4 ms·
Deliberate food wasters are despicable.
by ww520 3y ago
Deliberate food wasters are despicable.
- stronglikedan 3y agoIt's rice. It's not like they're wasting anything significant, like the meat of an animal that gave its life. But still, the restaurant should have charged them for it at least, like every other all you can eat sushi place would have.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 3y ago"like the meat of an animal that gave its life." - that's generally not how it works.
- standardUser 3y agoOutside of some restaurants in South Korea, we generally only eat dead animals.
- progbits 3y agoI assume the GP takes issue with the word "gave", as it was not given but taken.
- tomrod 3y agoCan something be taken without being given?
- 2023throwawayy 3y agoIf I kill you and take your land/stuff/body, did you give it or did I take it?
- tomrod 3y agoBoth.
- standardUser 3y agoA question for the pedants.
- jrflowers 3y agoNo. That is why there is no word or concept for theft
- rad_gruchalski 3y agoYes, it can be “taken away from one”. Frankly, quite forcibly. It’s a rather simple concept to understand.
- strken 3y agoBit of a tangent, but nearly all foods have an animal death rate per calorie, so there's no such thing as insignificant food. The exchange rate is usually better for grains than for e.g. chicken or even beef[0], though. [0] https://animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/ https://animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/ Note that I'm a little skeptical of the numbers here, particularly those for grass-fed beef. Not that it matters for the purpose of claiming rice has a cost in lives.
- senkora 3y agoRelevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-10-09 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-10-09
- kjkjadksj 3y agoKind of an interesting link. Another thing to keep in mind is that the rice patty being there means a natural habitat is now lost to make way for the farm. In truth there is no guilt free meal or anything else.
- eru 3y agoWell, we can relatively easily put a dollar value on human lives, too. So any kind of waste that we can put a dollar value on, also has a value in human lives. Make of that what you will.
- jefftk 3y agoI think this is an interesting idea, and people inclined towards veganism might be able to better achieve their goals by going for a suffering-minimizing diet, but the studies this is based on aren't very good. For example: > 33 field mice were fitted with radio collars and tracked before and after harvest. The researchers found that only 3 percent of them were actually killed by the combine harvester (amounting to one mouse). An additional 52 percent of them (17 mice) were killed following harvest by predators such as owls and weasels, possibly due to their loss of the crop cover. It is unknown how many of these mice would have been eaten by owls or weasels anyway. That last sentence is key: without a control you can't draw much from this experiment. Additionally, while they say "animals" many times they're not clear on which ones they're including. The decision on whether to consider insects would be especially important.
- JohnFen 3y agoAll food waste is significant.
- cm2012 3y agoQuite the opposite
- imadierich 3y ago[dead]
- adrian_b 3y agoNot really. Carbohydrates are much cheaper than proteins and fat. Proteins and fat of vegetable origin are cheaper than those of animal origin, but they come accompanied by excessive amounts of carbohydrates. The most efficient way of getting food for human consumption for now is to dump as waste most of the carbohydrates from vegetables and retain only the valuable proteins and fat (this can be done at home for instance by making bread but washing the dough before baking in order to remove most of the starch, producing thus a protein-enriched bread, or by removing completely the starch by extra washing of the dough, converting in into gluten a.k.a. seitan). The high proportion of carbohydrates from vegetable food can be used completely only by those who do hard physical work, but not by those who have a sedentary lifestyle, who must necessarily dump the carbohydrates as waste, either directly or indirectly (by buying food where the carbohydrates have already been wasted in various ways, including as energy sources for animals that have been raised for becoming food). In the future it might be possible to develop better ways to use the carbohydrates that must be wasted now, by converting them with high efficiency into proteins or fat, by using bacterial or fungal cultures.
- JohnFen 3y agoAre you arguing that wasting meat is more significant than wasting vegetation? I agree, but that doesn't diminish the fact that wasting both is significant. Are you arguing that everyone should be vegetarian? That's a topic I was not even remotely touching on.
- mc32 3y agoIt was rice but rice is a filler. Don’t know that the ratio is but let’s say 1:4 non-rice to rice. Dumping the rice skews that a lot.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoIronically the word "sushi" refers to the rice, not the topping. Rice properly seasoned with vinegar and sugar is the one essential ingredient in sushi. If there's no rice it's no longer sushi.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoThe word has a broader meaning in English, though. We'll often refer to things like raw fish alone, ie sashimi, as sushi.
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoThankfully there's still us pedants explaining repeatedly the difference between sashimi and sushi to anyone who will listen, and quite often those who won't. I've never had either.
- mc32 3y agoIt’s okay, in Japan, for lots of people spaghetti means any kind of pasta dish.
- Delk 3y agoRice has a significant climate footprint due to the methane produced by the agriculture. It also requires a lot of fresh water to grow. (How much of an issue the latter is depends on the local conditions, of course.)
- cm2012 3y agoThere's few things in your life that will impact the environment less than not finishing a bowl of rice.
- serf 3y agoyou're right, but a lifestyle that makes a habit of adding those small things up left and right becomes impactful quickly.
- Delk 3y agoThat may be true, if done on occasion rather than regularly. But just because it's "only" rice doesn't make it insignificant, even though rice is such a staple that it may seem so. That's what I commented on. Food in general is a significant part of our ecological footprint. Rice has a relatively high impact for a crop. Of course it's still in a different ballpark than beef.
- ghodith 3y agoDepends on the amount of rice obviously. Rice farming definitely has an impact on the environment in bulk. Now divide that by the amount of rice in a roll and we'll see how significant it is. I'm guessing it's very, very small.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoDon't forget as well that it's not only a case of them not eating the rice, they also massively increased their intake of fish by skipping the carbs.
- CaptainZapp 3y agoIt's a safe assumption that such all you can eat sushi was of mediocre quality. But, when it comes to the real deal. Sushi from a tier one or two Japanese sushi chef then the rice is actually the most important factor in making good sushi. Discarding the rice would be seen as comparatively barbarian as dunking a freshly made piece of sushi by a good chef into this mixture of soya sauce and ersatz "wasabi".
- easymodex 3y agoSomeone had to plant it, then water it and cultivate it, then harvest it, then package it, then ship it god knows how many miles, then the restaurant cooked it, prepared it, then they just threw it away. Then comes the trash processing chain. How is that not a completely useless waste of energy, time, money and resources?
- jstarfish 3y agoThis is a very human-centric view ;) I'm in the "every life is sacred" camp, but...even if you do kill one animal and leave it to rot, it's not a total waste, just a "cruel" one. Other things feed off of the carcasses of animals the same as you or I do. We just consider all other organisms beneath us, so if we kill and discard something, we write it off as a total waste. Birds, dogs, rodents and microorganisms disagree.
- oatmeal1 3y agoMore despicable than other kinds of wasters? Eating only the part of the food you like can't be that morally different from buying a sporty car that wastes gas, for example.
- avgcorrection 3y agoThey hacked the business model.