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The war on food waste is a waste of time
- mc32 7y agoUnfortunately a lot of these measures, it seems, are brought up because they’re “photogenic”, they lend themselves to inculcation of kids (like banning straws). But, in the end it has very minimal impact on the effects we’re trying to suppress but on the other hand is very good at getting people used to doing things without thinking through issues independently. It primes kids for ready-made ideology.
- rebuilder 7y ago"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they make token concessions and pretend you win."
- swiley 7y agoIsn’t that what they said about theranos?
- dkdk8283 7y agoI agree most of this is just a feel good campaign. Banning plastic straws infuriates me. Paper straws are trash. I carry my own plastic ones and use them as needed.
- liotier 7y agoWhat country do you live in ? Are straws necessities there ? I live in France and I can't remember the last time I used a straw - must have been a couple of years ago...
- swiley 7y agoI tried drinking coffee through a straw one summer because it’s supposed to protect your teeth. I’m pretty sure I’m at a greater risk of throat cancer now, and other than that I’m not too sure why you would want them.
- nkrisc 7y agoIf that's a concern, the more practical solutions are to 1) brush your teeth after drinking coffee or 2) don't drink coffee. I do choose to drink coffee and don't brush immediately after and accept the risk to my teeth. I was worried about the effect of soda on my teeth so I stopped drinking it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pnutjam 7y agohot drinks != use straw cold drinks = use straw
- KoftaBob 7y agoWhich is why it's not recommended to use a straw with hot beverages, only cold ones.
- i_am_proteus 7y agoStraws were originally introduced for public health reasons, so that your mouth need not touch a surface previously touched by someone else's mouth (and which was not well-cleaned). I'm not aware of any studies confirming or denying their advantage in the era of modern food safety standards.
- pnutjam 7y agoMy teeth hurt if I drink icy beverages without a straw. I think it can also contribute to tooth staining, and probably cavities if it's a sugary drink.
- danaris 7y agoThere are people with disabilities that make it difficult to impossible for them to drink without using a straw. Until plastic straws were banned, they were transparently accommodated by the existing systems. Now, they're shamed for or outright prevented from using the accessibility devices that allow them to actually, y'know, consume necessary and lifegiving liquid.
- poulsbohemian 7y agoSo in what way have you been harmed then, if you are using a reusable straw rather than one that would otherwise end up in a landfill or require recycling? We have metal and silicon ones we use - chances are our family will never need a disposable plastic or paper straw ever again, so I fail to see how we’ve been harmed in this ban.
- nkrisc 7y agoAt the same time, I don't miss them. Turns out that I never really needed them in the first place. Sure, some people might need them, but I imagine the vast majority of people don't really need to use a straw.
- ganstyles 7y agoSame. All cold brew coffee lately seems to come without straws and I don't miss them. I do carry around a reusable straw, one of the singular swag items from a conference that I've used. It's really a small trade-off from what, for me, must have been 1000 plastic straws used annually.
- prepend 7y agoYou drink 3 cold brew coffees a day? Your environmental impact would be so much better just skipping one coffee a week than all of your plastic straw usage. This is what bothers me is that it prohibits me from using straws for a nonissue.
- Tyr42 7y agoIt's a bit unfortunate for people with mobility issues who needed straws though. They benefited from it being a common thing and how they'll need to pack their own or something.
- JohnClark1337 7y agoMost restaurants in my area still use plastic straws. I think most people have forgotten about that and moved on to something else to be pissed about.
- downerending 7y agoIt's not just useless. At least one person has already been killed by a reusable straw. (Fell on metal one while using.)
- jgwil2 7y agoWhere exactly were plastic straws "banned?" As far as I know, the ban was on providing them without their being specifically requested.
- SllX 7y agoSan Francisco. Non-plastic straws only (so paper or even bamboo is fine), although there are a few businesses trying to work through their existing plastic stock on the down low.
- gamblor956 7y agoSanta Monica also has a complete ban on plastic straws, and LA City has a ban on providing them to dine-in customers unless specifically requested (https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-plastic-straws-20190301-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-plastic-straws-...). LA County has a similar rule but allows for the business to ask the customer if they want a plastic straw.
