A Lot of Rutabagas

In light of the continuing stormy financial weather, this article bounced to me from the SBS website provided more than a little food for thought. It’s more than a little astounding that we can come up with $700 billion just-like-that to support the global financial system when you consider what else could be done with that kind of money.

Basically, that’s a lot of rutabagas.

$700 billion would buy 2,000 McDonald’s Apple Pies for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Or, if you want to take the culinary high road, 31 pounds of foie gras (we’d have to buy the world’s production for 197 years to get there, though). Or 11 pounds of black truffles (if we got all of those truffles from France, we’d have to buy all of their annual production for three years, so maybe that’s more reasonable than the foie gras.)

At one of those hyper-food restaurants you read about occasionally, where they serve the results of “molecular cuisine,” we could take the entire population of the world’s five most populous nations out to a really fancy dinner.

For a more plebian approach, $700 billion would buy 350 billion pounds of certified organic rutabagas from Rock Spring Farm, at retail prices. That’s a heaping 20-bushel bin (the ones you see watermelons in at the grocery store) for everybody in the United States. Or, it’s enough rutabagas to stretch to the moon and back 92 times.

Don’t even get me started on beets.

On the other end of things, the UN’s World Food Program used about $3 billion to help feed 86.1 million people in 2007, about one tenth of the 850 million undernourished people on this planet. Based on those numbers, and assuming everything else stays the same, 700 billion dollars would feed all of the world’s hungry for the next 23 years.