7 ms·

Too Much Food in the Wrong Places

38 points by jelliclesfarm 7y ago

fovc 7y ago
Is there a robust but economical alternative to our current supply chain? I've been looking at local CSAs and most seem to be doing fine right now, but the pricing is way higher than in the supermarket (even comparing it to organic, grass fed to grass feed, etc.). Are the economies of scale so large, or is it more of a segmentation issue? If CSAs weren't such a niche would it be feasible to bring costs closer to supermarket levels?
- tathougies 7y ago
  CSAs are way less robust than the mainstream supply chain. People want a 'robust' supply chain that they define as one that is able to immediately (in the course of a day) shift from mostly commercial to mostly residential. This is a ridiculous ask, and I don't understand why people think this is how things should be.
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  Co-operatives or farm hubs with reliable stream of income. It is not that CSAs are expensive. It’s that most people pay less for industrially grown food. Supermarket tomatoes are uniform, thick skins, picked when green and gassed them red, grown in thousands of acres, mechanically harvested, grown broadacre with chemicals and trucked thousands of miles by palletfuls. How can you compare that to food grown in ten acres, harvested by hand and has the shortest distance from soil to kitchen and usually done by hand because true mechanization, automation tech and economies of scale hasn’t reached small farms. The consumer has to make a stand and be willing to pay what food is worth. That our food is cheap is what fuels many of the woes of the world.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > The consumer has to make a stand and be willing to pay what food is worth. By definition, the consumer is willing to pay what food is worth. On the other hand, the claim you're actually trying to make here, that the consumer should be willing to pay what food costs regardless of how little it's worth, is ludicrous.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > the claim you're actually trying to make here, that the consumer should be willing to pay what food costs regardless of how little it's worth, is ludicrous. Yes, the old labor theory of value. In one of pg's essays, he describes it as believing that if you want someone to paint your house, you should be willing to pay them ten times as much if they say they're going to do it with a toothbrush.
      - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
        Industrial food has hidden costs. It depletes non renewal resources. When you pay for pesticide laden food grown with fossil fuels, you are paying for it in another way by way of taxes. It creates billion dollar industries that don’t really need to exist in the first place. It destroys habitat and marine life with shipping containers plying up and down causing untold damage. It creates futures markets and commodity markets in Wall Street. You pay. You pay by way of taxes and the cherry on top is inequalities in society and destruction of the only habitable planet we have for now. Example: California grows 45 billion dollars worth of food..the food economy is worthy about 350 billion. We grew food and exported during drought. We exported water thirsty almonds to Middle East and China during a drought..so we exported water when Californians were asked to ration water and our water bills went up. And we paid the cost with no benefit to California. The beneficiary of a scarce resource..water..was those who imported Californian Ag produce at a discount when they should be paying more for it. Not only did we pay..we lost. When Ag workers expose themselves to pesticides, they end up on welfare or Medicare..more than $ cost, we have created a whole new class of vulnerable poor people. Pay more for your food. That’s what I say..stop destroying the planet for whatever pieces of genetic material you leave behind in your children. Do it out of self interest. Not altruism.
        pdonis 7y ago
        None of the problems you describe (to the extent they are problems--for example, futures and commodities markets are natural features of any market and serve useful purposes, though many people ignorant of basic economics don't recognize that) are problems of "industrial food". They are problems of bad government. Furthermore, even if all of those problems of bad government were magically solved, it wouldn't change the fact that people won't buy things they can't afford. If you can't make the kind of food you prefer cheaper, most people won't buy it, because they can't. They're going to get the best deal they can for what they can afford to spend. Moralizing won't change that.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > The consumer has to make a stand and be willing to pay what food is worth. Most consumers can't afford to. The solution is not to make everyone pay a lot more for food; it's to figure out how to produce healthier food cheaply enough that most consumers can afford it.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      >produce healthier food cheaply enough that most consumers can afford it That's sort of what supermarket produce is--especially fresh and frozen. It may not taste as good as something local that's in season a lot of the time. (Though some fresh supermarket produce is local depending upon where you live.) But by and large it's perfectly healthy.
    - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
      As long as population increases, production from fixed resources that are dwindling should cost more. Ag depends on labour. Right now cheap food doesn’t come from better production but from economies of scale to a certain extent but mostly by hedging and importing from poorer countries where labour is cheaper. Such a supply chain is unstable and unreliable. We will see food shortages in places like America as imports will fall short and labour dries up. The farm workers are the most vulnerable population. Most will likely be infected during this crisis and will contribute to community spread. Because there is no one willing to work as hard as them at such low wages, ag is going to come to a screeching halt in the coming seasons.
      - pdonis 7y ago
        > production from fixed resources > Ag depends on labour. Labor is not a fixed resource. Also, ag does not have to depend on labor. It does now because, as you say, the supply chain is currently set up to take advantage of the cheap labor which is available in many places. But it doesn't have to be set up that way.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    That our food is cheap is what fuels many of the woes of the world. And also accounts for the amazing progress of the 20th-21st century.
    - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
      Cheap food is not the reason for ‘amazing progress’ ..can you explain why you feel this way?
      - nitrogen 7y ago
        Cheap food allows us to spend more of our time, money, and attention on issues instead of finding food. It significantly increases the number of people who can get enough food at all. Ancient agriculture marked the birth of civilization. Modern agriculture is absolutely critical for modern civilization.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bluntfang 7y ago
  >but the pricing is way higher than in the supermarket How can you say this? Every CSA I've seen does not tell you how much you'll get or what kinds you'll get on a weekly basis, it depends on the grow season. What numbers are you comparing?
lisper 7y ago
There might not be food shortages, but something hinky is definitely going on with the paper product supply chain. I have not seen a single roll of TP or paper towels on a shelf anywhere in my area (San Francisco Peninsula) since we went on lockdown on March 16.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  Everyone is using more household TP (40% more IIRC), and much less commercial TP. And it isn't actually the same factories producing both, nor the same distribution network. TP for commercial businesses is different paper, packaged in different sized rolls. So shortages of household TP make sense. Some people might be hoarding, but even without that there is going to be an ongoing supply issue until the supply chain rebalances.
  - cameldrv 7y ago
    How hard can it be for Costco and Sams to just start stocking big packages of commercial TP? It might not be as soft, but it works fine.
    - donatj 7y ago
      I actually bought some commercial paper from a local hardware store. It's fine, but hard to use as there is no hole in the center of the roll.
    - toast0 7y ago
      Some commercial TP is on rolls suitable for homes. And some is on ultra mega rolls that are LP sized. That's not going to work without a mega dispenser.
      - cameldrv 7y ago
        If the alternative is no TP, the problem of it not fitting on the roll seems minor. Just put the roll on a counter.
zanny 7y ago
Its 2020 and we still have farmers destroying crops rather than having some sensible state backed cost floor price guarantee to just buy excess and distribute it freely. You can definitely guard against exploitation by doing the math on what the maxima is between the volatility of pegging it to market prices vs the delay in using historical means. I'd much rather get a quart of state milk once or twice a year for free while paying .2% more sales tax than having usable food destroyed.
- achamayou 7y ago
  How do you distribute it out freely without affecting the market price? If packaging and transport are a substantial part of the cost, which they are for milk, who’s going to pay that cost?
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    The GP literally said "state backed", so obviously the state is going to pay it.
    - abfan1127 7y ago
      an by the state, he means everyone else.
      - kevingadd 7y ago
