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Free food. We throw away billions of pounds of food because if it doesn't sell, they toss it.
Literally nobody should ever go hungry.
We can't have this because companies see giving away products as lost profits, and politicians see it as some handout.
Making sure a struggling human eats a warm sandwich does not change the billionaire eating lobster truffle caviar.
Not just that the company doesn’t want to get sued
What are you really saying though?
Here charities do sell a lot of this food, where it's possible and viable to do so.
You can't sell food which is out of date because there's a high likelihood it will be harmful.
Yes, there is a lot of food waste, but IMO that's the inefficiency of logistics rather than greed or trust.
A lot of food is still safe to consume after it's expiration date, tho. I think in the US it's called 'best by' or sth like that, underlining that it isn't necessarily a hard expiration date, just that it tastes the best before this date.
And there are plenty of restaurants and catering companies that routinely just throw huge amounts of unsold/uneaten food away at the end of each business day.
Yeah but it's a legal liability problem.
Food isn't instantly poisonous as of the best by date, but producers will have insurance that covers them for medical costs if someone gets sick from their food.
Obviously, that insurer is not going to cover them if the stuff is sold (or distributed) after the best by date has expired.
Suppose your local grocery store starts a "best by" program and gives out the free food which is out of date. Some customer eats a free bread role which is a tiny bit stale but otherwise satisfying... and then eats a dead pigeon the find on the side of the road.
You can probably see the problem.
A major part of the "inefficiency of logistics" is caused by greed. It costs too much to distribute... because it doesn't make them enough money to do so.
Yes it costs money to distribute free food. Obviously no business is going to do that. That's not greed.
Yes, yes, "there's no such thing as a free lunch" amirite?
After all, we all get to see how all the other roughly 2.17 million (according to IUCN Red List) known species beyond Homo sapiens, from avians (and especially birds!) to fishes and whales and dolphins and wild felines and so on so forth, we all see them practicing the Rothbardian, Mises-ian, Rand-ian and Friedman-ian economic principles such as the Laissez-Faire~~tale~~ economy.
Two days ago I got the presence of Ms. Hootie, a Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) who visited me in my backyard and told me about her successful startup company, Ornithoracle Webservices Ltd. (unfortunately she's not hiring Senior DevOps positions yet, but I managed to connect with her "L🦉kedIn" (it's read "LOOkedIn", the LinkedIn for owls) so I'm now part of the talents database, looking forward for the brilliant future in which she decides to hire new talents to the nest she's planning for 2027 to expand her business to Gliese-581g). She has shown me her extensive portfolio of clients and her diversified stock papers (she invests in MICE, FRRT, OPSM, CRKT and other very yielding businesses; in fact she seems to love investing in MICE, as she keeps watching it to grab more of it the instant it's wandering anywhere low).
Capitalism is practically a fundamental part of Evolution here in this Pale Blue Dot! In fact, Ms Hootie also told me she heard capitalism is very trendy in Gliese-581g either (hence why she's planning to do business there), and that the Big Bang was the "initial market boom" where the first CEOs and shareholders popped up into existence and extend the glorious invisible hand of the Market throughout the cosmos (it's especially handful if you got a wallet full of stocks like Ms Hootie has).
/s
!asklemmy@lemmy.world
While some of the food waste is because of logistics, the majority of it is not, and one could argue that food shortages are because of logistics; they are one and the same.
When you have food deserts and grocery stores gauge how profitable they are by how much food they throw away, then it's more than "well the food went bad".
I agree that there is the liability argument to be made that no company wants to deal with regarding food. That's why they spend the effort to recall products when they find something wrong with them, en masse. That's why in places like Wal-Mart, responsible associates take damaged food products like dented cans and give them to claims to be proceeded. Because nobody deserves to buy that kind of stuff.
However, there should be a point where if a grocery store or Wal-Mart for example, know that food product isn't selling as fast as they thought or that they just aren't seeing sales for it. Then yeah, they could do something about that than just mindlessly tossing it, like they could strike deals with food banks and charities to give those out with the understanding that they are about to go bad soon.
I think this is pretty much what happens. That's how food banks get food.
it's not that simple.
food has lots of costs of transport, storage, etc, those all get saved when you toss unsellable product.
also if you give stuff away for free, the market price would collapse. people would just wait to get it for free and then never buy the fresh product.
the issue with what you are talking about, is that while a single business might do this, it doesn't scale.
unless you make food production and distribution a controlled market and that has a boatload of new problems.
It really is that simple and already happens at a modest scale in the US. Businesses that want to put their unsellable food to good use have many options to do so without taking on additional cost.
It's a large chunk of how food banks and shelters are supplied. There are also non profits dedicated to collecting edible food that would be thrown away otherwise and distributing them.
Right, almost like this outrage over 'wasted food' is nonsense. Because these things already exist and they are already at capacity.
I think you might have missed my point. It is a travesty that so much food still gets tossed when there are many avenues to avoid doing so.
Sure, public awareness about food rescue options could be better but it takes a few minutes of searching to find a local group that will come pick up the food.
is it a travesty when i toss most of the food from my garden because I can't eat 20 lbs of tomatoes in two weeks when they all come in?
there are many logistical factors you are not aware of that come into food waste. you just see the images of it and get outraged, without understand the context that often makes it necessary to do these things.
you can't just magically get tons of produce into the hands of hungry people without massive costs and distribution problems and legal liabilities. nothing in life is free and easy, especially growing and distributing massive quantities of food.
maybe you think it's a moral failing, but logistical limits exist and your ignorance of them doesn't mean farmers and such are morally depraved for not want to pay the costs of distributing their products when they are already taking losses.
