16 ms·

Smashing Eggs, Dumping Milk: Farmers Waste More Food Than Ever

119 points by danso 6y ago

beervirus 6y ago
Simpsons did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qibFvDOrOjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qibFvDOrOjI
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rednerrus 6y ago
We can't possibly have enough overhead in our system to accommodate this, right? Eventually this is going to lead to shortages in grocery stores, right? This has to be our number one priority.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  Not necessarily, since there’s not much overlap between processors for commercial clients like restaurants and consumer clients like grocery stores. The market for commercial food products has apparently cratered while demand for consumer food products remains high.
  - gruez 6y ago
    But if commercial (eg. restaurants) food consumption is down, shouldn't it be replaced 1:1 by consumer food consumption?
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      Not necessarily, people don't cook the same things they purchase at restaurants. Additionally, a fair number of people don't seem to be competent at cooking much past a scrambled egg, so a lot of people choose packaged/prepared foods versus raw ingredients.
    - nyokodo 6y ago
      Restaurants can't put leftovers in the fridge, so there's a huge amount of waste in the restaurant system.
      - 0xffff2 6y ago
        Where did you get this idea? It depends on the item, but most things do get rolled over from one day to the next.
    - save_ferris 6y ago
      Sure, but the type of food people consume at home typically differs greatly from the food they eat out. Keep in mind that in this situation, the goal is to ensure that already-grown food isn’t wasted and is able to be processed, not necessarily meeting the perfect market demand that you’d see in normal economic conditions.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - xsmasher 6y ago
      Not necessarily for the same products - people cooking at home aren't deep-frying everything. "What I cook for myself at home" and "what I order in restaurants" are two pretty disjoint sets. I'm not even sure the total number of calories will come out 1:1; are people eating less because they're not commuting or working? Eating better because they are cooking? Eating worse because they are depressed? I can't even guess.
    - cwhiz 6y ago
      According to the article about 1/3 of food is thrown away. I would guess that consumers are throwing away less food and producers who typically sell to restaurants are throwing away more.
    - oasisbob 6y ago
      Consumers eat differently at home. Think fancy cheeses. Some dairy cows make excellent milk for cheese. The input into this market is raw milk. When that market disappears due to restaurants closing, it's a serious problem.
    - acmdas 6y ago
      Packaging and labeling are different for bulk commercial and small-package grocery-store logistics.
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      While overall consumption remains the same (or similar, people need to eat) there's different supply chains involved in commercial and consumer consumption. Say you've got a bottling plant that sells exclusively to commercial suppliers. The cost to retool to produce consumer packaged products is non-zero. Your shipping is all geared to commercial suppliers as well. If you decide to reorient to produce consumer packaged goods this takes some amount of time. The farmers that supply you have a batch of milk right now they're storing and a batch coming up next week. If you can't take delivery, you don't have infinite cold storage for milk after all, they need to dump their milk because they've for another batch on the way they'll need to store. You may also have milk stored in your refrigerated tanks waiting for you to be able to reorient for consumer packaging. If your tanks are full you're not going to get new supplies. There's a lot of supply chains that have a lot of momentum and they've been optimized for throughput because that's what gives everyone involved the best margins. When demand drops it takes time and money to slow down or adjust the supply chain because of the momentum. Things like milk can be more difficult because they need not just storage but refrigerated storage and shipping. You might have milk and I might want milk but we're far apart and if you can't get it to me (safely) I'm not going to buy it. That's not to say it's good farmers are dumping otherwise good food. Dealing with perishable things is not the same as dry goods. You can't just add more trucks or warehouses and problem solved.
  - wtvanhest 6y ago
    Anyone have any insight in to why people shifting to eat at home would lead to less overall food demand though? Presumably, if you have X food being produced by farms across the country, and people eating it, but split between restaurants (Y) and home (Z)... I would expect X to roughly equal Y + Z. I would also expect Y + Z = total food eaten and not see any change in the value of Y + Z regardless of how food shifts between the two. So how can you take away Y, but not increase Z at the same proportion? Guesses: 1) Restaurants use a lot more ingredients? Seems unlikely since margins are so low. 2) Consumers reduce waste because they are not balancing getting food from two sources and are more likely to eat everything in their fridge? (My wife, son and I experienced this after we found out our son has food allergies to more than nuts and we basically only eat home cooked food), but I don't know if that is big enough. 3) Something else? My gut tells me we are seeing a reduction in food waste which is due to less supplies, people being more careful. IDK.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      I'd say there's some slack in the system due to how incredibly wasteful the HoReCa sector is, in particular hotels and event catering. But to the extent people shifted from eating out to eating in, that amount of extra demand isn't met by the consumer-oriented sector, and must be eventually reflected somewhere. I'm honestly surprised the food prices haven't gone up just yet, given the stories I hear saying that processing plants supplying HoReCa have a problem adjusting to providing to grocery stores.
      - wtvanhest 6y ago
        Stores are locked in on pricing due to emergency order. I expect new stores to pop up with the ability to set new prices and pay more from suppliers.
    - save_ferris 6y ago
      > Anyone have any insight in to why people shifting to eat at home would lead to less overall food demand though? If you're calculating demand based on ability to pay (which is how markets work), it might be helpful to take a look at the pictures of food bank lines across America[0]. Tens of millions of people have filed for unemployment in the last several weeks, and demand at the food banks have skyrocketed. But since food banks don't operate as typical market, we don't pay attention to them. With so many millions at risk of starvation, we need to rethink how we understand demand in the context of food consumption, because millions of people waiting for several hours in order to get a bag of food tells me that the demand is there. 0: https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/04/these-photos-show-the-staggering-food-bank-lines-across-america/ https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/04/these-photos-show-t...
