how much food gets thrown away just because it isn’t picturesque?
I’ve tried growing tomatoes, and bub let me tell you, they look nothing like the pristine samples you find in grocery stores
We should be intercepting the landfill
I hate it here. We have answers to all of life’s problems, and yet we humans continue to choose the hard way.
Because the rich will lose profits, greed is the corruption we deal with. Enough is never enough.
https://www.misfitsmarket.com/
Buy food that was rejected because of its appearance. It’s super cheap, it slows food waste, and it helps out a small company.
Capitalism working as designed
What’s also weird is that if you want to get rid of perfectly good things nobody wants it or anyplace that might be able to use it makes it prohibitively difficult to get it to them. Got a functional fridge? Sure, you haul it out of your house, rent a truck, take it to the receiver - oh, and it can’t be more than 10 years old.
I find these posts that complain about waste kinda performative. While they’re not wrong, they ignore the logistical issues, both deliberate and indirect, of getting those things to the people that actually need them.
FWIW I’ve found that putting a “curb alert” for free good items with pictures and a location works pretty well. Some industrious person will usually pick something decent up 75% of the time.
These thimble deep hot takes are annoying.
Is there waste in the system… Yeah. It’s also worth noting there has never been a zero waste supply chain or distribution system under any economic system or government.
Centrallia PA had a lot of vacant houses for years. 500+ over about 4 decades. Nobody seemed to want them on account of the giant underground coal fire randomly collapsing the terrain and spewing toxic gasses. What a waste of good housing am I right?
Or check out some of the offerings around Amboy CA. You can get a vacant house and 5 acres in twenty nine palms for 18 grand.
https://www.trulia.com/home/78701-ramona-dr-twentynine-palms-ca-92277-299170461
These reactionary takes are annoying.
We can do better and make new systems that have less waste and benefit more people equally.
Great. So do it. Don’t talk about it be about it.
But that’s not what this meme is about. Spouting context free statistics to pretend there’s an evil conspiracy is just tin foil hat shit that serves no one.
I’d love it if I could always find someone who wants to finish the last half of my fried rice before it dries out in the fridge, but a food bank won’t take half eaten food. The distribution system exists, the soon to be wasted food has a willing donor. But there are practical limitations that generate millions of pounds of wasted food that have no basis in greed or Ill will.
This is a moral superiority circle jerk. “Look at us. We get it. Waste bad. Efficiency good. Helping others good.” Groundbreaking shit. It’s a shame no one’s thought of this before.
Which people do you want to put in what a vacant home? Who gets to decide? How do we relocate them? Do they have a say in this? What do they do once they’re there? What do we do if they won’t relocate? Show me a reasonable policy document you want passed that addresses any of this shit… I’ll personally write my congressman and senator about it. I’ll donate time and money to the cause.
There isn’t an evil conspiracy, there is capitalism.
Yes. And socialism. And communism. And feudalism.
Instead of doing the captain obvious bit, point me towards the -ism that fixes inefficiency, food spoilage, lopsided real estate demand, while respecting basic human rights and public safety. Cuz I’m in.
Hold the memes and show me the solution.
Anarchism.
If you don’t want to learn about it from memes, go do some hard reading. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index
Anarchism
“I’m twelve and this is deep” kind of take.
“I’m a dumbarse and don’t know what anarchism is” kind of take.
See how easy it would have been to start there?
There are vacant homes so if there was anarchy… People would identify and relocate to those vacant homes… By some means.
Or “if it wasn’t for this damned government, I wouldn’t be throwing away carrot skins and old leftovers, I’d be making vegetable stock and unregulated penicillin with them”.
More like if it wasn’t for this system, we wouldn’t be wasting 300,000 potatoes to make packets of chips that went into the bin when they didn’t sell compared to the more advertised brand.
More like if it wasn’t for this system, my toaster wouldn’t conveniently break 2 weeks out of warranty, and I would have a right to repair it myself.
More like if it wasn’t for this system this empty house with squatters wouldn’t be evicted and left empty again.
Read a book
So that’s a “no” on having any answers. We’re just going to do “capitalism bad. And no one starved outside of capitalism”. It’s okay.
The funny part is I’m not taking a pro capitalism stance. I’m not fighting you on this. I’ll accept your premise. Let’s hear the solution. You can solve the world’s problems no sense keeping it to yourself.
“Nobody has answers” is fucking lauguable, your voluntary ignorance is rhetorically worthless and shameful
Because the two thousand child raping and killing men who rule over us have deemed it so
We produce enough food to feed everyone, it’s just that it’s not profitable to do so because the rich are greedy ghouls.
The liars who pushed “there isn’t enough for everyone” aren’t pushing it much anymore. They’ve moved on to saying “not everyone deserves basic human needs”—which is what they really thought all along.
If you cannot pay for it, you don’t deserve it. The basic tenet of capitalism.
are you posting that though in a quote fashion or somewhat sarcastic or do you actually believe it?
Yes.
It’s sarcasm
Name a place you can exist in the capitalist Dreamland of the USA without paying money to do so?
In your eyes, is the USA the only capitalist country in the world, or just the only one you hate?
Because ……
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/capitalist-countries
The Library!
i dont think i can. whats your point?
Ecofascism is really about the fascism part at the end of the day.
What? I haven’t seen any ecofascists. The fascists are yet to give a fuck about ecology and climate. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism
Eco-fascists have been around for yonks. 90% of the time you hear people utter shit like ‘there’s too many people, we need a plague to cure the planet’ that’s an ecofash.
