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This feels like a problem that doesn’t need to be solved. Solving it might even be worse than not solving it. Do we really want our food production system to be

This feels like a problem that doesn’t need to be solved. Solving it might even be worse than not solving it. Do we really want our food production system to become “just in time”? Delivering exactly how much we need exactly when we need it. Overproduction feels like a safety net for when things go wrong. We really don’t want a food shortage the same way we had toilet paper shortages or gas shortages. Food shortages topple governments and empires the way other shortages don’t. The obvious solution is to keep production at say 150% of demand but if we are going to do that then we are going to be ‘wasting food’ just like you waste time with all those database backups you never needed. The only difference is we went though all this hoop jumping to make the end user not waste so much food just to push the waste back down the line to the producers (which as the article points out are already throwing away a bunch of food themselves under the current system.) All in, I would say this issue is close neighbors to the US switching to the metric system completely. Just not worth all the fuss and cost of doing it even though it has some feel good reasons for why getting to the other side of that big initiative would be worthwhile.

throwawaysea 5y ago
Maybe the solution is to overproduce on things with longer shelf life, which can be stored and transported without refrigeration, so any excess past the target 150% (or other figure) can be donated easily to other parts of the world?
- gruez 5y ago
  >Maybe the solution is to overproduce on things with longer shelf life, which can be stored and transported without refrigeration Then you get people complaining it's "ultraprocessed" >so any excess past the target 150% (or other figure) can be donated easily to other parts of the world? The logistics of this probably makes it more expensive overall than just donating bulk corn or whatever.
sfink 5y ago
I think you need to take the water consumption and greenhouse gas production into account. This isn't a small amount of overproduction. I agree that a healthy buffer is necessary and good, but we are way way beyond that. Producers do not need to overproduce at the current scale. Demand is not wildly unpredictable.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Maybe the solution is to overproduce on things with longer shelf life, which can be stored and transported without refrigeration, so any excess past the target 150% (or other figure) can be donated easily to other parts of the world?

gruez 5y ago
>Maybe the solution is to overproduce on things with longer shelf life, which can be stored and transported without refrigeration Then you get people complaining it's "ultraprocessed" >so any excess past the target 150% (or other figure) can be donated easily to other parts of the world? The logistics of this probably makes it more expensive overall than just donating bulk corn or whatever.

sfink 5y ago

I think you need to take the water consumption and greenhouse gas production into account. This isn't a small amount of overproduction. I agree that a healthy buffer is necessary and good, but we are way way beyond that. Producers do not need to overproduce at the current scale. Demand is not wildly unpredictable.