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> You're better off tossing potatoes that have turned green or grown sprouts. Jeez no wonder there is so much food waste. Peel off a green part. What's the wor

• JamesBarney 5y ago
  Starvation is like 99% a logistics issue and 1% a food quantity issue. A more people getting sick from eating green potatoes in the u.s. or Europe isn't going to cause any less people to starve in developing nations.
  • kingcharles 5y ago
    Exactly. I badly need food, and I live in a major US city, but I can't get to it because I can't leave my house to go to a food bank. There is a ton of food there, it's just a logistical problem for me.
    • CoastalCoder 5y ago
      If you want to name the city, someone here might be able to connect you with help.
• pdpi 5y ago
  Vomiting and diarrhoea can, and will, kill you. I have personally had a particularly bad bout of food poisoning (unrelated to potatoes) where I was dehydrating to the point it was affecting kidney and liver function, and I needed a few litres of fluids IV. IF you're in a wealthy country and have alternatives, potatoes are cheap enough they're not worth the risk, however small. If you are in such a bad situation that you're at risk of starvation, green/sprouted potatoes might be worth the risk, but you're also taking a genuinely dangerous gamble.
  • recursive 5y ago
    I've had vomiting and diahrea and they didn't kill me. So that's a counter example. I also eat sprouted potatoes occasionally and have never experienced so much as a negative thought.
    • pdpi 5y ago
      Fair enough. Let's remove personal anecdotes from the equation then, and look at the big picture. According to the WHO, diarrhoeal diseases are, world-wide, the second biggest cause of death for children under the age of 5, after only respiratory infections. That's approximately 3 deaths per 1000 births. For Somalia specifically, it's over 13 per mille, for Nigeria it's around 10. By comparison, that number is instead around 0.01 deaths per mille in western Europe and the US. To really put it into perspective, in aggregate across all causes of death, the US has an infant mortality rate of 6.5 per mille. Let that sit with you for a moment: Take all the small children that die in the US in any given year. Now double that number. Now imagine they all died to to a diarrhoeal disease. That is how much diarrhoea can kill.
• ouid 5y ago
  What do you mean by food waste? Most plants grow and then die and rot. We never had any intenton to eat them. It's not particularly tragic. In America, we subsidize the overproduction of food. This means that we grow more food than we eat. Food waste is exclusively a property of this relationship. Whether you throw it away from your kitchen or the grocery throws it away only matters for your personal expenses.
  • ip26 5y ago
    Waste from the point of view of the human labor and non renewable natural resources (e.g. fertilizer, fossil fuels) expended to bring the food to your hands.
    • ouid 5y ago
      So you oppose the subsidies for the overproduction of food and concede that this has nothing do with consumption habits then.