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"Our venture, and ventures like ours, which rely on redistributing food waste, cannot succeed if people waste less food. So please waste more food." Talk about

"Our venture, and ventures like ours, which rely on redistributing food waste, cannot succeed if people waste less food. So please waste more food." Talk about putting the cart before the horse. I have no problem with saying, "that food isn't really waste, let's redistribute it if it's going unused." But someone's got their head turned right around if they think that a logical corollary is, "and that food should never be used, because we're redistributing it."

hackinthebochs 8y ago
>that food isn't really waste, let's redistribute it if it's going unused. But this is exactly what I got from the article, that the supposed wasted food isn't being wasted. And so the consumer activism behind the appeal of these products is misplaced.
- arkades 8y ago
  “Food waste” means, specifically, food that went unsold because a market couldn’t be found for it. Donating something rather than throwing it out is how these venture began. If you can find a market for it, its not waste.
  - xg15 8y ago
    I think the problem was more with the inverse claim - that everything you can not find a market for were automatically waste.
    - jimmywanger 8y ago
      It's waste for the producer. If you stop giving a reason for producers to produce goods, the goods stop being made.
      - tivert 8y ago
        > It's waste for the producer. If you stop giving a reason for producers to produce goods, the goods stop being made. Not in this case: we're talking about growers not manufacturers. A farmer can't tell his beet not to grow in unaesthetic shapes at scale. If he wants to produce X tons of produce, Y% will be edible but "ugly," and there's not a lot he can do about it (absent an uneconomic increase in costs or some fantasy bit of genetic engineering).
        beat 8y ago
        Yes, but in our imaginary world of perfect capitalism, the inherent market flaw is that farmers should simply stop growing ugly vegetables, and only grow beautiful ones. Problem solved!
        NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        That seems to be the contract model supermarkets operate with. Of course if supermarkets still took "ugly" produce it would sell just fine. Just like it does at the local greengrocers.
        beat 8y ago
        There are already good markets for a lot of ugly produce. They wind up in a lot of prepared foods. Good example - baby carrots. They're not "baby carrots", they're lathed-down cores of regular carrots that had the misfortune of being ugly - crooked, lumpy, or broken. And the stuff that gets shaved off in the lathe? It winds up carrot juice, or stock, or animal feed, or any number of other things. Another example of reducing waste, though not ugly... one of our local co-ops recently started selling "pulled chicken" fresh in plastic containers, great for making dinner. Where does it come from? Their rotisserie chickens that don't sell by the end of the day. They reduce waste and get a valuable new product. (My daughter was raving about it while cooking dinner the other day - stripping chicken carcasses is one of her least-favorite bits of kitchen labor, and she's happy to be able to buy what someone else did for her already.)
        jimmywanger 8y ago
394549 8y ago
> Talk about putting the cart before the horse. I have no problem with saying, "that food isn't really waste, let's redistribute it if it's going unused." But someone's got their head turned right around if they think that a logical corollary is, "and that food should never be used, because we're redistributing it." No, I think you're the one who has it wrong. Previously, the "ugly produce" wasn't food waste because it was distributed to the needy through food banks and other social uses. The problem is that the "imperfect produce" startup used a glitzy marketing campaign to turn that produce into a marketable commodity, redirecting it from social uses to profit-making uses, making the poor worse off to benefit some VCs and midsize-to-large agribusiness companies. To add insult to injury, the marketing tries to pass off the profit-making use as a social one.
- jessedhillon 8y ago
  Here's a thought experiment for you: suppose that farming technology had developed which allows every fruit and vegetable grown to be "pretty" and saleable. Would it be immoral for farmers to stop producing "ugly" produce in that world? If so, I think your argument is with capitalism, and not any one actor. If not, what's the difference here?
MrEldritch 8y ago
I think there's a way to think about this that does actually make sense... "As long as people are only willing to buy pretty produce, then because actual produce inherently contains only a certain fraction of pretty produce, a demand for pretty produce inherently creates a surplus of ugly produce which can then be redistributed. In effect, every purchase of pretty produce hides an invisible tax which goes to buying ugly produce for the homeless. If paying customers no longer demand pretty produce, then stores will be able to only order as much produce as they need for paying customers, and the ugly-food surplus - that virtual tax on produce customers - will disappear. So, in effect, the ugly produce movement is the equivalent of advocating for a repeal of a tax on produce purchases which is used to buy produce for the poor." And phrased that way - "do you support or wish to abolish the produce tax and the social program based on it" - it becomes a political issue which one can reasonably have opinions supporting the tax on the basis that it helps the poor. Especially as this tax and feed-the-poor social program has been created without government intervention or regulation - they're an emergent product of unforced consumer preferences, and there's no administrative overhead involved in keeping track of the taxes and organizing food purchases because it's just an automatic consequence of spending money to buy produce.
- freetime2 8y ago
  This is an interesting way to frame the issue! However, your point about there being no overhead to organize food purchases seems dubious to me. Charities have overhead costs, too. And even if a food bank were run entirely by volunteers at no monetary cost to the public, there is a social cost in terms of the time the volunteers are donating. Furthermore, I suspect that the improper valuation of “ugly” produce leads to other sources of waste. Sure - some percentage of it makes its way to food banks. But how much of it is left to spoil or used to feed livestock?

