4 ms·

Tentatively - this might not really be much of a problem? In many situations, we deliberately make sure we have excess capacity because it's better to have too

Tentatively - this might not really be much of a problem? In many situations, we deliberately make sure we have excess capacity because it's better to have too much than too little. For example, I have a server running idle most of the time, but it's available to pick up a large long-running task when a user requests it. Analogously, when catering for an event, people often aim to have more than enough food for almost all scenarios, so they'll throw away food almost all the time. Running a restaurant is catering an event every day. When I was a teenager, I worked at Subway and we'd try to have more than enough bread (we only ran out once when we didn't anticipate a large sports-win-based city-wide party), so we'd throw away excess bread at the end of each day. Of course, people are starving and that's terrible. But reducing food waste in developed countries doesn't seem like a powerful lever to reduce it. Non-wasted food isn't going to be transported to developing nations. Reducing food demand would likely decrease food prices, but I wouldn't expect a large decrease. If my understanding is correct, the food supply is quite elastic, meaning we can easily produce more if there's people willing and able to pay for it. I think that the two main problems behind starvation are the lack of purchasing power of the poverty-stricken, and broken political systems. Solving those would eliminate starvation, even if the developed nations waste as much food as they like. (I'm no expert on this and welcome any corrections or opposing views.)

dools 12y ago
About 7 years ago I remember in Australia we had a couple of bad years of drought and there was a food shortage. I remember reading in the paper that this would put the cost of food up, in some cases because we would be importing but in other cases becasue of the simple fact that when things are scarce they cost more. What was really striking to me is that no-one was going to go hungry - we weren't going to run out of food. It would just cost more. Therefore people would naturally waste less food I suppose. So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away. The same goes for virtually all resources: power, water, petrol etc. what the political debate always dodges here is that in order to reduce consumption the cost has to go up which means discretionary spending power will decrease and the economy will collapse. The sooner the better.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  The reason you didn't starve wasn't that people just wasted less, but also that you had the capacity to import. The economy that you so hate is what prevented you from starving in the first place. The countries that experience hunger are either too poor to afford imports or involved in a conflict.
  - dools 12y ago
    If Australia didn't have the economic capacity to import there may have been a shortage to the extent that some poeple would have starved, but what would that really look like? Expensive food. Rich people wouldn't starve.
- alexeisadeski3 12y ago
  >So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away. Wut
  - vidarh 12y ago
    I guess he's saying that for food to be this cheap seen with our eyes, there needs to be a substantial oversupply. And since there are physical limitations to how much food we are able to actually eat, if there's an oversupply a bunch of it will be thrown away, whether by farmers, distributors or consumers: Either they fail to sell the food, or the low prices gets consumers to buy more than they need.
    - SixSigma 12y ago
      Food only looks cheap at the point of consumption. Millions of tax dollars went into the subsidy.
      - Retric 12y ago
        Depends on the type, some food receives no subsidy. Meat tends to receive a huge subsidys.
r0h1n 12y ago
I'm sorry but throwing food is nothing like shutting down a server. In the first case (food), significant amounts of water, energy and effort have been expended to create what is being thrown away, but in the latter case you merely stop using electricity or bandwidth (which doesn't get wasted). A better comparison would be buying 3-4 different types of servers because you weren't sure what the final load would be, and then deciding to throw away a few because you bought too many. California, America's "salad bowl", is facing a drought that threatens to turn it into a dust bowl. So even as a foreigner I'd think America throwing away 35 million tonnes of food every year is a serious cause for concern.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > California, America's "salad bowl", is facing a drought that threatens to turn it into a dust bowl. Then how about it stops trying to grow rice in semi-deserts? That's probably much more of a problem in that regard than some already-produced food being thrown away.
Rapzid 12y ago
I think you're spot on. I have read many articles suggesting that the problem is not food production, it's the logistics around getting it from the people who are producing it to the people who need it. This is not free, and quite expensive. I recall the first time I became aware of this, they mentioned a BOAT LOAD of rice that had been donating but it was waiting on transportation funds to move to those in need. It's my understanding that we can provide for everyone on earth so that their is no starvation. Unfortunately capitalism isn't quite up to the task.
- XorNot 12y ago
  Capitalism has very little to do with it. How do you stop a local warlord who uses starvation to control his people? How do you deal with all his cronies and standover men who are then out of business once you do? How do you then deal with the newly found dependence, and superstition about the colonists who came in and removed him? Coz they sure look like just another warlord and so on and so forth. If capitalism was the only problem with world hunger, then we'd have already solved it.
Shivetya 12y ago
broken political systems are the primary cause of starvation because they inherently disrupt supply and production; simply look towards Venezuela for an example if Zimbabwe where productive countries took a drastic turn for the worse. In the US throw in the issue that many companies do not understand the protection afforded by the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Law or that many facilities needing donations have no way to pick them up. Some cities have processes in place to organize and pick up donations and there are even some charity groups that do it, but its not widespread. A lot of waste in grocery is expired fruits, vegetables, and bakery, that may not be covered under the Emerson bill
- bilbo0s 12y ago