- standardUser 7y agoThat one-time use plastic straw - an object that no one strictly needs and has many alternatives - will persist in the environment indefinitely and will cause harm to ecosystems. You can think that's OK (I guess), but you can't pretend that preventing permanent harmful waste is only about feeling good. It's about preventing permanent harmful waste. Feeling good can be a little bonus I suppose.
- dkdk8283 7y agoI absolutely can think it’s ok. I purchase and properly dispose of single use plastic items. Nothing wrong with that.
- lopmotr 7y agoNo it won't if it's in a properly managed landfill. This is the misconception that anti-plastic fanatics have. Plastic doesn't kill fish when it's trapped underground forever. Straws in the ocean were dumped there by careless people. Since you care about the environment, there's no way you're using a paper straw so you can continue dropping it into the stormwater drain without the problems that you used to cause when you dropped plastic straws into the drain. The very people who choose paper straws are the ones that can't make any difference because they weren't the problem in the first place.
- poulsbohemian 7y agoWhy is causing people - kids or otherwise - to contemplate their footprint on the earth or their impact to other people a bad thing? I’ve never been a straw user, but frankly we bought some reusable metal straws (my partner uses them), some reusable portable utensils, and regularly carry our portable coffee cups when we go out in public. All things that can fit in a purse or bag. We don’t find it an inconvenience and we like that perhaps in a small way we are reducing the amount of generated waste.
- mc32 7y agoStraws are neither here nor there. More power to you on whatever choice you make. The point is these measures solidify indoctrination. Let us tell you what to do. “We’ll think it through for you. Here is what’s good.” And as kids grow up they grow up trusting these voices telling them what’s best for them. It undercuts their critical thinking skills. It’s one big “YEA”. Rarely are they asked to follow the rabbit hole or all the unintended consequences. But it makes people feel good about “having agency” and “doing good”.
- chimprich 7y agoIt seems to me that at least as big a problem in today's world is too much scepticism. Most of the time, the experts are correct. People question the science on climate change, the benefits of vaccination, whether the moon landings happened, whether the Earth is round, all based on the flimsiest of evidence.
- ganstyles 7y agoMy understanding is that a lot of people had this attitude when seatbelts were first introduced as being required for vehicles. And I see it now with respect to things like straws and mandatory bicycle helmet laws. It has always come across to me as very, "Old man yells at cloud" talk. Eventually you or your children won't even miss straws and the world will be better off for having banned them. We all play a part in making things better and it's very hard to argue that not being able to use straws is a bar thing.
- gamblor956 7y agoPeople like to pick on straw bans but the reason they're a thing is because plastic straws represent a substantial portion of the trash found on beaches and in waterways. And like plastic trash bags, plastic straws don't degrade, they just get ground up into smaller and smaller pieces. They can also choke fish and birds if they get caught in the throats, or poke holes in the stomachs/guts of fish and birds. Plastic straw bans may not make much sense in the Midwest, but they do matter in coastal areas.
- prepend 7y ago> substantial portion of the trash found on beaches and in waterways I don’t think do. What makes you think that. Unless you consider 1% substantial.
- coral-snake 7y agoLooking at the composition of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plastic straws don't qualify as a line-item in this[1] 2014 study (either by mass or count). 70.4% of the mass found in the gyre is from fishing-related items (with a whopping 58.3% of mass from fishing buoys alone). [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4262196/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4262196/
- gamblor956 7y agoI didn't say ocean. I said beaches. Straws and plastic bags are targeted because they are the low hanging fruit that is easy to change. Because people are highly resistant to change, even when it's just a mild inconvenience, and addressing a small part of the problem is better than doing nothing at all.
- jartelt 7y agoThis article is pretty off the mark. Yes, eliminating food waste will not solve the climate problem. However, eliminating food waste will absolutely help the climate problem as well as reduce needed landfill space, and provide valuable compost. There is very little downside to encouraging people to waste less food and to divert food waste from the trash into compost. Many people already have compost programs in their city, so it is trivial for them to stop throwing food in the trash. Food waste in landfills breaks down super slowly and releases methane into the atmosphere. This is not good. It's much better to use the food waste to make compost or to use an anaerobic digester and make carbon negative methane.
- hackeraccount 7y agoWhat is the downside?
- swiley 7y agoHaving to sort trash and manage a biological process are two that I can think of.
- dirtyid 7y agoCynical hottake, 150B of food waste per year in US, aka one mans trash is another's revenue.
