The Traditional Dorito Harvest on North Carolina Beaches
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12. 1.06
Everyone is excited when the Dorito season approaches. Children just want to be out there as the ocean bountifully provides, running through the sand, picking up Doritos just in time for the holidays, to export round the country for everyone's pleasure. It reminds us of the Spaghetti Harvest but the back story is far more significant. Containers drop off ships every day, and their contents are not always so edible or easy to pick up as this load of Doritos. A few years ago there was a big story about a container full of rubber duckies going overboard and a scientist tracking the duckies progress to Alaska; again cute and cuddly, but not typical. For every container with duckies or doritos there are ten or a hundred with stuff we don't want dumped into our oceans.Unfortunately it happens in international waters, the insurance companies pay up and nobody monitors it. The oceans are big so who cares?
if only a container of salsa would 'accidentally' dump, the world would be in harmony.
Lloyd strikes again! :)
In the Pacific Ocean, a significant amount of the stuff that doesn't wash on shore seems to end up in two massive "garbage patches", as described by the LA Times in their "Altered Oceans" series (link: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-oceans-series,0,7842752.special or http://tinyurl.com/hql49 ). Once there, some of it deteriorates into pieces small enough to be mistaken as food by birds, turtles and other sea life.
You mean Doritos eventually break down into something that can be mistaken for food? That is good news!
Dang, where the hails that beach.
Readin' this here post has gimme the munchies...