Food Waste is Hard to Deal With.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Food Waste is Hard to Deal With.

Mirthless: Mar 27, 2011; by the sex ghost

wateroverfire posted:

Maybe we can move the derail in the Techbros thread here.

Food waste happens, but most of it happens where it's hard to deal with. France will mandate that unsold food be given away to charities by large stores. However, most food waste occurs at the consumer level. That is, people buy food then don't eat it.

Big stores are just not that big a part of the problem, comparatively. Which makes sense if you think about it, because they have every incentive to reduce the wastage eating into their profits. However, they're easy targets for scapegoating and the easiest source of waste to regulate.

ITT let's try to agree on the facts.

This is kind of like people who bring up cows every time somebody talks about how quickly the water table is shrinking in California, "Well, guys, I know you're blaming Almonds/Pistachios/Alfalfa/Tomatoes/Etc but the REAL water consumers are cattle ranchers!" as if cutting back water consumption with any of those crops wouldn't also help the problem. "Welp, it's not the main source of the trouble so we'd better just do nothing at all!" is very poor reasoning imo.

If there's only one practical target for regulation then that is what is going to get regulated. At least 10% of the food France throws in the garbage gets saved. Surely the 10% of property that poor business owners get stolen from them (out of their garbage) by The Takers would be enough to feed the 150,000 homeless people in France.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 15:49

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 07:17

Mirthless: Mar 27, 2011; by the sex ghost

Yes, the Business Insider is here to tell us why the free market can't spare the food they're throwing in the 100,000 dollar industrial trash compactor they keep out back that is the size of two shipping containers stacked on top of each other and more than big enough to hold an entire week worth of food

# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 16:02

Mirthless: Mar 27, 2011; by the sex ghost

I mean for real though please explain how the administrative costs/storage space of food for the homeless is too much but the giant, expensive trash compactors that have become ubiquitous as a way to keep out the hungry are found behind every grocery store in America

# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 16:03

Mirthless: Mar 27, 2011; by the sex ghost

e: nvm

# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 16:06

Mirthless: Mar 27, 2011; by the sex ghost

Chomp8645 posted:

I waste a lot of food because I'm single and cannot buy a lot of things in portions that won't go bad.

The small containers of milk aren't enough and if I bought them I'd constantly run out. But a gallon is too big for just me and some will always go bad. There is no way I'm going to finish a whole loaf of bread myself before it molds so some slices always get thrown out. Any fruit that is not bought individually or is very large means I either have to gorge myself on fruit for the next day or two or throw some away. Buying a roast chicken means I better have chicken for dinner the next four days or throw some out.

Sorry I don't want to waste food but when you are just buying food for one it's a choice between buying constantly buying small portions (so a lot of hassle and greater expense) or just buying the normal portions and wasting some. Guess which method wins out.

The biggest problem is that the food industry has figured out that sane portion sizes is a marketable trait, so they charge you extra for less product because they know people will pay more for the convenience.

If you could buy a half loaf of bread people would buy half loaves of bread. The high end bread brands all sel half-loaves and seem to do just fine, but they're the only companies that do that. You can't just go to the dollar store and pay a 1.00 for half as many slices as the 1.80 white bread loaf. Instead it's $3.25 for the half of the $4 loaf of rye

We desperately need smaller standard package sizes and better proportional pricing to reflect it. It's not just the waste, our packaging and pricing schemes in the US are also contributing to diabetes in a huge way and that is an epidemic that is going to kill a whole lot of people and cost our society a whole lot of money in the long term

# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 16:28

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 07:17

Mirthless: Mar 27, 2011; by the sex ghost

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.

computer parts posted:

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.

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.

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.

Convenience products are often priced higher because yes, it is more expensive to produce, package and sell a smaller portion. But the proportional increases in price don't always make sense and there are total absences, like the aforementioned loaf of bread. Why is the only half loaf of bread in the grocery store the 4 dollar premium loaf? (Because it's way easier to just sell the full loaf of white bread to a consumer, since they'll pay the full price, needing bread regardless, and the grocery store doesn't care if the excess gets thrown away) This isn't going to be applicable in every scenario, of course, but there are still plenty of things in your supermarket that could be smaller at a reasonable price and aren't. (Why do I have to buy 8 hot dogs? Why do I have to buy 8 ounces of cheese? Will creating 4 dog/4 oz cheese packs make it impossible to sell the 8oz equivalents? Will they sell fewer overall hot dogs and less overall cheese if people aren't wasting excess product? And if that's the case, can't you make up the difference in the margins without it still being proportionally lopsided? Or in the extra things people are going to be able to buy now that they're not being forced to buy 12 extra slices of bread, 4 extra ounces of cheese and 4 extra hot dogs every time they want to make chilidogs?

The problem with looking at hunger and food waste as a singular problem is that the issue is complicated and there are a lot of individual components, but any improvement at this point is better than nothing. Will half loaves of wonderbread end world hunger and food waste? No. But it might result in a few thousand fewer loaves of bread a year ending up in the garbage.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

One of the reasons frozen dinners get grief is actually because they can be very, very unhealthy. A lot of them are primarily made of corn and salt. People also automatically think of the cheapest kinds of frozen foods and associate the frozen aisle with those people.

Part of it is because those people might not be able to afford more trips to the store than once a month when food stamps come out so they need to buy for the whole month. Suburbanites that can afford to go whenever they feel like it can get fresh produce all the time so they typically will.

Granted the other side of it is just not wanting to be viewed as lazy. Frozen food just has a nasty reputation all around that it doesn't deserve. It also doesn't help that somebody decided that freezing something ruins every nutrient it has, which is absolute bullshit. Frozen vegetables are just as good as fresh.

Agricultural subsidies make TV dinners and other convenience food artificially cheap, IMO, and are part of the problem. You'd think farm subsidies would have a positive impact on hunger, but it just encourages waste and overproduction (hence why corn is in loving everything) and masks the actual problem of "real" food being completely unaffordable for some people. It is a problem if it's legitimately cheaper (and sadly these days it often is) to feed your family a product that someone had to research and develop and package and market than it is to just feed them fruits, vegetables and a protein

It's like we force poor people to make bad choices by limiting the available options and then crucify them for taking the only choices we made available to them.

Mirthless fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Mar 23, 2016

# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 19:12

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Food Waste is Hard to Deal With.