- jartelt 7y agoIndustrial compost sites and anaerobic digesters are likely a bit smelly. People also may gripe about having a compost bin in addition to a recycling and trash bin.
- tastyfreeze 7y agoAerobic compost is not smelly. Anaerobic fermentation caused by not mixing in enough oxygen is very smelly and slow.
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- panzagl 7y agoThe easiest way to eliminate food waste would be to eliminate fresh produce, meat, and baked goods. If it can't be canned or frozen, process it and pump it full of preservatives until it can.
- defterGoose 7y agoNeeds a /s tag......
- refurb 7y agoThe OP is accurate. Canned food would see much less waste.
- defterGoose 7y agoExcept for all the extra packaging needed....not to mention the energy overhead of the processing operation and the fact that a world with only preserved food would suck......like really hard.
- refurb 7y agoYou’re not willing to sacrifice good food to save the environment?
- hombre_fatal 7y agoMost people won't even sacrifice food they like to avoid the suffering of conscious beings. The "environment" is even more abstract. It's a non-starter.
- scotty79 7y agoSome people can't sacrifice food they like to avoid their own personal suffering.
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- tsjq 7y agooff topic. it took me a while to notice this isn't outline.com :)
- zachware 7y agoI've been working on this problem for a few years now. The problem is systemic. You can solve the retail/consumer level issues but the big problems are market-level. Here are a few facts often overlooked because they aren't surface-level. - 1.3 billion metric tons (2,866 billion pounds) of food worldwide are produced and not consumed each year, representing approximately one-third of total food production by volume (FAO, 2011). - Most importantly, nearly 40 percent of losses in North American fruits and vegetables occur at the farm and distributor level...before it gets to the consumer. - USDA ERS: "The inelastic nature of fresh produce demand causes prices to fluctuate rapidly due to changes in supply. Prices fluctuate daily and can often cause the value of edible product to drop below the marginal cost of production. Depending on where and when the price fluctuations occur, produce could be left in the field, discarded at a packing shed, or dumped from the back of a truck." - Growers today earn roughly 30 cents for every dollar their products command at the end-customer point. It's a market system problem. It's a middleman problem. It's an incentive problem. It's going to change but it will take time and a willingness to ignore sexy-looking things like Imperfect Produce and the like.
- the_watcher 7y agoCan you clarify how ignoring things like Imperfect Produce helps? I'm open to it, but my impression was that Imperfect emerged simply because there was perfectly edible food being discarded because it looked off (anyone who has lived in an area anywhere near industrial agriculture already knew this due to experience with someone showing up at a soccer game with a bunch of fresh strawberries that looked weird but tasted better than anything at Safeway).
- J-dawg 7y agoFood is cheaper than at any other time in history. Make food expensive again and watch the wastage plummet. How to make food expensive? - Stop subsidising farmers to over-produce - End intensive farming of animals - Ban imports from any country that refuses to do the same In the process, you’d go a long way towards solving a whole bunch of environmental issues. The meat you’d produce would admittedly have a bigger carbon (and land) footprint, but the cost would make people eat less of it. Animal welfare would be massively improved. People don’t value things that are cheap. This is one of those issues where no politician can admit the real cause, so they have to resort to posturing.
- the_watcher 7y agoYou'd also disproportionately impact the poorest people in any given area where the cost of food increased.
- ksdale 7y agoI think an important question is how much slack does the system need? Such huge overproduction of food seems wasteful until there's a risk of famine. As the effect of coronavirus on supply chains is currently demonstrating, there are potentially giant hidden costs to maximizing efficiency at a certain point in time. I agree with drastically decreasing meat consumption, but food production in general is, AFAIK, a relatively minor portion of total greenhouse emissions (especially everything that is not meat and especially compared to how important food is sustaining human life).
- dev_tty01 7y agoActually, Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use is 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions (2010 numbers). That is second only to Electricity and Heat Production at 25%. So it isn't relatively minor, but it is, as you point out, an important activity. At least according to this source... https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
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- 11235813213455 7y agoThe problem comes from most first-world people lifestyles, it's an accumulation of consumerism and damaging things, like buying products with (plastic) packagings, non-necessary products (like cosmetics), non-seasonal vegetables/fruits, having pets for example (1/5th of meat and fish production is used for pets food)
- floren 7y agoCutting out deodorant and euthanizing my dog has allowed me to convert Soylent into Javascript at a much lower environmental cost.
