Rats on a Sinking Ship

In today's NY Times the paper reports on the city's efforts to control its rat epidemic. The conclusion: "Instead of waiting for residents' complaints and responding with rat poison and baits, officials want to tackle the root cause of infestation. They hope to reduce the number of rats by curtailing the food supply..."

Well, what do do you know? The city is finally coming to the conclusion that the Alliance has been advocating for close to four years. Yet, in spite of this welcome epiphany, neither the Times or the city has seen fit to address the main issue that the Alliance has been in the forefront of: the use of commercial food waste disposers to eliminate the food supply that the vermin feed on.

Earlier in the year the council and the mayor had agreed essentially to postpone any pilot program for food waste for at least three years, effectively discarding it into the garbage. So, therefore, the major source of food waste, the organic garbage that is produced by the city's restaurants and food stores, will continue to be stored on premise where it is commingled with the food that is being prepared for sale or service to customers.

All of this footdragging is a result of bogus hysteria from so-called environmental groups who are evidently more concerned with the algae in the Jamaica Bay than they are with the disease bearing rodents in the city's low income (and increasingly all-income) neighborhoods. Clearly, in the thousands of words in today's Times story, the exclusion of the food waste disposers issue was a glaring omission.