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silence_kit posted:I don't have a cost breakdown for food and other inexpensive consumer goods but you do realize that it's not just a corporate conspiracy that companies sell items in larger quantities for a lower cost per amount and there is such a thing as an economy of scale, right? Boutique brands can sell items in smaller amounts for the same cost per amount because their profit margin is greater. Yeah even I had this fallacy recently and I work with economies of scale. Basically it's not that the smaller food is more expensive, but that the larger food is cheaper. Ddraig posted:Actually I'm pretty sure most food waste is food that never even makes it to distribution because they contain cosmetic defects and some such, so even though it's a perfectly good food, it doesn't look perfect, and as such will not sell to major retailers etc. A lot of that gets used, just in a processed manner. For example, apples that don't look good but are otherwise fine turn into applesauce or apple juice.
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Mar 23, 2016 17:18
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ToxicSlurpee posted:A rather significant amount of it is a mix of that and stuff that just wasn't sold. Supermarkets, restaurants, and whatever are expected to have everything in stock all the time so they overstock by default, knowing ahead of time they'll never sell all of it. The stuff they don't sell just goes in the garbage. Some places have been selling it as compost but you'll see things like pizza places throwing away entire stacks of perfectly edible pies and contaminating it so nobody can eat it. I'd actually like to see data on this because at least for grocery stores it's a very very low margin business (about as close to even as you can get) so people throwing out stacks of anything are really bad at their jobs. Of course this probably also explains why most startup restaurants go bankrupt after 3 years.
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Mar 23, 2016 17:25
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Mirthless posted:Being a little obtuse here, guys. You're right in some (many!) cases. For example, tiny cans of soda - of course those are expensive, Aluminum isn't cheap. But you can't seriously tell me that Wonderbread can't afford to take one loaf of bread, split it down the middle and put it in a second bag. The profit margins at grocery stores aren't so thin that they couldn't make up the quarter of a cent worth of increased cost per unit. A half a loaf of bread in two bags takes up exactly the same space on a truck as one loaf of bread. Yeah but another factor to consider is "who would only eat one half of a loaf but not one full loaf?" Even assuming you're unaware of freezing bread, most households can probably eat a loaf of bread in a week (or however long it takes to go bad). The ones that can't are either extremely small (like 1 person) or don't eat bread that much. In that case, they should probably find another source of grain, or change their eating habits.
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Mar 23, 2016 20:28
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PT6A posted:So, you basically get a set amount of basic staples, inexpensive proteins and in-season fresh produce, and then you'd be allowed to buy additional or different food if you chose to do so? I think the bigger point is that food waste is not really that significant, at least not if you want to avoid punishing individual people. It sounds cliche, but this really is a case where capitalism incentivizes correctly. Companies don't like giving away food for free, but they really don't like being put in a position where they'd have to give away food for free. Any businessman that's not a total idiot will say "If I'm having to throw away so much food, I must be making too much in the first place". Now this doesn't solve hunger issues, but that's an issue that works better from a state driven solution rather than what's (essentially) business provided charity.
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Mar 23, 2016 22:55
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Count Roland posted:Anyway, as far as food waste goes, I was surprised to see in the OP that 2/3rds of waste came from consumers. This was in France, I wonder how that number changes in other countries, or in urban vs rural areas. It's probably pretty close in other countries. The smaller scale you are, the harder it is to control your inputs and outputs (or the variation thereof anyway). The big scale operations are able to devote time and resources to determine if there is a problem, where the problem is coming from, and how to fix it. The average joe? Maybe he sees he's spending more than he should but he doesn't really know where because different stuff might go bad every week.
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Mar 24, 2016 17:14
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Grundulum posted:The OP says that 67% of food is lost at the consumer level in France, no? That is a far cry from 21%, and suggests that legislation targeting businesses and producers is even more important here. That's measuring two different things. The French numbers are measuring where food is lost. The US numbers are measuring where food goes. Of the total amount of food in the US, 31% is lost. Of that 31% lost, 67.7% (21/31) is lost at the consumer level. So the numbers are basically the same.
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Mar 25, 2016 01:23
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DARPA Dad posted:So what exactly makes fresh vegetables more nutritious than frozen ones? There is a nutritional difference between cooked and uncooked food but it hasn't been shown that the same applies to fresh & frozen.
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Mar 25, 2016 23:33
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meristem posted:Whenever the topic comes up, I always want to ask one question - how about a bit of a return to communal kitchens? You sacrifice flexibility (may not always get what you like) for efficiency (cooking for a hundred people is more efficient and easier to eliminate waste from than cooking for one, less time is spent overall preparing the food, it's easier to make the food up to health standards). It would definitely reduce food waste, but I don't know if that's a decent enough tradeoff for letting cooking skills wither. Also the unstated assumption people have is that "if we wasted less food, we could give that food to poor people". There's no guarantee of that happening.
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Mar 28, 2016 14:51
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I think this would help a lot (do any schools still do home ec?), and don't underestimate the number of people who are completely unprepared when it comes to cooking. Most of my friends growing up were in families where the vegetable side dish at dinner, if there was one, was something like boiled broccoli with slices of American cheese on top, or tater tots with slices of American cheese on top, or boiled peas with slices of American cheese on top. When you don't know how to boil an egg, just going to Arby's for dinner seems really appealing. The actual mechanics of cooking aren't that difficult (otherwise a lot more people would've starved to death historically). Like sticking stuff into a pot of water and keeping it warm for a few hours isn't quite caveman level, but it's pretty close. If anything is the limiting factor it's probably lack of time and lack of available resources (primarily equipment, though ingredients too). Lack of information is also possible but these days you can type "How to cook ____" and get a million different step by step instructions.
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Mar 29, 2016 06:48
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nigga crab pollock posted:
A pizza's probably healthier without cheese too.
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Mar 30, 2016 18:02
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Baronjutter posted:
Probably people who buy lots of fresh food, more than they need. Other stuff doesn't go bad.
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Mar 30, 2016 19:51
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Baronjutter posted:Wouldn't people buying like twice as much food as they need raise the price ? 70% of food is not wasted. Of the amount wasted, 20% come from consumers. So it's at most about 30% extra food.
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Mar 31, 2016 17:14
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If you want to minimize food waste, make stews. They're the ultimate "shove all your leftover raw ingredients together" food, and you can freeze whatever you don't immediately eat.
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Apr 5, 2016 16:14
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pugnax posted:Can someone summarize the nutrition talk/food waste connection? Or is it just a derail? Either way is cool, just don't quite understand the rationale. Food waste is not really that big of a deal, or at least there's not much to do without targeting individual people. Thus, the topic turned to how else food can be improved.
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Apr 15, 2016 17:44
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Obdicut posted:It's a much bigger deal outside the US, but if we figure out how to reduce it here, we can export that knowledge. We need all our systems to be sustainable and reducing food waste would help agricultural sustainability, but so would, like, not growing oranges in the desert. It's mostly a solved issue in developed nations. The solutions are going to be "act more like developed nations". In that respect, it's similar to (eg) the education debate.
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Apr 15, 2016 17:51
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