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Something has to fill the increased consumer food demand though which is what I think the parent comment was getting at originally - what will do that? One could argue reduction in waste but I'm not sure that'd be enough.
    - save_ferris 6y ago
      Have you seen the images of food bank lines in the last two months[0]? The problem with quantifying demand is that’s typically based on ability to pay, and we’re currently looking at what, 20% unemployment? Millions upon millions of Americans are at risk of starvation, and a central goal of an initiative like this is to make food as available as possible so that people don’t starve. 0: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/17/837141457/thousands-of-cars-line-up-at-one-texas-food-bank-as-job-losses-hit-hard https://www.npr.org/2020/04/17/837141457/thousands-of-cars-l...
      - zamadatix 6y ago
        Sure but that only goes to say demand is even higher not answer the question about how we're supposed to be able to source food for that demand if commercial food production isn't efficiently convertible to consumer food production. I.e. the question isn't "do people still need to eat" it's "will the shift in food demand type from commercial to consumer good create shortages".
- war1025 6y ago
  From the first paragraph of the article: These disturbing images have stirred outrage around the world. But here’s the surprising part: the world may not actually be wasting more than normal, when a third of global food production ends up in landfills.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Also why are people who don’t understand the dynamics at play outraged at the people whose work keeps them fed?
    - wtetzner 6y ago
      They're outraged _because_ they don't understand.
      - mc32 6y ago
        That may well be true. Perhaps those covering these kinds of phenomena aren’t explaining and giving this phenomenon enough context and would rather leave their audience in shock to ponder what.
- downerending 6y ago
  This is the kind of problem that markets should be able to solve well, given a bit of time. We'll see what happens.
- pjc50 6y ago
  But shortages can't exist in a free market! /s
  - gruez 6y ago
    Technically in a free market there wouldn't be any shortages because the prices will go through the roof. Food's still available, it's just that it costs a fortune. This is not what's happening right now because we don't have a free market, due to anti-price gouging laws.
    - abfan1127 6y ago
      Any price is illegal - Too low - product dumping Too high - price gouging same as everyone else - price fixing I don't know why you're being down voted, especially since you're right. The best part is when prices sky-rocket, people don't horde, and others see a chance to make some good money, so they switch to the new market. Its simple market signals.
- q92z8oeif 6y ago
  This have only moved the waste from one place to another. producers > stores > consumers. The same waste would happen in the system. but now it moved all to the first step. This is not saying that this is OK. This is just highlighting a problem that was always there and nobody cared/cares :(
- topkai22 6y ago
  From my understanding, the shortages have already happened or are already happening. I was able to buy flour at my grocery store for first time in 2 months yesterady, I haven't seen a sale on meat since March, up till May we still had buying limits on milk and eggs. From my understanding, the bottlenecks are in the processing plants due to massive shift in demand preferences. Restuarants take their orders differently than consumers, often buying whole sections of an animal or at different style cuts, or in the case of flour buying it in 25-50 lbs bags. Consumers widely prefer more processing of their meats (meaning boneless skinlesss chicken breast rather than a whole chicken) or smaller purchases sizes. Honestly, I don't think this will get worse in the US in the short of mid term. The biggest issue is that the food prices being offered farmers/ranchers right now are terrible, so if we see a demand spike post recovery (due to restaurants reopening) we may not have the supply.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    > I was able to buy flour at my grocery store for first time in 2 months yesterady The experience for consumer-packaged flour differs a lot by region, but it seems it was mostly about the capacity of consumer flour packaging facilities than the capacity of flour mills or wheat farmers. Similar thing with toilet paper: people were pooping at home more, so they needed consumer-packaged toilet paper, thus there was a temporary shortage of consumer-packaged toilet paper while facilities adapted to demand. RE flour: here in Hamilton, Ontario, flour in consumer packaging was a rare find for about a week, until retail prices rose slightly (10%?) and now things are basically back to normal in terms of availability.
    - topkai22 6y ago
      It is still tough to find toilet paper at retail here (Reno, Nevada), but manageable. The lack of commercially packaged TP being sold at retail or alternative market mechanisms remains one of the greate mysteries of the crisis for me. I know plenty of people who would have bought the big rolls just have something. There was a real demand issue on TP as well- lots of people who used to only buy 1-6 roles at a time started panic buying 4x the amount.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  Wendy's is out of beef in some locations. Of the big chains they will be hit first because of their "fresh, never frozen" policy on beef. The others have some cushion in the form of warehouses of frozen product. Domino's is out of ham. Grocery stores everywhere are limiting purchases of meat, milk, and eggs. My favorite grocer's butcher counter is frequently 1/3 empty. I have a good relationship with the butcher and he told me when deliveries come and to show up early on those days because there is a rush to get product. The shortages are here. So far they're not so bad that people will starve, they will just have to transition to alternative food choices. How far it will go is anyone's guess.
  - fredophile 6y ago
    I'd guess that meat shortages are caused more by recent covid outbreaks at processing plants and less by waste.
    - Consultant32452 6y ago
      The article is about broken supply chains as the cause of waste, and covid outbreaks at processing plants is one example of problems in the supply chain. Pigs, for example, have a fairly short window during which they can be slaughtered for food sale. If there's a glitch in the supply chain, those pigs have to be killed as waste because the next batch is already coming into that window and it's too expensive to keep feeding the last batch for an unknown period into the future. Here's another interesting example with flour. King Arthur flour sales increased by 2,000% in March. > https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/king-arthur-flour-sales-up-over-2000-percent-march-coronavirus-baking/ https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/king-arthur-flour-sal... leading to problems like retail flour manufacturers running out of packaging to put flour in. https://www.businessinsider.com/flour-shortage-baking-quarantine-coronavirus-2020-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/flour-shortage-baking-quaran...