  I'm admittedly a little ill informed on the subject of Venezuela, (though I don't believe people starve in Venezuela either. I've just never been there, so I can't say for sure)... But people in Zimbabwe don't starve. I'm curious where you got this idea? There are a lot of parts of Africa where people DO starve however. Additionally, Zimbabwe's agricultural industry has never been a producer of food. Their principal product was tobacco... which was then traded for food. (Among other things.) You are correct about one thing... the broken political system did do in the tobacco farmers.
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
As much as we like to ignore it in our ivory tech towers, lack of affordable food is a problem in most developed countries. Also, the production and distribution of food produces a lot a waste that is considerably more problematic than organic waste.
k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "we'd throw away excess bread at the end of each day" And here's the problem. Good food getting wasted. That bread would be perfectly fine the next day and 90% of people would be happy with it but the business would rather waste it and have something perfect. The same thing happens in grocery stores. If a multi pack of crisps/chips splits they throw out the entire thing even though every pack inside the large container remains sealed. They could sell those individually or tape up the outer container and offer a discount. When I worked in a grocery store the amount of good food thrown away was unbelievable. I'm sure the amount of wasted food could be reduced significantly by focusing on these areas which don't fall under the 'better to have too much than too little' rule you mentioned.
- disputin 12y ago
  I'm guessing you got voted down because people don't want to eat bread baked the previous evening. Of course, I don't know because there are no frikkin' comments from the trigger happy. Even if they don't like your bread idea, doesn't your multi-pack point cancel that out? Waitrose discounts ageing sandwiches. I think you have a point that small improvements could be made in multiple areas. Assuming waste is a problem.
  - ntaso 12y ago
    In Germany, in some places there are bakeries that offer bread from the day before for a discount.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Jimmy Johns, the sandwich shop, specifically markets their day-old bread for 50 cents/loaf. It appears there is a (small) market for less than perfect food.
- mendort 12y ago
  In my region there is a group of charities that get food that would otherwise have been thrown out from local grocery stores. The handling of the food tends to be a bit careless so it's best to stay away from the things that really need to be refrigerated, but it was really helpful for me when I was unemployed. So I for one am glad that grocery stores have too much.
xtrasmart 12y ago
calorie reduction diet has been shown to drastically extend lifespan of rats. people are reporting the same thing as well. bodies run more efficiently. also can't there be a compost program for mixed food? i mean we compost compostable stuff and mulch make things grow in our garden very well. I think the city was going to even collect organic waste use for citywide processing and composting to be used on city grounds. this could be a boon to replacement of fertilizers and move towards self sustainability. my 2c
- kalleboo 12y ago
  > also can't there be a compost program for mixed food? Aren't there? I don't know how it looks in the US, but half the municipalities in Sweden collect food waste along with the recycling, turning it into natural gas, fertilizer and electricity/heat. http://matavfall.vasyd.se/media/2187/matavfallsprocess.pdf http://matavfall.vasyd.se/media/2187/matavfallsprocess.pdf
Lazare 12y ago
Basically, yes. In developed countries we spend a historically small percentage of our income on food, because food is cheap and abundant. Meanwhile, as you say, the problem with starvation is a lack of purchasing power. Amartya Sen won a Nobel prize for showing this, in fact. Over and over we see regions with famines exporting food, not importing food; Sen initially showed this was the case for the Bengal Famine of 1943, but it has been seen many times. People think the Irish potato famine was all about potato blight, but to quote Wikipedia "Records show Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine" and "Ireland exported approximately thirty to fifty shiploads per day to Britain, which was more than enough to feed the population." The same pattern has shown up in Africa over, and over, and over, for example in the Somali famine of 1981, or the Somali famine of 2001. (This is also why food aid to stricken regions so frequently makes things worth. Donate a few hundred tons of food, and the market for food in the region crashes. Good for the urban poor; terrible for the rural farmers and pastoralists who are usually the primary victims of a famine. Worse, "death spirals" have been documented where the price of cows drops so low that farmers can no longer afford to feed them, and end up having to slaughter them all, just as the market price is at the lowest. Then when food prices recover, the herds are dead and the farmers are bankrupt, and can afford neither food nor new cows. And the famine keeps on rolling.) In short: You're right. Food wastage in America has no impact overseas. Edit: There's also some political issues. India is currently fighting tooth and nail to protect the millions of small grocers and shopkeepers from the international supermarkets and "big box" retailers. India points out—correctly—that if WalMart or its kin come in, many of those small shopkeepers will lose their jobs. Economists point out—correctly—that the existing system is horrifically inefficient. For the system as a whole, those jobs are a massive cost centre, begging to be rationalised with automated warehouses, containerization, RFID tags, the whole 9 yards, instead of the archaic, expensive, inefficient system now that wastes so much of what passes through it through wastage, overheads, spoilage, etc. The same fight is also brewing over farming; peasant farmers are horrifically expensive and inefficient, but while a few mega farms could produce several times as much food for less total cost, they would do so with a tiny fraction of the manpower. And the urban jobs for the peasant farmers do not exist, and throwing them out of work would be a humanitarian disaster which the Indian government is not equipped to deal with. And so on. Food is cheap and abundant in the West as part of a massive system of technology and infrastructure; as much as we might wish otherwise, it cannot be easily grafted onto a non-Western society without major changes which Africa and India, at least, are not yet able to embrace.
oftenwrong 12y ago
Many stores sell "yesterday's bread" which keeps well if sliced and frozen, or can be used for bread crumbs, bread pudding, French toast, crouton, etc. One time I was in a store and asked where they had "yesterday's bread", and they said they don't have any because at the end of the day they donate it to some organization that collects excess food and distributes it to the poor.

