face food insecurity. Nine million of them are children.
We produce enough food to feed everyone twice over. The scarcity is manufactured.
Why? Because scarcity drives prices. Abundance threatens profits. The grocery chains, the distributors, the agricultural conglomerates — they all benefit from a system where food stays just out of reach for millions. They lobby against laws requiring donation of unsold food. They fight legislation penalizing waste. They ensure dumpsters stay locked and security cameras watch the loading docks.
The crime happens every night behind these stores. Dumpsters overflow with perfectly edible food. Bread one day past its sell-by date. Produce with minor blemishes. Canned goods approaching expiration. All thrown away — often doused with bleach or secured behind gates to prevent “theft.”
Because in America, taking discarded food from a dumpster is theft. But throwing away tons of food while people starve? That’s just business.
The Quiet Part Out Loud
The UN vote wasn’t about logistics or implementation. It was about principle. Do human beings have a fundamental right to food?
America’s no vote answered that question with brutal clarity: We don’t believe feeding people is a right. We believe it’s a privilege, reserved for those who can pay.
This is the same government that lectures the world about human rights. The same establishment claiming moral authority in international affairs. But when 180 nations stood for basic human dignity, America stood against it.
Why? Because recognizing food as a right would obligate action. It would require restructuring a system built on artificial scarcity. It would mean accountability for the waste, the exploitation, the calculated cruelty of letting food rot while people starve.
So they voted no. And they keep voting no — through policy, through practice, through every padlocked dumpster and every expired product sold to desperate customers with nowhere else to shop.
What Other Nations Have Already Solved
The solution isn’t complicated. Other countries figured it out years ago.
France banned supermarkets from throwing away unsold food. Italy followed. These laws require stores to donate to food banks or compost. Simple. Effective. Humane.
But in America, such legislation gets fought tooth and nail by industry lobbyists warning of dire consequences — as if feeding hungry people would somehow collapse the economy. As if basic human decency would bankrupt the nation that spends trillions on weapons systems.
The resistance isn’t about practicality. It’s about ideology. An ideology that treats human need as a market opportunity. An ideology that would rather destroy abundance than share it.
The Feature, Not the Bug
Here’s the hard truth you need to accept: Hunger is useful to the people who run this system.
It keeps wages low when workers are desperate. It maintains social hierarchies when access to basic needs depends on economic status. It creates dependency when charity replaces rights. Hunger isn’t a failure of American policy. It’s the point.
Every vote against food as a human right, every pound of food destroyed, every expired product sold to struggling families — they’re components of the same machine. A machine that extracts profit from human misery. A machine that measures success in shareholder value while children go to bed hungry.
The grocery store in your small town isn’t just failing its community. It’s executing policy. Policy that originates in Washington, flows through corporate boardrooms, and terminates in padlocked dumpsters and hungry families. Policy that says food is a commodity, not a right. Policy that Madeleine Albright would recognize instantly — where human suffering gets weighed against other priorities and found acceptable.
“I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
– Thomas Jefferson
The Constitutional Betrayal
The framework that’s supposed to protect Americans from this tyranny has been gutted from the inside.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness mean nothing if you’re too hungry to live, too poor to be free, too desperate to pursue anything beyond your next meal. But try explaining that to the think tanks and lobbyists shaping policy. Try explaining it to corporate boards that would rather destroy food than watch prices drop.
The disconnect between constitutional promise and daily reality has never been starker. We pledge allegiance to principles we refuse to practice. We claim rights we systematically deny. We celebrate freedom while thirty-four million Americans wonder where their next meal will come from.
What This Means for You
When your government votes against feeding people, when your stores throw away food while neighbors starve, when profit consistently defeats life itself — you’re not living in the democracy you were promised.
You’re living in something that measures human worth in dollars. Something that sees basic needs as leverage. Something that calculates acceptable death the same way Madeleine Albright calculated those Iraqi children — coldly, publicly, without apology.
The grocery store waste is the local version of global policy. The expired food sold to desperate customers is the small-town expression of the cruelty that starved half a million children overseas. It’s all connected. It’s all intentional. It’s all justified by the same lie.
The lie says some system, some strategy, some profit margin is worth more than human lives. That’s what America told the world with that UN vote. That’s what every wasted meal and every hungry child confirms.
The Only Question That Matters
The evidence is documented. The vote is recorded. The food is rotting in dumpsters behind stores where expired goods sell at full price to people with no alternatives.
The only question remaining is whether you’ll continue accepting a system that denies food as a human right while drowning in waste. Whether you’ll keep believing the propaganda about freedom and moral leadership while your neighbors go hungry. Whether you’ll recognize that the calculation killing children abroad is the same calculation squeezing your community dry.
Because every time you walk past that locked dumpster, every time you pay full price for marked-down expired food, every time you watch perfectly good produce get thrown away while families struggle — you’re witnessing doctrine in action.
The price, they think, is worth it.
They’ve made their calculation. Now you need to make yours.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
– Thomas Jefferson