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Comment by MaysonL | Hacker News Reader

> food scarcity

How much food rotted at the Texas border after Governor Abbott's PR stunt held it up? Estimated to be over $4Billion.

>How much food rotted at the Texas border after Governor Abbott's PR stunt held it up? Estimated to be over $4Billion.

First, I'm skeptical about $4 billion. That's a lot of food.

Second, what is with the need to bring up something or someone irrelevant as a rebuttal every time there's even a tangential criticism of the current powers-that-be?

Because they have no actual rebuttal.

>How much food rotted at the Texas border after Governor Abbott's PR stunt held it up? Estimated to be over $4Billion.

https://medium.com/the-haven/texas-gov-abbotts-racist-border...

This article says $240 million and he reversed the policy? So it's not an ongoing issue?

Also if food is 'rotting' because he is sitting in a truck for perhaps a day longer? Perhaps it was rotting before?

What I’ve read is: Refrigerated trucks only have so much fuel to maintain the coolers. Typically, this is enough fuel for a standard haul, but forcing the trucks to stand motionless in the heat leads to the coolers running out of fuel and the food spoiling in the heat. Keep in mind that food safety regulations has specific guidelines for time/temp that may not align with a common expectation for “spoiled”.

Something about that $4 Billion figure seems exaggerated, intangible, or simply an on-paper calculation. Assuming a truck carrying food is 6 hours late, how much spoilage does that actually cause? Would a pileup on an interstate causing an hours long delay likewise have its "impact" calculated to be in the tens of millions?

I haven’t seen a $4 billion number, $9 billion is the total trade. $240 million is the estimate lost due to spoilage, and the longest waiting time looks to have been 30 hours: https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-gov-greg-abbott-truck-...

I don't know about fruit, but nuts like pistachios will spoil after 12 hours in a truck. You have a finite time before picking and processing before they rot, and a tractor trailer is about the worst environment as the the load can cook itself from the waste heat of biological activity in a large poorly ventilated volume.

"food rotted" today != future "food scarcity"

Abbott wouldn't be doing things like that if the Federal Government would do it's job.

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