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Your expectation is that farms should operate at a loss such that no food goes to waste? Businesses that don't make money very quickly will get shut down. Or

Your expectation is that farms should operate at a loss such that no food goes to waste? Businesses that don't make money very quickly will get shut down. Or they could just always underproduce what the market needs in order to ensure that there is no waste.

kerkeslager 7y ago
Nice try, but when states and municipalities have made anti-food-waste laws, this hasn't happened. In fact, with a little tweaking, most food businesses can profit from throwing away less food: garbage disposal isn't free, and food donations are a tax writeoff. Someone I knew in Philadelphia used to trash pick food from the Trader Joe's dumpster. But they caught him on camera and then put up signs, and eventually put a lock on the dumpster. They literally spent money to buy signs and a lock, and pay people to put up the signs and lock the dumpster every night.
- jmchuster 7y ago
  Oh, for sure, if the government is fronting the cost of donations via tax incentives, then we just need to keep on increasing those incentives until it's worth it for the farms to implement this for whatever we consider a "required" percentage of their waste. Farms are already heavily incentivized to minimize their waste in the first place, since that's a ton of labor costs going down the drain, in a business with relatively low margins, but missing out on the sale is still more important for staying in business.
ModernMech 7y ago
Then maybe we need to re-evaluate the idea that farms need to be making profit over distributing food. I mean, farms already receive massive subsidies from the government in order to operate. We just had a round of farm bailouts because they couldn’t sell their food to international markets. Now they are throwing food away because they can’t sell it locally. Meanwhile there are lines stretching miles long with people waiting for food. Perhaps for-profit food production should not be a goal for a society.

kerkeslager 7y ago

Nice try, but when states and municipalities have made anti-food-waste laws, this hasn't happened. In fact, with a little tweaking, most food businesses can profit from throwing away less food: garbage disposal isn't free, and food donations are a tax writeoff. Someone I knew in Philadelphia used to trash pick food from the Trader Joe's dumpster. But they caught him on camera and then put up signs, and eventually put a lock on the dumpster. They literally spent money to buy signs and a lock, and pay people to put up the signs and lock the dumpster every night.

jmchuster 7y ago
Oh, for sure, if the government is fronting the cost of donations via tax incentives, then we just need to keep on increasing those incentives until it's worth it for the farms to implement this for whatever we consider a "required" percentage of their waste. Farms are already heavily incentivized to minimize their waste in the first place, since that's a ton of labor costs going down the drain, in a business with relatively low margins, but missing out on the sale is still more important for staying in business.

ModernMech 7y ago

Then maybe we need to re-evaluate the idea that farms need to be making profit over distributing food. I mean, farms already receive massive subsidies from the government in order to operate. We just had a round of farm bailouts because they couldn’t sell their food to international markets. Now they are throwing food away because they can’t sell it locally. Meanwhile there are lines stretching miles long with people waiting for food. Perhaps for-profit food production should not be a goal for a society.