- geddy 7y agoI have no idea what I just read but you might be on to something, or you have lost your mind, possibly both.
- jessaustin 7y agoI can't believe you wasted all that meat through euthanization... what do you think they make Soylent from?
- greenshackle2 7y agoHave you considered using a more efficient programming language to lower the environmental cost of running your code?
- 11235813213455 7y agostand away from python, ruby then
- war1025 7y agoThe line from Fight Club really hit me hard and sunk in deep when I saw the movie as a teen: "We work jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need" Want to feel less stress as work? Consume less. Want to have a smaller impact? Consume less. Want to have freedom to splurge on things that you do actually care about? Consume less.
- lacker 7y agoThis seems totally backwards. Americans in general are eating too much. Our society would be better off if people ate less food and wasted more of it.
- war1025 7y agoThe motto of people everywhere: "I want change as long as I don't have to change."
- code_duck 7y agoIdeally, if eating less food, they should produce less food. Even better, though, rather than throw it away, diverting it to people who lack sufficient food would be nice. You do have a point that occurred to me before... By the time you've purchased too much food and have it on your plate, it's not actually better to finish eating it versus throw it away. There's no advantage to obesity.
- himinlomax 7y agoA very effective way to reduce food waste is to make sure produce is not damaging during shipping and handling. You just need to wrap individual fruits and vegetables in a lot of plastic. Great way to save the planet! Green marketing is such a scam.
- mech1234 7y agoIf we lived in a world where 0% of food was wasted, we would be living in a world with 0% safety margin for a supply shock (aka famine). For this reason alone, I don't mind food waste too much. It's also a reason (although I think corn ethanol is more wasteful than useful on the whole) for the government to support corn ethanol. If famine arrives, divert the dent corn from the refineries and have everyone eat more grits.
- basch 7y agoI dont buy that. Excess can be canned and frozen.
- mech1234 7y agoYour statement seems confused. The food production system as a whole produces more food than humanity as a whole consumes. If you can and freeze your leftovers as an individual it does not change this. At a system level- farms, silos, and grocery stores have no interest in storing any more stock than reasonable, and continually stuffing a growing stock into a larger warehouse/silo is wasteful. If wide swathes of citizens changed their behavior to habitually can and freeze more leftovers, and waste less, it would be a good thing, and farms would decrease production, I agree. But it misses the point I made.
- basch 7y ago>At a system level- farms, silos, and grocery stores have no interest in storing any more stock than reasonable That sounds like an economic failure. On one hand we have futures and maple syrup reserves to keep prices up during shortages, but we dont have reserves to address "0% safety margin for a supply shock (aka famine)"? I would expect excess farm production to be stored for famine, as a stability control function of government. The farms still produce, still get their money, and the government has a safety net for keeping the peace during chaos.
- imtringued 7y ago
- ciconia 7y ago> This creative accounting suggests that wasting less food would somehow undo all of the harms of food production. But the nutrient cycle does not care whether or not you clean your plate. This nails it. Unfortunately people who compost their food waste are a negligible minority, especially in the city. I collect the food waste of a local restaurant every week, and it goes to the compost pile. I collect waste from the butcher and it goes to my dog and cat, and what they don't eat goes back to the chickens. The chickens pick through the compost pile for worms and insects and whatever proteins they find, and the compost that's left will eventually feed the garden beds and the vegetables and fruits we'll eat in the summer.
- screye 7y ago> Much like paper straws or canvas totes, though, well-meaning small changes miss the forest of structural change for the trees of lifestyle tweaking This is my big takeaway from this article. It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of sustainability, and how astoundingly futile or even counter productive it is. At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than make actual change. At its base level things like urban design, our reliance on cars, subsidies on crop mono-cultures and the lack of proper introspection as a people hurt us far more than any of these specific problems. Maybe we should start at the most basic question. Is food-waste even a bad thing to begin with. Food waste has been proven to not be the cause of malnutrition issues plaguing some parts the US or the world. If it is because of depleting water resources or land fertility, then crop-monocultures and mono culture subsidies are more at fault. Being sustainable is clearly more expensive, so it is certainly not a cost issue. Across social, policy and organizational issues in the world, activists routinely assume a vague sense of what is "good" and then champion it, without actually looking into why something is good or what the word means in that context to begin with. I know that not everyone is as utilitarian about how they go about things, but I often wonder if a concept even holds ground if it cannot be rephrased in a manner that makes sense in a utilitarian setting.