        Yes, that's how governments and taxes work. The entire nation pays (at various levels depending on their income/resources) collectively to provide public services that cannot easily be provided on an individual basis. In the Free Market similar approaches are used for things like insurance.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  They're destroying crops because there's a surplus due to changes on the demand side. What they do with crops isn't all that important right now, as long as there's government support so that they replant next season. > I'd much rather get a quart of state milk once or twice a year for free while paying .2% more sales tax than having usable food destroyed. Once you realize wasting food isn't bad and a surplus actually implies resiliency, that statement is just confusing to read. Governments subsidizing farmers to overproduce so that shocks to the system don't cause famines is a good thing. That just means there's either waste or obesity.
sudosteph 7y ago
My mom, who's from a town in the Appalachian mountains in NC, was just telling me about how she and her sisters would can tons of vegetables in the summer because there were times in the winter when they would get snowed in for weeks because the roads weren't safe. That surprised me because she didn't even grow up that long ago, she was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s. I had always pictured canning as a thing people did in the twenties, not in modern era (unless they were hipsters), or just something that had to be done in a factory. But now I'm sitting here wondering, if it's so easy a bunch of kids could do it without poisoning themselves - why can't farms can the excess food themselves? I get that some stuff (canned powdered milk from the article) is harder to do locally, but we still did it with worse technology for many years. Is it a regulation problem, are they not allowed to? Is it economics - are human-canned goods worth less than the cost of paying people to pick+can? Is it too hard to get canning supplies / train people to can on short notice? Do the grocery stores have deals with certain brands of canned foods that would prevent them from introducing locally canned items? It's just interesting because while I've only been out shopping twice in the past month, both times the canned good aisle was hit much harder than the fresh produce section. I know this is a temporary thing, but it just feels like preserving food is something that has been done effectively on a local scale for so many years - it seems weird to let good food rot because large-scale canning factories can't keep up with demand.
- catalogia 7y ago
  My family has been canning (or freezing) food for years. If you know when local foods are in season, you can buy large amounts of food for very cheap by buying directly from the farmers. Often farmers will set up markets by the side of the road or on their own property. Sometimes farmers will have deals where you go into the fields yourself and pick as much as you want, paying for it by weight at very cheap prices. (If you factor in the cost of your labor, that's probably not a very good deal. However if you think of it as a fun weekend family activity instead of labor, then you can get a lot of food for very cheap.)
- ghaff 7y ago
  Presumably the farmers are already selling for canning and frozen vegetables to the degree they can. They are not set up to do it themselves at industrial scale. (And, despite mostly panicked buying of canned goods because it probably seemed like the thing to do, most vegetables--outside of tomato products--are bought fresh or frozen, rather than canned, today.) I guess it's because so many people are fixated on stuff that will keep either on the shelf or in a freezer, but the fresh produce section is far and away the area of my local grocery store that looks most normal.
aazaa 7y ago
The closure of big distributors such as restaurants means that big orders get cancelled. These cancelations cause a glut at the point of production. However, the article fails to mention the role that agricultural subsidies play in the oversupply. Regarding dairy in particular, consider: > "... in 2015, the support granted to U.S dairy producers represented approximately C$35.02/hectolitre - the equivalent of 73% of the farmers' marketplace revenue. USDA data also reveals that US dairy farmers operate at a loss, and have a cost of production that is higher than what they earn from the marketplace." https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/american-dairy-farmers-depend-on-government-subsidies-1015126442 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/american-dai... This has been happening for decades, leading to artificially suppressed food prices and market distortions across many categories.
- mjw1007 7y ago
  Historically, one of the main purported justifications for agricultural subsidies has been to ensure that insert-country-name-here can be more nearly self-sufficient if some crisis comes along to make importing food difficult. That doesn't sound too silly today.
  - heurifk 7y ago
    It does sound silly if the food is left to rot on fields. Maybe we should also subsidize food transportation and storage or something.
    - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
      It has to be harvested first.

