Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

380 SOCIAL INDIGNATION
no moral feelings about the technical aids used in the production of the
goods-the tools, that is, of prosperity. . . . 4
I have, however, observed certain inhibitions about the junking of
obsolete industrial products. But let us return to bread. What really
underlies this 'intact moral survival'? Exactly five years after the publication
of the article quoted, the front page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung carried a leading article by Nikolas Benckiser entitled 'Bread in
the Dustbin.' He, too, ponders upon what he calls a short-sighted
passion, but takes the analysis one step further:
How, as a person of sensibility, in the face of the mountains of available
grain, meat, fruit and vegetables . . . could one fail to think of
all the starving millions. . . . Yet these goods are left to rot, and are
even systematically destroyed. And then come the inevitable indignant
remarks such as: A society that tolerates want anywhere is not worthy of
existence ....
Benckiser then proves to these agitated critics how difficult and even
impossible it is, if only for reasons of transport, so to distribute a local
food surplus throughout the rest of the world as to waste nothing at all.
(He could also have culled many examples from what happened in the
case of development aid. If it proves impossible to deal rationally with
the forwarding of materials such as cement, wood and steel, not to speak
of machinery, after arrival at the ports of the developing countries, what
would happen to perishable foodstuffs?)
Benckiser states the moral dilemma in microcosmic terms: in the
average household's dustbin remains of food may often be found which
could, in theory, fill some other person's empty stomach (whether he
would accept it is another question). How would this person feel on
seeing food in the dustbin?
He wouldn't like it. He would think, 'Give us this day our daily bread';
there is always something sinful about throwing away bread, which is at
once a symbol and a staple. And again, one is aware that in the same city,
only a few streets away . . . there are people to whom the few pennies that
food would have cost before it went bad would really mean something.
4 Stuttgarter Zeitung, October 17, 1959, p. 3.