dools 12y ago

About 7 years ago I remember in Australia we had a couple of bad years of drought and there was a food shortage. I remember reading in the paper that this would put the cost of food up, in some cases because we would be importing but in other cases becasue of the simple fact that when things are scarce they cost more. What was really striking to me is that no-one was going to go hungry - we weren't going to run out of food. It would just cost more. Therefore people would naturally waste less food I suppose. So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away. The same goes for virtually all resources: power, water, petrol etc. what the political debate always dodges here is that in order to reduce consumption the cost has to go up which means discretionary spending power will decrease and the economy will collapse. The sooner the better.

tomjen3 12y ago
The reason you didn't starve wasn't that people just wasted less, but also that you had the capacity to import. The economy that you so hate is what prevented you from starving in the first place. The countries that experience hunger are either too poor to afford imports or involved in a conflict.
- dools 12y ago
  If Australia didn't have the economic capacity to import there may have been a shortage to the extent that some poeple would have starved, but what would that really look like? Expensive food. Rich people wouldn't starve.
alexeisadeski3 12y ago
>So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away. Wut
- vidarh 12y ago
  I guess he's saying that for food to be this cheap seen with our eyes, there needs to be a substantial oversupply. And since there are physical limitations to how much food we are able to actually eat, if there's an oversupply a bunch of it will be thrown away, whether by farmers, distributors or consumers: Either they fail to sell the food, or the low prices gets consumers to buy more than they need.
  - SixSigma 12y ago
    Food only looks cheap at the point of consumption. Millions of tax dollars went into the subsidy.
    - Retric 12y ago
      Depends on the type, some food receives no subsidy. Meat tends to receive a huge subsidys.

