We produce enough food to feed everyone, it’s just that it’s not profitable to do so because the rich are greedy ghouls.
“Here, live off of my garbage.”
That’s sort of what some European countries are doing with some African ones regarding “recycling”.
Like it or not, there are a fixed amount of resources on this planet. Letting the standard for quality of life drop or using it as an excuse is not a solution.
There are more than enough resources to go around. We don’t need to give them our scraps.
Our “quality” of life does need to change. We do not need a new phone every few years, we don’t need fast fashion, we don’t need 50 different varieties of plain salt chips on the supermarket shelves.
We can reduce, reuse, and repair much of what we already have and live extremely comfortably while giving more to others who have less.
Capitalism depends on violence and deprivation to keep labor desperate and exploitable.
The weird part is that the rest of us don’t simply devour those who are perpetuating this evil on almost everyone else.
I dont really understand im sorry.
Yes, wealth is distributed unfairly.
However, the value of spoiled food and the existence of discarded furniture isn’t really evidence of anything? Practically by definition, no one wants that stuff, even hungry and / or homeless people.
Thus the problems are logistics and overconsumption
Furniture can easily be restored instead of being thrown away. And parts of that furniture (if it’s damaged beyond repair) could be recycled (i.e. glass).
I have a friend who chose not to replace his 50+ year old wooden floor in his house, but rather call a restoring company. He sent me a pic with that done and it’s looking gorgeous.
Amazing. I can’t believe no one else has thought of this “restoration” life hack over the millennia /s.
Many homeless do want it, it’s often illegal to dumpster dive.
But that problem could be alleviated before it happens. If you know a region wastes X food, you supply less.
We don’t fairly supply our food resources because we decided “poor” people don’t deserve access to it.
Oh man.
If only there were some way we could incentivise suppliers to supply the correct amount to different regions. Like some kind of reward or financial incentive for applying the correct amount? /s
Sadly such a system if it existed would never work. It would lead to people chasing higher imaginary numbers that can only come from taking more of other people imaginary numbers away from them.
Some of the large grocery store spoilage is because it is not sold quick enough. This week I grabbed a had of lettuce for sandwiches, $6, so I put it back. Same every week the prices are over inflated but wages aren’t. This stuff gets tossed eventually. Have reasonable prices or controlled prices would ensure more good produce kis eaten and not discarded. Canada wastes ~ 45% of food.
People toss perfectly good furniture and electronics out because they don’t want the inconvienence of listing for free on market place or Craigslist
There was a large item waste pickup at out apartment recently, somebody put out a perfectly good desk and drawers. Looked new but had a small scratch on one panel edge ( easy to paint over or touch up )
Also thrift stores exist which are discarded belongings. I pickup what I can at thift stores in the way of electronics and reflash firmware or reformat etc, and put it out on the market. Trouble is majority of thift stores don’t accept electronics because they don’t know the working condition, so those items go to the dump.
My local Goodwill thrift has a deal with Dell, where the stores get paid a flat fee to just recycle every computer, instead of hiring or training someone to check if they’re working for resale. And Dell gets to reduce the size of the local used computer market.
Ugh
The thing you are missing is that not all the food is spoiled. Restaurants and supermarkets do not allow employees to take home food that is going to the dumpster, even if it is still good to eat for that night. Perfectly edible food is being thrown away since giving it to employees would “cause employees to make unsellable food so they can take it home at the end of the day”. It is all greedy mental gymnastics by corporate assholes who want to line their pockets by making food a scarcity.
Discarded does NOT by definition mean nobody wants it. It means that somebody threw something away. There could be plenty of people who wanted or needed it but were prevented from obtaining it due to greed or regulation.
Those greedy corporate assholes have an incentive to maintain an efficient distribution system. They dont make money by throwing food away. Any system has some waste.
Here its not really possible to discard furniture that might be usable. When you go to the rubbish dump with a load of stuff someone inspects what youve got and directs you to sort recyclables and furniture and stuff that someone may want. Only real waste ends up in landfill.
I agree with you but there are logistic challenges to getting 1/3 of a banana to the person who needs it. This example may seem silly but it’s a realistic example of household food waste.
But I agree that solving hunger should be a society’s top priority which it clearly isn’t under a food for profit model
The issue I see is overpriced food leading to low amount of buyers so the food spoils. Because Loblaws doesn’t care about feeding everyone they want most profit even if it means tossing food away to maintain the pricing
The food could have been given to someone hungry before it spoiled in the fridge.
