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> conscientious people who think they are helping farmers But they are helping farmers, they are giving them money they otherwise would not have gotten. Why sh

• bunderbunder 8y ago
  That one seems arguable to me. They are probably getting their food either from larger farmers, or from wholesalers. The rate at which most people consume food is relatively constant, and it's a fair bet that people in these services' target market are more likely than most to get a lot of produce from smaller farmers at farmer's markets. Meaning that it kind of depends on what you mean by "helping farmers". If you narrowly mean increasing the income of some set of farmers, yeah, sure. If you implicitly mean the small family farms many of us like to romantically think of when we use phrases like "helping farmers", nah, it's probably diverting money away from family farmers and toward bigger players in the industry. If you mean diverting more money toward farmers in general, that also seems doubtful - most people have a relatively fixed grocery budget, and these services are probably just shuffling around who gets a cut of it, and naturally keeping some of it for themselves. That suggests a good chance of a net decrease in the amount of money going to farmers of any size. There's also an angle that's not-so-tacitly baked into the sales pitch: Less food wasted translates pretty directly into less economic demand for food to be grown.