More like: There’s too many brown people, we need a plague to cure the planet.
Funny how they’re never willing to sacrifice themselves/their family/friends/community though. It’s always others who must die in order to
make lebensraumsave the planet.
Capitalism depends on violence and deprivation to keep labor desperate and exploitable.
The abundence argument seems written by people who do not produce anything.
I don’t think abundence arguments help the left. I raise fruit. I lose fruit to animals and weather. There is variability in the amount of fruit I produce. I often produce more than I can consume, but the logistics of getting the fruit to someone else doesn’t work out and the fruit rots. Some years I lose my fruit blossoms to frost.
I have family that work potatoes for a commercial operation. There were a bunch of potatoes that were too big to sell commercially. The operation left the potatoes to rot in the field. My relative bagged potatoes and brought them to family in the old gift economy fashion.
What is the abundence economy argument really about? Are you going to buy bird pecked fruit or C’thulu looking potatoes? Country folk trim off the bad spots. City folk often haven’t gotten their hands dirty.
I’m all for anarchy and communism. That means doing some real work and not just reaping the surpluses of capitalism. Chop some wood, it’ll do you good and be a good neighbor.
Yeah, you want waste in the food system.
If you don’t have waste in a good year, you’ll have famine in a bad year.
I have read some more comments. Looks like food pantries are mentioned which is further down the supply chain. Yes, canning and nitrogen warehouses exists. That is more infrastructure. I would assume all land and infrastructure is ideally community owned and operated.
Abundance is just centrist rebranding of trickledown.
The storage unit business is still booming, growing at over 7% annually in NA.
We have so much shit we have to rent units offsite to store our shit.and there are legit hoarders, i know someone that is.
And that’s happening at the same time that the square footage per capita has increased dramatically. Not only are houses bigger now, but household size (number of people living in each house) has shrunk too. That’s how much shit we got.
Is this happening in rural areas? I feel like in cities and suburbs there are more people living in a household. Like roommates or multiple families, because of how expensive housing is.
The weird part is that the rest of us don’t simply devour those who are perpetuating this evil on almost everyone else.
Why doesn’t Ross, the largest friend, simply devour the others!?
I agree about the furniture, electronics and housing part. But food gets spoiled rather rapidly unfortunately. Any effort to give food away to those in need would have to move the goods quick enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation
We’ve had this technology for a fucking century now, food waste could easily be drastically reduced, this shit is on purpose
Any effort to give food away to those in need would have to move the goods quick enough.
Having volunteered at a local food bank I can confidently say that it is absolutely possible to do. And not even that difficult, assuming there is a genuine will to do it.
Annoyingly, there are still far too many companies in the food supply chain whose mindset is that they would rather trash something than allow it to get into the hands of people who need it without them paying for it.
Stuff was tried and is being tried. For example, in my country, local supermarkets are giving away food that’s close to due date at a discount (mostly it’s 50%). It’s an easy way of buying food for cheap.
We have long life food, it still goes into the bin at your local supermarket.
Food insecurity is a capitalism problem. We can supply logistics to anywhere in the world if we want. We have more than enough to feed everyone. We don’t because profit is the motivation not humanity.
Logistically it’s a nightmare, but local food offerings in supermarkets and farmers markets are useful in reducing resources usage.
Logistically a nightmare like having a “last chance” area where homeless and poor people can just take it before it gets thrown in the dumpster? Like, literally just allowing a space?
We put more effort into denying homeless people a place to exist than it would take to enable them to exist.
I know when I say “enable” people will immediately conflate that to “encourage”, but we’ve tried for decades to be as ruthless and unkind to homeless people and the numbers haven’t exactly plummeted.
I completely agree. Things like anti homeless architecture, shelter quality and the housing voucher system (and consequent rent gauging) are obscene.
Ending homelessness would take way way less money than the current system, but the capitalist elites need a threat to barely making ends meet workers so they don’t have time or energy to worry about their neighbor.
If it is something for the homeless people inside the same city, it’s fine. However, I was thinking about the scenario where food would get transported from the richer parts of the world to the poorer parts of the world. In that case, I do not see the viability of a “last chance” - part of the food would still get spoiled and thrown away, unless you want to feed the poor some spoiled food.
I’d rather see more people educated not to buy too much food in the first place, then direct the remaining to the poor (and even, if possible, produce less in the 1st place. Have fewer cows, less agricultural land and more wild terrain (forests and the likes) if possible).
Oh, for sure transporting food across the world is a disastrously inefficient way to solve it.
I may be wrong about this, but I dont think there are many (if any) food-poor countries that are that way because of a lack of local fertile land.
I don’t think waste and excess are really the issue, but rather misallocation of resources, like you mentioned, raising cattle (or growing coffee/cocoa) over primary foods for profit over basic needs.
Something-something-communism, I suppose.
Logistically it’s not a nightmare. We already do it, we get crops grown in country A, shipped to country B to be processed before shipping them off to country C to sell. We could easily work out to send less to C and more to D, if we wanted to.
It’s a capitalist choice to not supply everyone.
Logistically, ie making sure the food is still fresh or good Legally (as in the US it’s illegal to give food to the homeless in some places) There are some CSR initiatives from supermarkets like Lidl but in a capitalist society it’s just not profitable for the supply chain. Maybe a nightmare is too dramatic, but highly improbable in current society as it stands.
That’s true