- abfan1127 6y ago
  It has more to do with the supply chain. Farmers sell to organizations who target certain areas. they sell to grocers who sell in stores. They also sell to restaurants, schools, etc. The restaurants and schools closed, so did those supply chains. Those who normally ate at school and restaurants now wanted to eat at home. Grocers had to pick up the supply chain. They didn't want to invest because this uptick was only temporary. So we had demand shock. If they raised prices, they'd be harassed for price gouging. So, then people started hording because there was no incentive to not horde, so the supply chain got more stressed.
- notaphilosopher 6y ago
  "Eventually?" Where were you? There already were and are shortages. Costco at the beginning of March and seeing 10 gallons of only whole milk and no eggs, when they usually had 4-500 gallons of milk and thousands of eggs out for sale. The place was empty and there was little stock for months.
save_ferris 6y ago
Fresh Air recently interviewed a chef, Tom Colicchio (sp?) and he had what seemed like a novel solution to this problem. Since suppliers to commercial kitchens aren’t able to easily switch production to support consumer-facing customers, he argued that the Federal Government should subsidize restaurants based on a percentage of typical revenue (say 80%), and then use the kitchen staff to make prepared meals that can be sold via takeout, or CSA-style boxes that customers can take home and cook themselves. This way, restaurants get to employ staff while using their commercial kitchens to process food that consumers/food pantries could actually use. This would help stabilize the restaurant industry while we wait for a vaccine and keep at least some staff employed while performing an essential task (converting food for consumers)
- jcims 6y ago
  How is this different than just allowing restaurants to sell curbside?
  - war1025 6y ago
    I believe the difference is the government would subsidize the cost. So for example, instead of heading to the food bank, you'd get food from a restaurant.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    More opportunity for grifter bureaucrats to worm their tendrils in.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    Not all restaurants have menus that are able to easily translate to takeout, and restaurants don’t currently coordinate with producers on what food is backing up in the supply chain. For example, say that the chicken supply has outgrown its demand. A coordinated food production effort between suppliers and restaurants could ensure that supply of chicken is sent to a restaurant to be processed and sold directly as a raw ingredient, which isn’t something you typically see in a takeout situation. Or the processed chicken could go to a community kitchen or something. Either way, the food is successfully processed and sold/donated instead of being wasted.
nostromo 6y ago
We need to end the lock downs. It's time we did what we should have done after two weeks of quarantine: open back up, encourage social distancing, sanitation, masks, temperature checks, and encourage the very old and ill to self-isolate (with financial help if needed).
- gootdude 6y ago
  Even before Covid-19, our health care system doesn't really provide much for these folks. Additionally, seeing all the failures of getting money to small businesses during this crisis and all the deaths in nursing homes, I find it hard to believe we'd effectively care for these people as they are isolated at home.
- christophilus 6y ago
  Shh. You're not allowed to think that. In all seriousness, I've been really disappointed with people who I respect who have consistently belittled anyone who questions the prudence of the lockdown. "Covidiot" is thrown around indiscriminately. The other thing that has surprised me is how many people use absolute numbers rather than per-capita numbers in order to prove their points. I even found Neil deGrasse Tyson doing this on Twitter.
  - Skunkleton 6y ago
    Per-capita and absolute numbers are both incorrect. What matters is local concentrations. For example, If all of cases were contained to a few metro areas then there would be no problem outside those areas. This would not be reflected in per-capita numbers.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    Well, a lot of people feel, I think accurately, that the lockdowns are what are or were keeping the case load relatively low. Regarding absolute numbers, in the early phase when we had a 2-3 day doubling rate, per capita numbers didn't matter very much because you only needed ~2 days for it to double, so any difference in per capita cases saw that gap closed pretty quickly. So for instance, I saw people downplaying the danger by saying "sure Italy has it bad, but the US has 5x the population". That missed the point a bit. It didn't take that long for the US to become the leader in absolute number of cases, then a bit more for it to exceed per capita rates of Italy. Probably both would have happened sooner had there not been any intervention.
fasteddie31003 6y ago
I imagine some of this comes from the waste of the restaurant system. So far in the lockdown, I've made every meal I've eaten and I have only wasted a couple of sweet potatoes and some onions that went bad. And seeing those ingredients go to waste really upset me. From my past experiences working at restaurants tons of food goes into the garbage every week.
- cdubzzz 6y ago
  As an aside -- don't let "bad" vegetables go completely to waste. Compost them and grow new ones (if you have the space)!
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    Not everyone has space/resources to do either of those things.
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    Sure, let me just set up a composting and hydroponics operation in my 400 sq. ft. apartment...
    - korethr 6y ago
      I'm not sure the snark is warranted. If you're truly living in 400 sq ft apartment, you're probably already used to thinking of your space utilization in a manner akin to 3-dimensional tetris. If that's the case, I'm sure you can find space for a small vermicomposting bin and one of those vertical planters. Even better if you have a small balcony or patio that gets some sunlight. When I was living in an apartment, more than one unit in my building would set up a small garden on the patio using various planters to host tomatoes, peppers, herbs, etc. No, that won't replace your need to go to the grocery store for fruits and veggies, but it will compliment it.
      - 0xffff2 6y ago
        My lease specifically forbids putting any plants outdoors (I don't have a patio to put them on, so they would be taking up space in shared walkways). And yes, space is limited, which is exactly why unless I want to start throwing away furniture I can't in fact find the space inside. There was no "snark" intended. My response is just as serious and practical as "Compose [sic] them and grow new ones!".
tomohawk 6y ago