r0h1n 12y ago

I'm sorry but throwing food is nothing like shutting down a server. In the first case (food), significant amounts of water, energy and effort have been expended to create what is being thrown away, but in the latter case you merely stop using electricity or bandwidth (which doesn't get wasted). A better comparison would be buying 3-4 different types of servers because you weren't sure what the final load would be, and then deciding to throw away a few because you bought too many. California, America's "salad bowl", is facing a drought that threatens to turn it into a dust bowl. So even as a foreigner I'd think America throwing away 35 million tonnes of food every year is a serious cause for concern.

Dewie 12y ago
> California, America's "salad bowl", is facing a drought that threatens to turn it into a dust bowl. Then how about it stops trying to grow rice in semi-deserts? That's probably much more of a problem in that regard than some already-produced food being thrown away.

Rapzid 12y ago

I think you're spot on. I have read many articles suggesting that the problem is not food production, it's the logistics around getting it from the people who are producing it to the people who need it. This is not free, and quite expensive. I recall the first time I became aware of this, they mentioned a BOAT LOAD of rice that had been donating but it was waiting on transportation funds to move to those in need. It's my understanding that we can provide for everyone on earth so that their is no starvation. Unfortunately capitalism isn't quite up to the task.

XorNot 12y ago
Capitalism has very little to do with it. How do you stop a local warlord who uses starvation to control his people? How do you deal with all his cronies and standover men who are then out of business once you do? How do you then deal with the newly found dependence, and superstition about the colonists who came in and removed him? Coz they sure look like just another warlord and so on and so forth. If capitalism was the only problem with world hunger, then we'd have already solved it.

Shivetya 12y ago

broken political systems are the primary cause of starvation because they inherently disrupt supply and production; simply look towards Venezuela for an example if Zimbabwe where productive countries took a drastic turn for the worse. In the US throw in the issue that many companies do not understand the protection afforded by the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Law or that many facilities needing donations have no way to pick them up. Some cities have processes in place to organize and pick up donations and there are even some charity groups that do it, but its not widespread. A lot of waste in grocery is expired fruits, vegetables, and bakery, that may not be covered under the Emerson bill

bilbo0s 12y ago
I'm admittedly a little ill informed on the subject of Venezuela, (though I don't believe people starve in Venezuela either. I've just never been there, so I can't say for sure)... But people in Zimbabwe don't starve. I'm curious where you got this idea? There are a lot of parts of Africa where people DO starve however. Additionally, Zimbabwe's agricultural industry has never been a producer of food. Their principal product was tobacco... which was then traded for food. (Among other things.) You are correct about one thing... the broken political system did do in the tobacco farmers.

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

As much as we like to ignore it in our ivory tech towers, lack of affordable food is a problem in most developed countries. Also, the production and distribution of food produces a lot a waste that is considerably more problematic than organic waste.

k-mcgrady 12y ago

>> "we'd throw away excess bread at the end of each day" And here's the problem. Good food getting wasted. That bread would be perfectly fine the next day and 90% of people would be happy with it but the business would rather waste it and have something perfect. The same thing happens in grocery stores. If a multi pack of crisps/chips splits they throw out the entire thing even though every pack inside the large container remains sealed. They could sell those individually or tape up the outer container and offer a discount. When I worked in a grocery store the amount of good food thrown away was unbelievable. I'm sure the amount of wasted food could be reduced significantly by focusing on these areas which don't fall under the 'better to have too much than too little' rule you mentioned.