38 points by jelliclesfarm 7y ago

fovc 7y ago

Is there a robust but economical alternative to our current supply chain? I've been looking at local CSAs and most seem to be doing fine right now, but the pricing is way higher than in the supermarket (even comparing it to organic, grass fed to grass feed, etc.). Are the economies of scale so large, or is it more of a segmentation issue? If CSAs weren't such a niche would it be feasible to bring costs closer to supermarket levels?

tathougies 7y ago
CSAs are way less robust than the mainstream supply chain. People want a 'robust' supply chain that they define as one that is able to immediately (in the course of a day) shift from mostly commercial to mostly residential. This is a ridiculous ask, and I don't understand why people think this is how things should be.
jelliclesfarm 7y ago
Co-operatives or farm hubs with reliable stream of income. It is not that CSAs are expensive. It’s that most people pay less for industrially grown food. Supermarket tomatoes are uniform, thick skins, picked when green and gassed them red, grown in thousands of acres, mechanically harvested, grown broadacre with chemicals and trucked thousands of miles by palletfuls. How can you compare that to food grown in ten acres, harvested by hand and has the shortest distance from soil to kitchen and usually done by hand because true mechanization, automation tech and economies of scale hasn’t reached small farms. The consumer has to make a stand and be willing to pay what food is worth. That our food is cheap is what fuels many of the woes of the world.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > The consumer has to make a stand and be willing to pay what food is worth. By definition, the consumer is willing to pay what food is worth. On the other hand, the claim you're actually trying to make here, that the consumer should be willing to pay what food costs regardless of how little it's worth, is ludicrous.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > the claim you're actually trying to make here, that the consumer should be willing to pay what food costs regardless of how little it's worth, is ludicrous. Yes, the old labor theory of value. In one of pg's essays, he describes it as believing that if you want someone to paint your house, you should be willing to pay them ten times as much if they say they're going to do it with a toothbrush.
    - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
      Industrial food has hidden costs. It depletes non renewal resources. When you pay for pesticide laden food grown with fossil fuels, you are paying for it in another way by way of taxes. It creates billion dollar industries that don’t really need to exist in the first place. It destroys habitat and marine life with shipping containers plying up and down causing untold damage. It creates futures markets and commodity markets in Wall Street. You pay. You pay by way of taxes and the cherry on top is inequalities in society and destruction of the only habitable planet we have for now. Example: California grows 45 billion dollars worth of food..the food economy is worthy about 350 billion. We grew food and exported during drought. We exported water thirsty almonds to Middle East and China during a drought..so we exported water when Californians were asked to ration water and our water bills went up. And we paid the cost with no benefit to California. The beneficiary of a scarce resource..water..was those who imported Californian Ag produce at a discount when they should be paying more for it. Not only did we pay..we lost. When Ag workers expose themselves to pesticides, they end up on welfare or Medicare..more than $ cost, we have created a whole new class of vulnerable poor people. Pay more for your food. That’s what I say..stop destroying the planet for whatever pieces of genetic material you leave behind in your children. Do it out of self interest. Not altruism.
      - pdonis 7y ago
        None of the problems you describe (to the extent they are problems--for example, futures and commodities markets are natural features of any market and serve useful purposes, though many people ignorant of basic economics don't recognize that) are problems of "industrial food". They are problems of bad government. Furthermore, even if all of those problems of bad government were magically solved, it wouldn't change the fact that people won't buy things they can't afford. If you can't make the kind of food you prefer cheaper, most people won't buy it, because they can't. They're going to get the best deal they can for what they can afford to spend. Moralizing won't change that.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > The consumer has to make a stand and be willing to pay what food is worth. Most consumers can't afford to. The solution is not to make everyone pay a lot more for food; it's to figure out how to produce healthier food cheaply enough that most consumers can afford it.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    >produce healthier food cheaply enough that most consumers can afford it That's sort of what supermarket produce is--especially fresh and frozen. It may not taste as good as something local that's in season a lot of the time. (Though some fresh supermarket produce is local depending upon where you live.) But by and large it's perfectly healthy.
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    As long as population increases, production from fixed resources that are dwindling should cost more. Ag depends on labour. Right now cheap food doesn’t come from better production but from economies of scale to a certain extent but mostly by hedging and importing from poorer countries where labour is cheaper. Such a supply chain is unstable and unreliable. We will see food shortages in places like America as imports will fall short and labour dries up. The farm workers are the most vulnerable population. Most will likely be infected during this crisis and will contribute to community spread. Because there is no one willing to work as hard as them at such low wages, ag is going to come to a screeching halt in the coming seasons.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > production from fixed resources > Ag depends on labour. Labor is not a fixed resource. Also, ag does not have to depend on labor. It does now because, as you say, the supply chain is currently set up to take advantage of the cheap labor which is available in many places. But it doesn't have to be set up that way.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  That our food is cheap is what fuels many of the woes of the world. And also accounts for the amazing progress of the 20th-21st century.
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    Cheap food is not the reason for ‘amazing progress’ ..can you explain why you feel this way?
    - nitrogen 7y ago
      Cheap food allows us to spend more of our time, money, and attention on issues instead of finding food. It significantly increases the number of people who can get enough food at all. Ancient agriculture marked the birth of civilization. Modern agriculture is absolutely critical for modern civilization.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bluntfang 7y ago
>but the pricing is way higher than in the supermarket How can you say this? Every CSA I've seen does not tell you how much you'll get or what kinds you'll get on a weekly basis, it depends on the grow season. What numbers are you comparing?

lisper 7y ago

There might not be food shortages, but something hinky is definitely going on with the paper product supply chain. I have not seen a single roll of TP or paper towels on a shelf anywhere in my area (San Francisco Peninsula) since we went on lockdown on March 16.

rootusrootus 7y ago
Everyone is using more household TP (40% more IIRC), and much less commercial TP. And it isn't actually the same factories producing both, nor the same distribution network. TP for commercial businesses is different paper, packaged in different sized rolls. So shortages of household TP make sense. Some people might be hoarding, but even without that there is going to be an ongoing supply issue until the supply chain rebalances.
- cameldrv 7y ago
  How hard can it be for Costco and Sams to just start stocking big packages of commercial TP? It might not be as soft, but it works fine.
  - donatj 7y ago
    I actually bought some commercial paper from a local hardware store. It's fine, but hard to use as there is no hole in the center of the roll.
  - toast0 7y ago
    Some commercial TP is on rolls suitable for homes. And some is on ultra mega rolls that are LP sized. That's not going to work without a mega dispenser.
    - cameldrv 7y ago
      If the alternative is no TP, the problem of it not fitting on the roll seems minor. Just put the roll on a counter.