hackinthebochs 8y ago

>that food isn't really waste, let's redistribute it if it's going unused. But this is exactly what I got from the article, that the supposed wasted food isn't being wasted. And so the consumer activism behind the appeal of these products is misplaced.

arkades 8y ago
“Food waste” means, specifically, food that went unsold because a market couldn’t be found for it. Donating something rather than throwing it out is how these venture began. If you can find a market for it, its not waste.
- xg15 8y ago
  I think the problem was more with the inverse claim - that everything you can not find a market for were automatically waste.
  - jimmywanger 8y ago
    It's waste for the producer. If you stop giving a reason for producers to produce goods, the goods stop being made.
    - tivert 8y ago
      > It's waste for the producer. If you stop giving a reason for producers to produce goods, the goods stop being made. Not in this case: we're talking about growers not manufacturers. A farmer can't tell his beet not to grow in unaesthetic shapes at scale. If he wants to produce X tons of produce, Y% will be edible but "ugly," and there's not a lot he can do about it (absent an uneconomic increase in costs or some fantasy bit of genetic engineering).
      - beat 8y ago
        Yes, but in our imaginary world of perfect capitalism, the inherent market flaw is that farmers should simply stop growing ugly vegetables, and only grow beautiful ones. Problem solved!
        NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        That seems to be the contract model supermarkets operate with. Of course if supermarkets still took "ugly" produce it would sell just fine. Just like it does at the local greengrocers.
        beat 8y ago
        There are already good markets for a lot of ugly produce. They wind up in a lot of prepared foods. Good example - baby carrots. They're not "baby carrots", they're lathed-down cores of regular carrots that had the misfortune of being ugly - crooked, lumpy, or broken. And the stuff that gets shaved off in the lathe? It winds up carrot juice, or stock, or animal feed, or any number of other things. Another example of reducing waste, though not ugly... one of our local co-ops recently started selling "pulled chicken" fresh in plastic containers, great for making dinner. Where does it come from? Their rotisserie chickens that don't sell by the end of the day. They reduce waste and get a valuable new product. (My daughter was raving about it while cooking dinner the other day - stripping chicken carcasses is one of her least-favorite bits of kitchen labor, and she's happy to be able to buy what someone else did for her already.)
      - jimmywanger 8y ago

394549 8y ago

> Talk about putting the cart before the horse. I have no problem with saying, "that food isn't really waste, let's redistribute it if it's going unused." But someone's got their head turned right around if they think that a logical corollary is, "and that food should never be used, because we're redistributing it." No, I think you're the one who has it wrong. Previously, the "ugly produce" wasn't food waste because it was distributed to the needy through food banks and other social uses. The problem is that the "imperfect produce" startup used a glitzy marketing campaign to turn that produce into a marketable commodity, redirecting it from social uses to profit-making uses, making the poor worse off to benefit some VCs and midsize-to-large agribusiness companies. To add insult to injury, the marketing tries to pass off the profit-making use as a social one.

jessedhillon 8y ago
Here's a thought experiment for you: suppose that farming technology had developed which allows every fruit and vegetable grown to be "pretty" and saleable. Would it be immoral for farmers to stop producing "ugly" produce in that world? If so, I think your argument is with capitalism, and not any one actor. If not, what's the difference here?

MrEldritch 8y ago

I think there's a way to think about this that does actually make sense... "As long as people are only willing to buy pretty produce, then because actual produce inherently contains only a certain fraction of pretty produce, a demand for pretty produce inherently creates a surplus of ugly produce which can then be redistributed. In effect, every purchase of pretty produce hides an invisible tax which goes to buying ugly produce for the homeless. If paying customers no longer demand pretty produce, then stores will be able to only order as much produce as they need for paying customers, and the ugly-food surplus - that virtual tax on produce customers - will disappear. So, in effect, the ugly produce movement is the equivalent of advocating for a repeal of a tax on produce purchases which is used to buy produce for the poor." And phrased that way - "do you support or wish to abolish the produce tax and the social program based on it" - it becomes a political issue which one can reasonably have opinions supporting the tax on the basis that it helps the poor. Especially as this tax and feed-the-poor social program has been created without government intervention or regulation - they're an emergent product of unforced consumer preferences, and there's no administrative overhead involved in keeping track of the taxes and organizing food purchases because it's just an automatic consequence of spending money to buy produce.

freetime2 8y ago
This is an interesting way to frame the issue! However, your point about there being no overhead to organize food purchases seems dubious to me. Charities have overhead costs, too. And even if a food bank were run entirely by volunteers at no monetary cost to the public, there is a social cost in terms of the time the volunteers are donating. Furthermore, I suspect that the improper valuation of “ugly” produce leads to other sources of waste. Sure - some percentage of it makes its way to food banks. But how much of it is left to spoil or used to feed livestock?