"Farmers waste more food than ever" should be "Government deciding to stop the economy wastes more food than ever" or maybe "Failure of Chinese government to prevent outbreak wastes more food than ever"
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  This is a wild, myopic, borderline tinfoil hat opinion. The government didn't decide to 'stop the economy', they decided to order shelter in place in the face of an exponentially growing pandemic. In March, the number of cases was doubling every two days in the US. And it's especially weird to see you throw stones at the Chinese Government over their inability to stop the spread of this pandemic when many, many governments around the world are also struggling to stop its spread. I'm not a fan of the CCP, and they definitely made mistakes, but I don't think there's a leg to stand on that they could have just 'prevented the outbreak'.
  - tomohawk 6y ago
    The Chinese government literally arrested doctors and ordered them to recant their statements saying there was an outbreak of a SARS like disease.
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      You said that the Chinese government failed to contain the pandemic, which is different than the Chinese government worsened the pandemic. I agree, they did things that probably made things worse. I disagree that they could have easily stopped it from occurring.
lcam84 6y ago
We need to understand that this large scale economy is very fragile. We need to reinvest in antifragile local communities. And no, I'm not talking about of going back to dark ages just to reduce the scale, maybe to the levels of 30 years ago.
- tomohawk 6y ago
  What economy would survive arresting people for going to work?
- simmanian 6y ago
  I agree with you, but just wondering - what industries could we move to local communities aside from growing & delivering food?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - kitotik 6y ago
    broadband internet, clothing, real estate, banking, grocery stores would be an awesome start. Which ones could we not?
    - simmanian 6y ago
      I'm picturing every community building their own cloud provider (AWS equivalent) and I don't see how it would be more sustainable than having Amazon do it. I think there would be a right balance between "every community does everything with full redundancy!" and "have economies of scale take care of everything!"
      - jagger27 6y ago
        Kind of tangential, but wouldn’t it be cool to have a rack or two of Internet Archive shards in local library basements?
ars 6y ago
Would it be so terrible to just sell food in commercial packaging to consumers? I wish stores like Target and Walmart would stock pallets of 40lb flour sacks and just sell them like any other product. Even things like 50lb sacks on onions could be sold, and let people figure out how to split it up with neighbors, etc. People are smart, they'll figure out what to do.
gpsx 6y ago
I expect people leave a lot of food uneaten at restaurants. The times I completely clear my plate, which should be the norm, I often get the same comment from the waiter, "Wow, you really liked that."
- viklove 6y ago
  The problem isn't uneaten food on your plate. Just think about it, if you finish the food on your plate, how is that going to help someone that is going hungry and can't afford or access groceries?
  - gpsx 6y ago
    True, this was just an observation that, as the article said, there probably is more waste when you eat at a restaurant as compared to eating at home. They have a one-size-fits all problem in portion serving.
- mnm1 6y ago
  The norm should be to eat 2000-3000 calories at every meal? No wonder most people here are fat and obese with ideas like that.
LockAndLol 6y ago
40% of food in American homes lands in the trash? They only have themselves to blame. The demand was artificially inflated and now that it's dropping due to lower waste at home, because people are afraid stores won't have what they need, what was made expecting inflated usage, can't be delivered and used. We brought this upon ourselves. Even worse, we won't learn from it. Once things are back to normal, the rest of the world will copy / continue copying the american gluttony making us susceptible to another situation like this.
- viklove 6y ago
  Not just America, Europe as well!
kwhitefoot 6y ago
Why is this happening? Farmers dumping food at the same time that supermarkets are unable to supply basics like flour and chicken. Does anyone know why this is happening in the US and whether it is also happening in other countries? It certainly isn't happening here in Norway. We had short term shortages of flour and yeast but that is over and now there seems to be no shortage of anything else.
- brlewis 6y ago
  Read the 4th and 5th paragraphs of the article, starting with "Blame broken supply chains"
- eqdw 6y ago
  The intermediates between the farms and the grocery stores were closed by law, for the most part
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    Eh, what intermediaries between farms and grocery stores are "closed by law"?
- tssva 6y ago
  I'm not sure it is really happening in most of the US anymore. Take your examples of flour and chicken. They were sometimes difficult to find at the beginning of the lock down but it has been weeks since I went to a grocery store that didn't have flour and chicken available. My friends in other parts of the US report the same. Edit: By "really happening" I mean shortages of foods in the stores and not the dumping of food.
LB232323 6y ago
When people talk about food costs in America, an extremely crucial element is often overlooked. For all the moral posturing about animal treatment in factory farms and sustainability, which I can sympathize with, there is a massive army of illegal migrant workers that are invisible both legally and socially. These migrant workers grow and harvest the food that Americans survive on every day. Not to mention cleaning homes, landscaping, and even raising families. This is a major factor in why food is so cheap and abundant in America. Illegal migrant workers who are paid sub-minimum slave wages to feed the citizens of the United States. Until we take a hard look at this labor system and widely acknowledge its economic role, these debates are empty. If you know your history, you understand why this system exists.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I'm not sure this is accurate. The US H2-A seasonal farm worker visa program allows almost 200000 workers (mostly from Mexico) work in the US without needing to be illegal. My understanding of illegal immigrant jobs was that they were centered more in the restaurant and construction/landscaping fields (and many others, I'm sure). source: https://cis.org/Report/Unlimited-Cheap-Farm-Labor-Evaluating-H2A-Disclosure-Data https://cis.org/Report/Unlimited-Cheap-Farm-Labor-Evaluating...
- simmanian 6y ago
  Is there a source that describes just how dependent we are on slave labor for food? I think some numbers would do a lot of good here.
  - AviationAtom 6y ago
    You call is slave labor, but I'm willing to be many in those jobs could not view it as further from the truth. The know they life they left behind and are ex exceptionally grateful to have an opportunity to make what most Americans would see as peanuts. It's all perspective. Americans demand a lot.