zanny 7y ago

Its 2020 and we still have farmers destroying crops rather than having some sensible state backed cost floor price guarantee to just buy excess and distribute it freely. You can definitely guard against exploitation by doing the math on what the maxima is between the volatility of pegging it to market prices vs the delay in using historical means. I'd much rather get a quart of state milk once or twice a year for free while paying .2% more sales tax than having usable food destroyed.

achamayou 7y ago
How do you distribute it out freely without affecting the market price? If packaging and transport are a substantial part of the cost, which they are for milk, who’s going to pay that cost?
- kevingadd 7y ago
  The GP literally said "state backed", so obviously the state is going to pay it.
  - abfan1127 7y ago
    an by the state, he means everyone else.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      Yes, that's how governments and taxes work. The entire nation pays (at various levels depending on their income/resources) collectively to provide public services that cannot easily be provided on an individual basis. In the Free Market similar approaches are used for things like insurance.
dehrmann 7y ago
They're destroying crops because there's a surplus due to changes on the demand side. What they do with crops isn't all that important right now, as long as there's government support so that they replant next season. > I'd much rather get a quart of state milk once or twice a year for free while paying .2% more sales tax than having usable food destroyed. Once you realize wasting food isn't bad and a surplus actually implies resiliency, that statement is just confusing to read. Governments subsidizing farmers to overproduce so that shocks to the system don't cause famines is a good thing. That just means there's either waste or obesity.

sudosteph 7y ago

My mom, who's from a town in the Appalachian mountains in NC, was just telling me about how she and her sisters would can tons of vegetables in the summer because there were times in the winter when they would get snowed in for weeks because the roads weren't safe. That surprised me because she didn't even grow up that long ago, she was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s. I had always pictured canning as a thing people did in the twenties, not in modern era (unless they were hipsters), or just something that had to be done in a factory. But now I'm sitting here wondering, if it's so easy a bunch of kids could do it without poisoning themselves - why can't farms can the excess food themselves? I get that some stuff (canned powdered milk from the article) is harder to do locally, but we still did it with worse technology for many years. Is it a regulation problem, are they not allowed to? Is it economics - are human-canned goods worth less than the cost of paying people to pick+can? Is it too hard to get canning supplies / train people to can on short notice? Do the grocery stores have deals with certain brands of canned foods that would prevent them from introducing locally canned items? It's just interesting because while I've only been out shopping twice in the past month, both times the canned good aisle was hit much harder than the fresh produce section. I know this is a temporary thing, but it just feels like preserving food is something that has been done effectively on a local scale for so many years - it seems weird to let good food rot because large-scale canning factories can't keep up with demand.

catalogia 7y ago
My family has been canning (or freezing) food for years. If you know when local foods are in season, you can buy large amounts of food for very cheap by buying directly from the farmers. Often farmers will set up markets by the side of the road or on their own property. Sometimes farmers will have deals where you go into the fields yourself and pick as much as you want, paying for it by weight at very cheap prices. (If you factor in the cost of your labor, that's probably not a very good deal. However if you think of it as a fun weekend family activity instead of labor, then you can get a lot of food for very cheap.)
ghaff 7y ago
Presumably the farmers are already selling for canning and frozen vegetables to the degree they can. They are not set up to do it themselves at industrial scale. (And, despite mostly panicked buying of canned goods because it probably seemed like the thing to do, most vegetables--outside of tomato products--are bought fresh or frozen, rather than canned, today.) I guess it's because so many people are fixated on stuff that will keep either on the shelf or in a freezer, but the fresh produce section is far and away the area of my local grocery store that looks most normal.

aazaa 7y ago

The closure of big distributors such as restaurants means that big orders get cancelled. These cancelations cause a glut at the point of production. However, the article fails to mention the role that agricultural subsidies play in the oversupply. Regarding dairy in particular, consider: > "... in 2015, the support granted to U.S dairy producers represented approximately C$35.02/hectolitre - the equivalent of 73% of the farmers' marketplace revenue. USDA data also reveals that US dairy farmers operate at a loss, and have a cost of production that is higher than what they earn from the marketplace." https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/american-dairy-farmers-depend-on-government-subsidies-1015126442 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/american-dai... This has been happening for decades, leading to artificially suppressed food prices and market distortions across many categories.

mjw1007 7y ago
Historically, one of the main purported justifications for agricultural subsidies has been to ensure that insert-country-name-here can be more nearly self-sufficient if some crisis comes along to make importing food difficult. That doesn't sound too silly today.
- heurifk 7y ago
  It does sound silly if the food is left to rot on fields. Maybe we should also subsidize food transportation and storage or something.
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    It has to be harvested first.