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The article seems to assume that food that is now wasted by consumers would instead be distributed to needy folks. I don't see why this is the case. From a busi

The article seems to assume that food that is now wasted by consumers would instead be distributed to needy folks. I don't see why this is the case. From a business perspective, why do food producers care whether the food they sell is eaten or thrown away? It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of business. Then again, maybe this is why I'm an engineer, not a businessperson.

fennecfoxen 10y ago
> It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of business. No, a widespread shift to selling food which would otherwise be turned into waste would represent an increased supply of edible foodstuffs, reducing prices across the entire food-market, making it less profitable for any one farmer to produce one unit of food, and probably increasing the quantity of food consumed in worldwide markets (depending on the precise elasticities of supply and of demand involved - and it doesn't have to be the same food that was rescued, if vegetables get cheaper people can eat less vegetables than bread and grain farmers can export the grain. Or they can pickle or freeze the vegetables for future consumption. And some farmers could switch crops. There's a lot of options.) That's Economics 150. (No, I had it as Economics 150, not 101.) But an individual food seller is already incentivized to reclaim and sell as much would-be food-waste as possible before it becomes unprofitable to do so: it is likely cheaper for the food owner to dump food than to turn the would-be waste into food somewhere else. (Historically, food recycling of last resort would probably have taken the form of feeding it to local hogs or turning it into compost, but shifts in population and farming patterns have moved the farms away from the food consumption centers where the waste takes place.)

fennecfoxen 10y ago

> It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of business. No, a widespread shift to selling food which would otherwise be turned into waste would represent an increased supply of edible foodstuffs, reducing prices across the entire food-market, making it less profitable for any one farmer to produce one unit of food, and probably increasing the quantity of food consumed in worldwide markets (depending on the precise elasticities of supply and of demand involved - and it doesn't have to be the same food that was rescued, if vegetables get cheaper people can eat less vegetables than bread and grain farmers can export the grain. Or they can pickle or freeze the vegetables for future consumption. And some farmers could switch crops. There's a lot of options.) That's Economics 150. (No, I had it as Economics 150, not 101.) But an individual food seller is already incentivized to reclaim and sell as much would-be food-waste as possible before it becomes unprofitable to do so: it is likely cheaper for the food owner to dump food than to turn the would-be waste into food somewhere else. (Historically, food recycling of last resort would probably have taken the form of feeding it to local hogs or turning it into compost, but shifts in population and farming patterns have moved the farms away from the food consumption centers where the waste takes place.)