119 points by danso 6y ago

beervirus 6y ago

Simpsons did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qibFvDOrOjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qibFvDOrOjI

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rednerrus 6y ago

We can't possibly have enough overhead in our system to accommodate this, right? Eventually this is going to lead to shortages in grocery stores, right? This has to be our number one priority.

save_ferris 6y ago
Not necessarily, since there’s not much overlap between processors for commercial clients like restaurants and consumer clients like grocery stores. The market for commercial food products has apparently cratered while demand for consumer food products remains high.
- gruez 6y ago
  But if commercial (eg. restaurants) food consumption is down, shouldn't it be replaced 1:1 by consumer food consumption?
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Not necessarily, people don't cook the same things they purchase at restaurants. Additionally, a fair number of people don't seem to be competent at cooking much past a scrambled egg, so a lot of people choose packaged/prepared foods versus raw ingredients.
  - nyokodo 6y ago
    Restaurants can't put leftovers in the fridge, so there's a huge amount of waste in the restaurant system.
    - 0xffff2 6y ago
      Where did you get this idea? It depends on the item, but most things do get rolled over from one day to the next.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    Sure, but the type of food people consume at home typically differs greatly from the food they eat out. Keep in mind that in this situation, the goal is to ensure that already-grown food isn’t wasted and is able to be processed, not necessarily meeting the perfect market demand that you’d see in normal economic conditions.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - xsmasher 6y ago
    Not necessarily for the same products - people cooking at home aren't deep-frying everything. "What I cook for myself at home" and "what I order in restaurants" are two pretty disjoint sets. I'm not even sure the total number of calories will come out 1:1; are people eating less because they're not commuting or working? Eating better because they are cooking? Eating worse because they are depressed? I can't even guess.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    According to the article about 1/3 of food is thrown away. I would guess that consumers are throwing away less food and producers who typically sell to restaurants are throwing away more.
  - oasisbob 6y ago
    Consumers eat differently at home. Think fancy cheeses. Some dairy cows make excellent milk for cheese. The input into this market is raw milk. When that market disappears due to restaurants closing, it's a serious problem.
  - acmdas 6y ago
    Packaging and labeling are different for bulk commercial and small-package grocery-store logistics.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    While overall consumption remains the same (or similar, people need to eat) there's different supply chains involved in commercial and consumer consumption. Say you've got a bottling plant that sells exclusively to commercial suppliers. The cost to retool to produce consumer packaged products is non-zero. Your shipping is all geared to commercial suppliers as well. If you decide to reorient to produce consumer packaged goods this takes some amount of time. The farmers that supply you have a batch of milk right now they're storing and a batch coming up next week. If you can't take delivery, you don't have infinite cold storage for milk after all, they need to dump their milk because they've for another batch on the way they'll need to store. You may also have milk stored in your refrigerated tanks waiting for you to be able to reorient for consumer packaging. If your tanks are full you're not going to get new supplies. There's a lot of supply chains that have a lot of momentum and they've been optimized for throughput because that's what gives everyone involved the best margins. When demand drops it takes time and money to slow down or adjust the supply chain because of the momentum. Things like milk can be more difficult because they need not just storage but refrigerated storage and shipping. You might have milk and I might want milk but we're far apart and if you can't get it to me (safely) I'm not going to buy it. That's not to say it's good farmers are dumping otherwise good food. Dealing with perishable things is not the same as dry goods. You can't just add more trucks or warehouses and problem solved.
- wtvanhest 6y ago
  Anyone have any insight in to why people shifting to eat at home would lead to less overall food demand though? Presumably, if you have X food being produced by farms across the country, and people eating it, but split between restaurants (Y) and home (Z)... I would expect X to roughly equal Y + Z. I would also expect Y + Z = total food eaten and not see any change in the value of Y + Z regardless of how food shifts between the two. So how can you take away Y, but not increase Z at the same proportion? Guesses: 1) Restaurants use a lot more ingredients? Seems unlikely since margins are so low. 2) Consumers reduce waste because they are not balancing getting food from two sources and are more likely to eat everything in their fridge? (My wife, son and I experienced this after we found out our son has food allergies to more than nuts and we basically only eat home cooked food), but I don't know if that is big enough. 3) Something else? My gut tells me we are seeing a reduction in food waste which is due to less supplies, people being more careful. IDK.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I'd say there's some slack in the system due to how incredibly wasteful the HoReCa sector is, in particular hotels and event catering. But to the extent people shifted from eating out to eating in, that amount of extra demand isn't met by the consumer-oriented sector, and must be eventually reflected somewhere. I'm honestly surprised the food prices haven't gone up just yet, given the stories I hear saying that processing plants supplying HoReCa have a problem adjusting to providing to grocery stores.
    - wtvanhest 6y ago
      Stores are locked in on pricing due to emergency order. I expect new stores to pop up with the ability to set new prices and pay more from suppliers.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    > Anyone have any insight in to why people shifting to eat at home would lead to less overall food demand though? If you're calculating demand based on ability to pay (which is how markets work), it might be helpful to take a look at the pictures of food bank lines across America[0]. Tens of millions of people have filed for unemployment in the last several weeks, and demand at the food banks have skyrocketed. But since food banks don't operate as typical market, we don't pay attention to them. With so many millions at risk of starvation, we need to rethink how we understand demand in the context of food consumption, because millions of people waiting for several hours in order to get a bag of food tells me that the demand is there. 0: https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/04/these-photos-show-the-staggering-food-bank-lines-across-america/ https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/04/these-photos-show-t...
