The Harvest Thanksgiving Supply Chain

In an earlier blog I mentioned links between O.R. and Christianity. September and October are the months when (in the Northern Hemisphere's temperate regions) churches celebrate harvest thanksgiving. (Cue for the traditional harvest hymn: "We plough the fields and scatter, The good seed on the land, But it is fed and watered, By God's Almighty hand." You can tell that I am a Brit, because I spell plough without a "w".) Increasingly church services also give thanks for the makers and producers of food -- and at our service yesterday the preacher thanked God for the drivers of delivery trucks -- she almost used the words "supply chain", but the congregation would not have been familiar with that technical term.