Page 92 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

The Vorax

that sealed, packaged food to local homeless shelters and soup
kitchens; the still-edible food would be consumed within days, the
donors would refresh their emergency supplies, salve their
consciences and receive a financial incentive.
Avery figured that once he got the program going and everyone
saw its mutual benefits at work, the city fathers would buy him out
and run the enterprise as a public program. I guess it could have
played out that way, a perfectly transparent series of transactions
recycling goods for the good of all; but he failed to take one factor
into account: corporate greed. No sooner had he committed his
funds and gotten some official support then he found himself up
against a formidable combine: the supermarkets and big food
manufacturers. They realized that ultimately discarded out-of-date
food represented a significant, although small, percentage of their
business—in the same way postal services profited from stamps sold
to collectors and never used. Established charities already effectively
purchased the same range of products—some as donations from
shoppers paying retail and donating them at the point of sale, some
as cheaper overstocks—again a source of revenue for powerful
players unwilling to be diminished by so simple a strategy as Avery’s.
No doubt, if automobile manufacturers could prevent the sale of
used cars by private parties, they would do so. The last and largest
links in the food chain were not about to let a similar percentage of
their trade slip out of their hands. They exerted pressure on
Goodman’s “official support,” finding legal arguments that his
arrangements would be an unlicensed “sale” (based on quid pro quo)
and violated abstruse sections of the tax code; that put an end to his
scheme and his bank account.
Embittered, he dropped out of sight for years, returning in a
reduced capacity to Chimeratech. No longer a rising star in the field,
he did the grunt work by day for younger researchers, staying late at
night to continue refining his own designs. He had not lost
confidence in his abilities, nor had he abandoned his dream of a
universal, cross-cultural technological fix for poverty and
malnutrition. His employer provided both the inspiration and
facilities for concocting his subsequent inventions. Chimeratech, as
its name implied, specialized in creating modified flora and fauna for
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