- xtian 7y ago> At its base level things like urban design, our reliance on cars, subsidies on crop mono-cultures and the lack of proper introspection as a people hurt us far more than any of these specific problems. With the current ordering of our society, most people do not have the power or economic freedom to effectively advocate for change in our urban design, reliance on cars, or subsidies on crop monocultures. Do you really think the people making small changes in the ways that they have access to would reject more significant structural changes? This seems like a complete caricature to me.
- nitrogen 7y agoThis has been called the partial control fallacy, and we all fall for it at least occasionally: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8ecz5iMQ7wNmhEaCh/the-partial-control-fallacy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8ecz5iMQ7wNmhEaCh/the-partia... If you might be very near some threshold where the outcome can go from bad to good, then this kind of microoptimization in the face of macrowaste can make sense. Otherwise, it's actually more wasteful to do small things when the big things don't change. The urge to "do my part" is a strong and important one, but in some contexts it leads to a more wasteful outcome.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aSplash0fDerp 7y agoIts too early to add more "Mickey Mouse math" to "food stuff" waste, but humanity will need to figure out the math/processes to a self-sustaining food supply for space exploration and habitation, so the authors timing couldn't be better. Humanity has a valid excuse to cord-cut from much of the 20th century AG and water systems and see what combination of solutions that automation, more time (fewer jerbs) and scientific leaps bring to the table in the way of working models. Even if we don't get to explore space, we should at least get to see the quality of ingredients go up exponential as we start eating more "fresh off the vine" food in our daily meals as a byproduct of the research. If they can get the angle right and ride the coat-tails of space expansion, they'll cut thru decades of red-tape to bypass the existing infrastructure and entrenched investors to clear a path for sustainable agriculture research.
- scott_s 7y ago> In her 1998 book Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement, sociologist Janet Poppendieck controversially argued that, rather than seriously addressing the problem of hunger, food shelves and other nodes of the charity-based “emergency food system” unintentionally served to perpetuate it in their feeble attempts to mend the holes in the social safety net wrought by Reagan-era bootstrapping and Clinton-era welfare reform. Rather than focus more structurally on workers’ rights and economic justice issues, organizations and institutions coalescing around fighting hunger concerned themselves with addressing immediate needs in ways that did not rock the boat politically. If bad building and furniture regulations were causing home fires, we would of course want to focus on improving those. But we would still need fire fighters.
- rabidrat 7y agoIf we continually needed more firefighters, and the government either refused to hire them or couldn't afford them, so a volunteer group took up the cause and got people to donate money for trucks and volunteer their time to fight fires...this would cover up the problem sufficiently so that it would seem like "we only need to have enough firefighters to get to zero casualties relating to fire". Which means that we would not have a focus on improving the bad building and furniture regulations. Sometimes you need people to see how bad things truly are, before you can get the resources to fix them at the root.
- forgotmypw16 7y agoI've removed one human's worth of money flow from the system.
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- chiefalchemist 7y agoYes and no. Yes, there are limits. The food system sucks. But it sucks because people had become mindless about the system, the junk they're stuffing into their mouth, etc. If being aware of waste wakes some of them up then that's a step in the right direction. Sleeping people can't care.
- musicale 7y agoThe US doesn't seem to have millions of starving people; it does, however, have millions of obese people with poor but caloric diets.