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Something has to fill the increased consumer food demand though which is what I think the parent comment was getting at originally - what will do that? One could argue reduction in waste but I'm not sure that'd be enough.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    Have you seen the images of food bank lines in the last two months[0]? The problem with quantifying demand is that’s typically based on ability to pay, and we’re currently looking at what, 20% unemployment? Millions upon millions of Americans are at risk of starvation, and a central goal of an initiative like this is to make food as available as possible so that people don’t starve. 0: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/17/837141457/thousands-of-cars-line-up-at-one-texas-food-bank-as-job-losses-hit-hard https://www.npr.org/2020/04/17/837141457/thousands-of-cars-l...
    - zamadatix 6y ago
      Sure but that only goes to say demand is even higher not answer the question about how we're supposed to be able to source food for that demand if commercial food production isn't efficiently convertible to consumer food production. I.e. the question isn't "do people still need to eat" it's "will the shift in food demand type from commercial to consumer good create shortages".
war1025 6y ago
From the first paragraph of the article: These disturbing images have stirred outrage around the world. But here’s the surprising part: the world may not actually be wasting more than normal, when a third of global food production ends up in landfills.
- mc32 6y ago
  Also why are people who don’t understand the dynamics at play outraged at the people whose work keeps them fed?
  - wtetzner 6y ago
    They're outraged _because_ they don't understand.
    - mc32 6y ago
      That may well be true. Perhaps those covering these kinds of phenomena aren’t explaining and giving this phenomenon enough context and would rather leave their audience in shock to ponder what.
downerending 6y ago
This is the kind of problem that markets should be able to solve well, given a bit of time. We'll see what happens.
pjc50 6y ago
But shortages can't exist in a free market! /s
- gruez 6y ago
  Technically in a free market there wouldn't be any shortages because the prices will go through the roof. Food's still available, it's just that it costs a fortune. This is not what's happening right now because we don't have a free market, due to anti-price gouging laws.
  - abfan1127 6y ago
    Any price is illegal - Too low - product dumping Too high - price gouging same as everyone else - price fixing I don't know why you're being down voted, especially since you're right. The best part is when prices sky-rocket, people don't horde, and others see a chance to make some good money, so they switch to the new market. Its simple market signals.
q92z8oeif 6y ago
This have only moved the waste from one place to another. producers > stores > consumers. The same waste would happen in the system. but now it moved all to the first step. This is not saying that this is OK. This is just highlighting a problem that was always there and nobody cared/cares :(
topkai22 6y ago
From my understanding, the shortages have already happened or are already happening. I was able to buy flour at my grocery store for first time in 2 months yesterady, I haven't seen a sale on meat since March, up till May we still had buying limits on milk and eggs. From my understanding, the bottlenecks are in the processing plants due to massive shift in demand preferences. Restuarants take their orders differently than consumers, often buying whole sections of an animal or at different style cuts, or in the case of flour buying it in 25-50 lbs bags. Consumers widely prefer more processing of their meats (meaning boneless skinlesss chicken breast rather than a whole chicken) or smaller purchases sizes. Honestly, I don't think this will get worse in the US in the short of mid term. The biggest issue is that the food prices being offered farmers/ranchers right now are terrible, so if we see a demand spike post recovery (due to restaurants reopening) we may not have the supply.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  > I was able to buy flour at my grocery store for first time in 2 months yesterady The experience for consumer-packaged flour differs a lot by region, but it seems it was mostly about the capacity of consumer flour packaging facilities than the capacity of flour mills or wheat farmers. Similar thing with toilet paper: people were pooping at home more, so they needed consumer-packaged toilet paper, thus there was a temporary shortage of consumer-packaged toilet paper while facilities adapted to demand. RE flour: here in Hamilton, Ontario, flour in consumer packaging was a rare find for about a week, until retail prices rose slightly (10%?) and now things are basically back to normal in terms of availability.
  - topkai22 6y ago
    It is still tough to find toilet paper at retail here (Reno, Nevada), but manageable. The lack of commercially packaged TP being sold at retail or alternative market mechanisms remains one of the greate mysteries of the crisis for me. I know plenty of people who would have bought the big rolls just have something. There was a real demand issue on TP as well- lots of people who used to only buy 1-6 roles at a time started panic buying 4x the amount.
Consultant32452 6y ago
Wendy's is out of beef in some locations. Of the big chains they will be hit first because of their "fresh, never frozen" policy on beef. The others have some cushion in the form of warehouses of frozen product. Domino's is out of ham. Grocery stores everywhere are limiting purchases of meat, milk, and eggs. My favorite grocer's butcher counter is frequently 1/3 empty. I have a good relationship with the butcher and he told me when deliveries come and to show up early on those days because there is a rush to get product. The shortages are here. So far they're not so bad that people will starve, they will just have to transition to alternative food choices. How far it will go is anyone's guess.
- fredophile 6y ago
  I'd guess that meat shortages are caused more by recent covid outbreaks at processing plants and less by waste.
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    The article is about broken supply chains as the cause of waste, and covid outbreaks at processing plants is one example of problems in the supply chain. Pigs, for example, have a fairly short window during which they can be slaughtered for food sale. If there's a glitch in the supply chain, those pigs have to be killed as waste because the next batch is already coming into that window and it's too expensive to keep feeding the last batch for an unknown period into the future. Here's another interesting example with flour. King Arthur flour sales increased by 2,000% in March. > https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/king-arthur-flour-sales-up-over-2000-percent-march-coronavirus-baking/ https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/king-arthur-flour-sal... leading to problems like retail flour manufacturers running out of packaging to put flour in. https://www.businessinsider.com/flour-shortage-baking-quarantine-coronavirus-2020-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/flour-shortage-baking-quaran...
abfan1127 6y ago
It has more to do with the supply chain. Farmers sell to organizations who target certain areas. they sell to grocers who sell in stores. They also sell to restaurants, schools, etc. The restaurants and schools closed, so did those supply chains. Those who normally ate at school and restaurants now wanted to eat at home. Grocers had to pick up the supply chain. They didn't want to invest because this uptick was only temporary. So we had demand shock. If they raised prices, they'd be harassed for price gouging. So, then people started hording because there was no incentive to not horde, so the supply chain got more stressed.
notaphilosopher 6y ago
"Eventually?" Where were you? There already were and are shortages. Costco at the beginning of March and seeing 10 gallons of only whole milk and no eggs, when they usually had 4-500 gallons of milk and thousands of eggs out for sale. The place was empty and there was little stock for months.

