How the heck would anyone sell two 80,000 lb truck loads of nuts? It shouldn’t be hard to find a guy parked on the highway with a big sign. It would take a week out there working non-stop to sell one truck load.
Walnuts 25 cents a pound.
http://www2.tbo.com/news/breaking-news/2012/oct/29/300000-truckload-of-walnuts-stolen-between-califor-ar-548353/
Blame the squirrels.
Someone’s planning on some major Christmas baking!
StG
Another man’s nuts stolen right off the stem err branch. 
Hey, man, I’ve got baking to do.
Psst! Hey buddy! Wanna buy some nuts?
Imagine how many fruit cakes 80,000 lbs of nuts would make. 
Don’t you mean ‘Stealing a man’s nuts is just nuts’?
As my grandpaw always used to say:
“We are gonna need a bigger nutsack”
I think the bigger question is, how can you pack 80,000 lbs of walnuts into a truck and still have it be road-legal? Florida is not Michigan.
Methinks there was a misunderstanding here somewhere.
I’m also thinking that 80,000 lbs of walnuts would take up a huge volume, especially if they were still in the shell (likely).
Anyone have any walnuts nearby to weigh and figure out just how many walnuts 80,000 lbs would be, and then figure out the volume it would take to hold 80,000 lbs of walnuts?
I found a value of 4.41 lbs/gallon for the density of dry black walnuts.
For 80,000 lbs of walnuts that comes out to nearly 70 cubic meters of nuts. That sounds large to me, but not impossible for a semi-truck full of nuts.
I might be way off though. Source online said Semis have a volume of over 100 cubic meters so I think it checks out.
Now whether it’s legal or not, I have no idea.
I’d imagine the walnuts are in 50lb or 75lb bags. Takes a bit more space in the truck than just pouring the walnuts in. But, I’d expect 80,000 lbs would fit.
Heck, I usually buy a couple pounds at kroger. Even if the criminals packaged them up in 10 lb bags that would be 8,000 sales transactions per truck. I can’t see anyone selling all of them before they went bad.
I sense a conspiracy here…
Clearly, there must be a black market for bakery goods somewhere. Do we *know *that there was really a drought in the Midwest or has someone just made off with all the flour products? Oh, sure they tell us that farmers have sold off their dairy cows… but maybe they’re diverting the outputs to this underground economy.
OMG! Don’t tell anyone, but I have walnut maple logs in my kitchen!
Clearly, it is an international crime organization:
A STOLEN tanker carrying 22,000 litres of milk has been intercepted following a 200km two-hour police pursuit this morning. (Aug 2012 - http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/two-men-arrested-after-two-hour-pursuit/story-e6frf7kx-1226453069944 )
It looks like they’re counting 40,000 pounds per truckload (two loads have disappeared).
How many nuts do a man need?
I don’t see the mystery here. If there were trucks carrying that many walnuts then obviously there are buyers in this world for that quantity of walnuts, or enough purchasers for smaller quantities to enable them to be sold at one or a few destinations. The intended buyers were probably commercial bakeries or businesses that repackage them for retail sale.
Unless we assume that the intended buyer or buyers were the only existing ones in the country then other such buyers can be found. If you fudge the paperwork and make the price low enough there are probably enough people who will look the other way that you can make a profit off of free walnuts. You don’t even have to sell every last pound to make a profit since you didn’t pay anything.
It could even be that some commercial bakery teetering on bankruptcy had them stolen for direct use rather than resale.
I don’t like walnuts in my fudge.