disputin 12y ago
I'm guessing you got voted down because people don't want to eat bread baked the previous evening. Of course, I don't know because there are no frikkin' comments from the trigger happy. Even if they don't like your bread idea, doesn't your multi-pack point cancel that out? Waitrose discounts ageing sandwiches. I think you have a point that small improvements could be made in multiple areas. Assuming waste is a problem.
- ntaso 12y ago
  In Germany, in some places there are bakeries that offer bread from the day before for a discount.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Jimmy Johns, the sandwich shop, specifically markets their day-old bread for 50 cents/loaf. It appears there is a (small) market for less than perfect food.
mendort 12y ago
In my region there is a group of charities that get food that would otherwise have been thrown out from local grocery stores. The handling of the food tends to be a bit careless so it's best to stay away from the things that really need to be refrigerated, but it was really helpful for me when I was unemployed. So I for one am glad that grocery stores have too much.

xtrasmart 12y ago

calorie reduction diet has been shown to drastically extend lifespan of rats. people are reporting the same thing as well. bodies run more efficiently. also can't there be a compost program for mixed food? i mean we compost compostable stuff and mulch make things grow in our garden very well. I think the city was going to even collect organic waste use for citywide processing and composting to be used on city grounds. this could be a boon to replacement of fertilizers and move towards self sustainability. my 2c

kalleboo 12y ago
> also can't there be a compost program for mixed food? Aren't there? I don't know how it looks in the US, but half the municipalities in Sweden collect food waste along with the recycling, turning it into natural gas, fertilizer and electricity/heat. http://matavfall.vasyd.se/media/2187/matavfallsprocess.pdf http://matavfall.vasyd.se/media/2187/matavfallsprocess.pdf

Lazare 12y ago

Basically, yes. In developed countries we spend a historically small percentage of our income on food, because food is cheap and abundant. Meanwhile, as you say, the problem with starvation is a lack of purchasing power. Amartya Sen won a Nobel prize for showing this, in fact. Over and over we see regions with famines exporting food, not importing food; Sen initially showed this was the case for the Bengal Famine of 1943, but it has been seen many times. People think the Irish potato famine was all about potato blight, but to quote Wikipedia "Records show Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine" and "Ireland exported approximately thirty to fifty shiploads per day to Britain, which was more than enough to feed the population." The same pattern has shown up in Africa over, and over, and over, for example in the Somali famine of 1981, or the Somali famine of 2001. (This is also why food aid to stricken regions so frequently makes things worth. Donate a few hundred tons of food, and the market for food in the region crashes. Good for the urban poor; terrible for the rural farmers and pastoralists who are usually the primary victims of a famine. Worse, "death spirals" have been documented where the price of cows drops so low that farmers can no longer afford to feed them, and end up having to slaughter them all, just as the market price is at the lowest. Then when food prices recover, the herds are dead and the farmers are bankrupt, and can afford neither food nor new cows. And the famine keeps on rolling.) In short: You're right. Food wastage in America has no impact overseas. Edit: There's also some political issues. India is currently fighting tooth and nail to protect the millions of small grocers and shopkeepers from the international supermarkets and "big box" retailers. India points out—correctly—that if WalMart or its kin come in, many of those small shopkeepers will lose their jobs. Economists point out—correctly—that the existing system is horrifically inefficient. For the system as a whole, those jobs are a massive cost centre, begging to be rationalised with automated warehouses, containerization, RFID tags, the whole 9 yards, instead of the archaic, expensive, inefficient system now that wastes so much of what passes through it through wastage, overheads, spoilage, etc. The same fight is also brewing over farming; peasant farmers are horrifically expensive and inefficient, but while a few mega farms could produce several times as much food for less total cost, they would do so with a tiny fraction of the manpower. And the urban jobs for the peasant farmers do not exist, and throwing them out of work would be a humanitarian disaster which the Indian government is not equipped to deal with. And so on. Food is cheap and abundant in the West as part of a massive system of technology and infrastructure; as much as we might wish otherwise, it cannot be easily grafted onto a non-Western society without major changes which Africa and India, at least, are not yet able to embrace.

oftenwrong 12y ago

Many stores sell "yesterday's bread" which keeps well if sliced and frozen, or can be used for bread crumbs, bread pudding, French toast, crouton, etc. One time I was in a store and asked where they had "yesterday's bread", and they said they don't have any because at the end of the day they donate it to some organization that collects excess food and distributes it to the poor.