save_ferris 6y ago

Fresh Air recently interviewed a chef, Tom Colicchio (sp?) and he had what seemed like a novel solution to this problem. Since suppliers to commercial kitchens aren’t able to easily switch production to support consumer-facing customers, he argued that the Federal Government should subsidize restaurants based on a percentage of typical revenue (say 80%), and then use the kitchen staff to make prepared meals that can be sold via takeout, or CSA-style boxes that customers can take home and cook themselves. This way, restaurants get to employ staff while using their commercial kitchens to process food that consumers/food pantries could actually use. This would help stabilize the restaurant industry while we wait for a vaccine and keep at least some staff employed while performing an essential task (converting food for consumers)

jcims 6y ago
How is this different than just allowing restaurants to sell curbside?
- war1025 6y ago
  I believe the difference is the government would subsidize the cost. So for example, instead of heading to the food bank, you'd get food from a restaurant.
- catalogia 6y ago
  More opportunity for grifter bureaucrats to worm their tendrils in.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  Not all restaurants have menus that are able to easily translate to takeout, and restaurants don’t currently coordinate with producers on what food is backing up in the supply chain. For example, say that the chicken supply has outgrown its demand. A coordinated food production effort between suppliers and restaurants could ensure that supply of chicken is sent to a restaurant to be processed and sold directly as a raw ingredient, which isn’t something you typically see in a takeout situation. Or the processed chicken could go to a community kitchen or something. Either way, the food is successfully processed and sold/donated instead of being wasted.

nostromo 6y ago

We need to end the lock downs. It's time we did what we should have done after two weeks of quarantine: open back up, encourage social distancing, sanitation, masks, temperature checks, and encourage the very old and ill to self-isolate (with financial help if needed).

gootdude 6y ago
Even before Covid-19, our health care system doesn't really provide much for these folks. Additionally, seeing all the failures of getting money to small businesses during this crisis and all the deaths in nursing homes, I find it hard to believe we'd effectively care for these people as they are isolated at home.
christophilus 6y ago
Shh. You're not allowed to think that. In all seriousness, I've been really disappointed with people who I respect who have consistently belittled anyone who questions the prudence of the lockdown. "Covidiot" is thrown around indiscriminately. The other thing that has surprised me is how many people use absolute numbers rather than per-capita numbers in order to prove their points. I even found Neil deGrasse Tyson doing this on Twitter.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  Per-capita and absolute numbers are both incorrect. What matters is local concentrations. For example, If all of cases were contained to a few metro areas then there would be no problem outside those areas. This would not be reflected in per-capita numbers.
- asveikau 6y ago
  Well, a lot of people feel, I think accurately, that the lockdowns are what are or were keeping the case load relatively low. Regarding absolute numbers, in the early phase when we had a 2-3 day doubling rate, per capita numbers didn't matter very much because you only needed ~2 days for it to double, so any difference in per capita cases saw that gap closed pretty quickly. So for instance, I saw people downplaying the danger by saying "sure Italy has it bad, but the US has 5x the population". That missed the point a bit. It didn't take that long for the US to become the leader in absolute number of cases, then a bit more for it to exceed per capita rates of Italy. Probably both would have happened sooner had there not been any intervention.

fasteddie31003 6y ago

I imagine some of this comes from the waste of the restaurant system. So far in the lockdown, I've made every meal I've eaten and I have only wasted a couple of sweet potatoes and some onions that went bad. And seeing those ingredients go to waste really upset me. From my past experiences working at restaurants tons of food goes into the garbage every week.

cdubzzz 6y ago
As an aside -- don't let "bad" vegetables go completely to waste. Compost them and grow new ones (if you have the space)!
- giantrobot 6y ago
  Not everyone has space/resources to do either of those things.
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  Sure, let me just set up a composting and hydroponics operation in my 400 sq. ft. apartment...
  - korethr 6y ago
    I'm not sure the snark is warranted. If you're truly living in 400 sq ft apartment, you're probably already used to thinking of your space utilization in a manner akin to 3-dimensional tetris. If that's the case, I'm sure you can find space for a small vermicomposting bin and one of those vertical planters. Even better if you have a small balcony or patio that gets some sunlight. When I was living in an apartment, more than one unit in my building would set up a small garden on the patio using various planters to host tomatoes, peppers, herbs, etc. No, that won't replace your need to go to the grocery store for fruits and veggies, but it will compliment it.
    - 0xffff2 6y ago
      My lease specifically forbids putting any plants outdoors (I don't have a patio to put them on, so they would be taking up space in shared walkways). And yes, space is limited, which is exactly why unless I want to start throwing away furniture I can't in fact find the space inside. There was no "snark" intended. My response is just as serious and practical as "Compose [sic] them and grow new ones!".

tomohawk 6y ago

"Farmers waste more food than ever" should be "Government deciding to stop the economy wastes more food than ever" or maybe "Failure of Chinese government to prevent outbreak wastes more food than ever"