'market price would collapse'
that's fucking retarded.
People prefer fresh food. People will pay more for it.
I have survived by dumpster diving, and I prefer to buy fresher food.
Nobody waiting for the handout of still edible but kinda sad food can afford the fresh shit, otherwise they would have bought it.
Market price, get the fuck outta here
Accessible media piracy has not caused people to stop paying for media. They buy new cars. They use meal delivery apps despite that they are many times more expensive than other ways of getting food. People would absolutely keep buying food even if they had the option to get everything they need at a food bank for free. The only effect might be somewhat reduced sales and lower profits, but there would still be a large consumer base that is willing to blow money on stuff like convenience and status.
Tossing food might make those listed costs disappear... if it's tossed, or rather never harvested or collected, at the source, like on a farm or tree. Wait no even then there's costs associated.
Just kidding, stopped reading at "market." That word's a near sure sign that someone's definitely swallowed a lot of somethin that ain't food.
cool, then why don't you work for free then? since the market and money are just all made up concepts that don't exist.
and clearly material reality has no limits or restrictions.
by the way, nobody is stopping you from giving away ever penny of your own to feed hungry people... but you aren't doing that... i wonder why...
Oh yeah, nobody ever volunteers for anything. Like the red cross. Or as firefighters. Or ten thousand other organizations that contribute to the common good, whereas your contribution seems to be 'more people should starve to death so the prices of these oranges don't tank'
Proposing an individual solve a systemic problem is disingenuous. They're saying that society could fix the problem if it cared to; we are choosing to let kids go hungry as a culture because it "costs too much," as if the starving child isn't a too-high cost that we're already paying.
They're saying that we need to reevaluate our society's social priorities, and you're saying they should give up everything themselves if they care so much— as if that would solve the systemic problem instead of creating another starving person.
systematic problems exist because of individual choices.
you are society. you are traffic, etc.
it's pathetic, lazy, and shitty to be like 'someone else should solve this problem, but i can't do anything about it'.
when you absolutely can. you can absolutely volunteer or donate to a food pantry.
instead of wringing your hands on the internet about this 'ideal world that should be' while you do nothing to contribute to it. because it's easy to sit on your ass and day dream. it's a lot harder to go do the boring unrewarding work of actually making the world a better place, because when you do that you quickly realized how insignificant you are and how the 'need' never ends.
further, if you want to talk about systematic issues of hunger, then you shoudl do that properly and in detail instead fo this high concept moralizing shit. you should actually get into the gritty of how food is produced, shipped, and the numbers involved, but oh no, that's WORK, that's difficult and scary. we can't do that.
The irony is half the idiots who think there should be no world hunger, also don't understand the implications for what that would require, like a massive expansion of resources, of monoculture, and factory farming. all of which have huge negative externalities.
but again, it's EASY to sit here and bitch and downvote and idealize and distort a complex reality into a feel good tag line. and it feels good.
understanding how our food supply worlds and the tradeoffs in how it's structured and the incentives for what things it produced an dhow they are distributed doesn't feel good. and further, hunger has little to do with any of that and a lot more to do with power and corruption. but hey, why understand any of that when you can just blame grocery stores and farms as selfish evil greedy devils or something, when most of our food supply is a product of government policy.
Bro, it's a asklemmy post.
You answer the question with words.
Who blamed grocery stores and farms? I said it was a SYSTEMIC issue, which implies the SYSTEM is to blame, and that we should change that.
Nobody said it'd be easy, just that it's worth doing despite all the FrEe MaRkEt bloviating.
But keep fighting those straw men, you're so good at it. Meanwhile, I think we can absolutely afford to feed everyone because it's demonstrably true.
For someone who started their spiel with "it's not so simple..." you sure throw out a lot of extremely simplistic suggestions and examples to try and prove your point. Irony.
Also, you think I work a "job"? I suppose in your small simple world anyone who doesn't clock in and clock out is either homeless or uber rich and successful. Amazing what capitalism can do to brains.
like convince weirdos on the internet they are superior beings because they think 'capitalism bad' when they don't understand how anything works in the real world? because it's complex and difficult and that hurts their feelings?
anyway, keep daydreaming if that what gets your rocks off.
Buddy, you think people you talk to have to have a high opinion of themself or something?
Pause the ad hominem train for one second even, lol, and maybe consider that most of us "weirdos" are perfectly satisfied just getting day to day with a clear conscience.
And please stop projecting I beg you it hurts both of us more you think 😵. Like do you actually think your juvenile attempts at vitriol isn't stuff I've seen 200,000 times, like 20 years ago? A w k w a r d.
If you actually care about other people even possibly considering what you have to say instead of just laughing at your monologues, try stating only constructive stuff (conservatives hate this one trick!).
i'm not projecting anything dude, do you even use this site?
like 50% of the comments on here are from angry basement dwellers who think the world should collapse and they fantasize about doing mass murder because they think they will the kings when the communist utopia begins.
no, i don't care about internet people's opinions about my comments. especially insane ones who get all angry and tell me how my logic is shit when they make the same logical mistakes in their own comments because they know nothing about how logic works or how it's supposed to be applied and they are only using it as a crude cudgel to feel like they 'owned' another person on the internet and they are SMARTER. when most of the time the shit they are talking abotu is objectively wrong and stupid.
i mean, don't get me wrong. when I was 14 and angry at the world I was a communist too. The difference Is I grew up and decided to take responsibility for myself and stop blaming others. and then i got to watch all my friends fail at life because they refused to make that change that I actively made.
You sure hate mondays, huh?