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How would you distribute free food without encouraging excessive waste?

• southerntofu 6y ago
  Very good question. Where does waste come from? There's individual waste ("i bought too much cheese") and there's mutualized waste ("the supermarket is throwing away 20-40% of what comes in"). The former is incentivized by individual lifestyles. In a capitalist system, everyone needs their own fridge and food. You need to be pretty rich to employ other people to cook for you (go to the restaurant), or cook for yourself which requires more infrastructure (therefore more pollution). Maybe popular canteens would help? https://dinnerdocument.com/2019/04/30/i-dream-of-canteens/ https://dinnerdocument.com/2019/04/30/i-dream-of-canteens/ About mutualized waste, some loss is due to food traveling incredible lengths to reach supermarkets. Strongly incentivizing local production could help for that. The biggest waste generation machine is competition between supermarkets. All supermarkets need all of their alleys full of food. If supermarkets were a public service (without competition), they wouldn't need to overflow with food that will end up in the trash. If you have never worked in a supermarket, you'll be SHOCKED by the amount of meat and dairy products ending up in the trash every week. Third kind of mutualized trash is due to financial incentives. When markets decide that your product is worthless, you'll just throw it away. The fact that capitalism even makes "negative prices" possible is fucked up. When producers destroy TONS of food/milk because selling it would make them loose even more money, how is that even a thing? So there's plenty of room for improvement on food waste, and all of them have more or less to do with abolishing the capitalist system.