Pfhreak 6y ago
This is a wild, myopic, borderline tinfoil hat opinion. The government didn't decide to 'stop the economy', they decided to order shelter in place in the face of an exponentially growing pandemic. In March, the number of cases was doubling every two days in the US. And it's especially weird to see you throw stones at the Chinese Government over their inability to stop the spread of this pandemic when many, many governments around the world are also struggling to stop its spread. I'm not a fan of the CCP, and they definitely made mistakes, but I don't think there's a leg to stand on that they could have just 'prevented the outbreak'.
- tomohawk 6y ago
  The Chinese government literally arrested doctors and ordered them to recant their statements saying there was an outbreak of a SARS like disease.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    You said that the Chinese government failed to contain the pandemic, which is different than the Chinese government worsened the pandemic. I agree, they did things that probably made things worse. I disagree that they could have easily stopped it from occurring.

lcam84 6y ago

We need to understand that this large scale economy is very fragile. We need to reinvest in antifragile local communities. And no, I'm not talking about of going back to dark ages just to reduce the scale, maybe to the levels of 30 years ago.

tomohawk 6y ago
What economy would survive arresting people for going to work?
simmanian 6y ago
I agree with you, but just wondering - what industries could we move to local communities aside from growing & delivering food?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kitotik 6y ago
  broadband internet, clothing, real estate, banking, grocery stores would be an awesome start. Which ones could we not?
  - simmanian 6y ago
    I'm picturing every community building their own cloud provider (AWS equivalent) and I don't see how it would be more sustainable than having Amazon do it. I think there would be a right balance between "every community does everything with full redundancy!" and "have economies of scale take care of everything!"
    - jagger27 6y ago
      Kind of tangential, but wouldn’t it be cool to have a rack or two of Internet Archive shards in local library basements?

ars 6y ago

Would it be so terrible to just sell food in commercial packaging to consumers? I wish stores like Target and Walmart would stock pallets of 40lb flour sacks and just sell them like any other product. Even things like 50lb sacks on onions could be sold, and let people figure out how to split it up with neighbors, etc. People are smart, they'll figure out what to do.

gpsx 6y ago

I expect people leave a lot of food uneaten at restaurants. The times I completely clear my plate, which should be the norm, I often get the same comment from the waiter, "Wow, you really liked that."

viklove 6y ago
The problem isn't uneaten food on your plate. Just think about it, if you finish the food on your plate, how is that going to help someone that is going hungry and can't afford or access groceries?
- gpsx 6y ago
  True, this was just an observation that, as the article said, there probably is more waste when you eat at a restaurant as compared to eating at home. They have a one-size-fits all problem in portion serving.
mnm1 6y ago
The norm should be to eat 2000-3000 calories at every meal? No wonder most people here are fat and obese with ideas like that.

LockAndLol 6y ago

40% of food in American homes lands in the trash? They only have themselves to blame. The demand was artificially inflated and now that it's dropping due to lower waste at home, because people are afraid stores won't have what they need, what was made expecting inflated usage, can't be delivered and used. We brought this upon ourselves. Even worse, we won't learn from it. Once things are back to normal, the rest of the world will copy / continue copying the american gluttony making us susceptible to another situation like this.

viklove 6y ago
Not just America, Europe as well!

kwhitefoot 6y ago

Why is this happening? Farmers dumping food at the same time that supermarkets are unable to supply basics like flour and chicken. Does anyone know why this is happening in the US and whether it is also happening in other countries? It certainly isn't happening here in Norway. We had short term shortages of flour and yeast but that is over and now there seems to be no shortage of anything else.

brlewis 6y ago
Read the 4th and 5th paragraphs of the article, starting with "Blame broken supply chains"
eqdw 6y ago
The intermediates between the farms and the grocery stores were closed by law, for the most part
- vonmoltke 6y ago
  Eh, what intermediaries between farms and grocery stores are "closed by law"?
tssva 6y ago
I'm not sure it is really happening in most of the US anymore. Take your examples of flour and chicken. They were sometimes difficult to find at the beginning of the lock down but it has been weeks since I went to a grocery store that didn't have flour and chicken available. My friends in other parts of the US report the same. Edit: By "really happening" I mean shortages of foods in the stores and not the dumping of food.

LB232323 6y ago

When people talk about food costs in America, an extremely crucial element is often overlooked. For all the moral posturing about animal treatment in factory farms and sustainability, which I can sympathize with, there is a massive army of illegal migrant workers that are invisible both legally and socially. These migrant workers grow and harvest the food that Americans survive on every day. Not to mention cleaning homes, landscaping, and even raising families. This is a major factor in why food is so cheap and abundant in America. Illegal migrant workers who are paid sub-minimum slave wages to feed the citizens of the United States. Until we take a hard look at this labor system and widely acknowledge its economic role, these debates are empty. If you know your history, you understand why this system exists.

koheripbal 6y ago
I'm not sure this is accurate. The US H2-A seasonal farm worker visa program allows almost 200000 workers (mostly from Mexico) work in the US without needing to be illegal. My understanding of illegal immigrant jobs was that they were centered more in the restaurant and construction/landscaping fields (and many others, I'm sure). source: https://cis.org/Report/Unlimited-Cheap-Farm-Labor-Evaluating-H2A-Disclosure-Data https://cis.org/Report/Unlimited-Cheap-Farm-Labor-Evaluating...
simmanian 6y ago
Is there a source that describes just how dependent we are on slave labor for food? I think some numbers would do a lot of good here.
- AviationAtom 6y ago
  You call is slave labor, but I'm willing to be many in those jobs could not view it as further from the truth. The know they life they left behind and are ex exceptionally grateful to have an opportunity to make what most Americans would see as peanuts. It's all perspective. Americans demand a lot.