- treetoppin 7y agoThis article conflates "clean your plate" with taking actionable steps to minimize food waste where you have mid-level influence. To steel man the author's arguments, the large, systemic food issues in the United States will not be solved merely by trying to keep food from spoiling in your home. Corporations trying to shame people for wasting food is the same as them shaming us for littering, when its the system that sells single use plastic that is to blame. But lets get past the author's dismissal of books and studies, and talk about what actual, motivated humans are doing to effect change. There are currently student groups across the US at universities who have advocated with their dining service providers to create a pipeline where in excess food from the dining service is packaged in food safe containers, brought to food rescue organizations, and then fed to people in need. This isnt "cast off" food either, its high quality prepared food. In the city I live in my spouse has started working with a local school district to get them to take the excess meals from school lunches, package it, and then allow school children to take it home. If you work at a company that has a cafeteria, there is a decent chance that the food service provider is already competing for the contract on not just the basis of cost, but on the steps they are taking to minimize food waste. That comes from just better planning, but also from the hierarchy of feeding first people, then animals, and then composting when it comes to excess food. You dont have to try to solve poverty in the US, or fix the entire system, to make actionable change. Connecting the right people, and providing the right training, could be all it takes to have your job start directing a few hundred meals a week to people in need in your own community. Source - Spouse co-founded a national organization to redirect food waste in colleges across the nation
- velosol 7y agoDo these programs have an overarching name or a good reading point I could point others to? I think it's in the realm of the possible for me locally but I'm not going to be able to get it off the ground if I have to pull together success stories, plans, etc.
- treetoppin 7y agoCheck out food recovery network for the college organization, and then food rescue us if you want to kick things off from the ground level since that's more their specialty. If you want more specific guidance PM me a contact and I can put you in touch with some folks.
- justlexi93 7y agoEfforts to reduce the amount of food in landfills produce a lot of pretty infographics but very little change to a deeply flawed food system.
- dahart 7y agoI see many good points to think about, but it seems pretty strange to have a whole article on food waste and to talk about a “shitty system” without a single mention of meat, which is by far the largest source of food inefficiency in our system... > There is a rosy assumption that wasting less food would make it back up the supply chain in the most impressive game of telephone ever and signal to farmers to grow less food. But that seems unlikely in an agricultural paradigm staked by subsidies that incentivize the overproduction of four or five commodity crops It’s a decent point that we have incentivized a few crops and over-produce it. However, it’s not like supply and demand is magical. A reduction in demand can and will telephone through the system and lead to less production, it’s not an assumption or particularly impressive, it happens routinely.
- hodgesrm 7y agoWow. So the basic argument here is that since reducing food waste does not solve world hunger it's wrong to try to make the food chain more efficient. We're not going to solve a lot of big problems if we throw out divide and conquer.
- dnprock 7y agoI think I know how to fix food waste :): Everyone learns to cook and eat their own food. We decentralize the food system. It's disturbing that we come to rely on other people's cooking our food. When I buy and cook my own food, I find it very hard to not waste food. There's a lot of planning to budget my own food for the week. For businesses, they need to plan for change in volume as well as making money. Then it's an easy call: optimize for money, food waste is not a problem. The foodservice industry is huge. Recently, there's a new trend: software eats the food industry. We'll continue to waste more food as we try to make more money. Most great dishes are invented by the people, not corporations or governments, except maybe Pad Thai. We'll have more great food if we put our own creativity into food. We don't have to declare war on anybody. We just cook our own food.
- miguelmota 7y agoFood waste happens because food is cheap and abundant. Food is cheap because it’s cheap to produce. It’s cheap to produce because a large portion of field and dairy workers are undocumented immigrants that get exploited for cheap labor. People don’t care how the food got put in front of their plate. People don’t care about the process of food production or the environmental impacts. People simply care that it’s cheap and tastes good. People won’t change their habits unless they really have to. Food waste is a by-product of a system that takes advantage of people with limited choices. Food waste is just a symptom of a larger problem.
- jamil7 7y agoI'm involved in a volunteer organisation in my city that takes excess food from supermarkets and bakeries and reuses it, if you signup to be someone to collect the food you can either keep it for yourself or redistribute it by taking it to a shared fridge for homeless people. There is often far too much for a single household so it usually taken to these fridges or shelters. I work directly as someone who collects the food and also on programming related tasks to keep the organisations website and apps running to coordinate pickups. There are 30,000 people involved in this initiative in cities all over Europe. While it may not "solve climate change" or "solve homelessnes" it has a direct impact on my local community, we can all only work in the frameworks we're given while rallying and voting for bigger systematic changes at the same time. The idea that one activity somehow cancels out or distracts from a bigger issue is bullshit, humans are capable of caring about and being involved in multiple causes.
- jfax 7y agoComplete nonsense article. Only a US person, or generally someone who is unfamiliar with the history of food rationing, could've written something like this.