The furniture could have been given to someone else instead of tossing it for the newer model/different decor.
My in-laws throw half-eaten food away every day. They redecorate for every season and usually only keep entire couches for 2-3 years. I’m assuming they’re an extreme outlier, but I know plenty of people who toss food like it’s fashionable to waste half your fridge every week, and get new furniture when I see nothing wrong with the old furniture.
Too few are the type to get a new chair only when the old one has broken in half, and eat everything they made for lunch.
The majority of the food isn’t spoiled. There’s nothing wrong with it before it goes to the landfill, it just looks funny. Same for the furniture and clothes. That was last seasons stock, and we can’t give it away, so into the dump it goes. They do the same with housing. It just takes longer. The worst thing you can do with a building is let it sit empty. They rot quicker that way.
Hyperbole.
Yes some things are wasted, that doesn’t mean they can be redistributed to solve scarcity.
It means its not economically viable to get those things to the people who need them.
The liars who pushed “there isn’t enough for everyone” aren’t pushing it much anymore. They’ve moved on to saying “not everyone deserves basic human needs”—which is what they really thought all along.
If you cannot pay for it, you don’t deserve it. The basic tenet of capitalism.
are you posting that though in a quote fashion or somewhat sarcastic or do you actually believe it?
Name a place you can exist in the capitalist Dreamland of the USA without paying money to do so?
The Library!
i dont think i can. whats your point?
It’s sarcasm
Ecofascism is really about the fascism part at the end of the day.
What? I haven’t seen any ecofascists. The fascists are yet to give a fuck about ecology and climate. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism
Eco-fascists have been around for yonks. 90% of the time you hear people utter shit like ‘there’s too many people, we need a plague to cure the planet’ that’s an ecofash.
Funny how they’re never willing to sacrifice themselves/their family/friends/community though. It’s always others who must die in order to
make lebensraumsave the planet.
The storage unit business is still booming, growing at over 7% annually in NA.
We have so much shit we have to rent units offsite to store our shit.And that’s happening at the same time that the square footage per capita has increased dramatically. Not only are houses bigger now, but household size (number of people living in each house) has shrunk too. That’s how much shit we got.
Is this happening in rural areas? I feel like in cities and suburbs there are more people living in a household. Like roommates or multiple families, because of how expensive housing is.
I agree about the furniture, electronics and housing part. But food gets spoiled rather rapidly unfortunately. Any effort to give food away to those in need would have to move the goods quick enough.
We have long life food, it still goes into the bin at your local supermarket.
Food insecurity is a capitalism problem. We can supply logistics to anywhere in the world if we want. We have more than enough to feed everyone. We don’t because profit is the motivation not humanity.
Any effort to give food away to those in need would have to move the goods quick enough.
Having volunteered at a local food bank I can confidently say that it is absolutely possible to do. And not even that difficult, assuming there is a genuine will to do it.
Annoyingly, there are still far too many companies in the food supply chain whose mindset is that they would rather trash something than allow it to get into the hands of people who need it without them paying for it.
Stuff was tried and is being tried. For example, in my country, local supermarkets are giving away food that’s close to due date at a discount (mostly it’s 50%). It’s an easy way of buying food for cheap.
Logistically it’s a nightmare, but local food offerings in supermarkets and farmers markets are useful in reducing resources usage.
Logistically it’s not a nightmare. We already do it, we get crops grown in country A, shipped to country B to be processed before shipping them off to country C to sell. We could easily work out to send less to C and more to D, if we wanted to.
It’s a capitalist choice to not supply everyone.
Logistically a nightmare like having a “last chance” area where homeless and poor people can just take it before it gets thrown in the dumpster? Like, literally just allowing a space?
We put more effort into denying homeless people a place to exist than it would take to enable them to exist.
I know when I say “enable” people will immediately conflate that to “encourage”, but we’ve tried for decades to be as ruthless and unkind to homeless people and the numbers haven’t exactly plummeted.
If it is something for the homeless people inside the same city, it’s fine. However, I was thinking about the scenario where food would get transported from the richer parts of the world to the poorer parts of the world. In that case, I do not see the viability of a “last chance” - part of the food would still get spoiled and thrown away, unless you want to feed the poor some spoiled food.
I’d rather see more people educated not to buy too much food in the first place, then direct the remaining to the poor (and even, if possible, produce less in the 1st place. Have fewer cows, less agricultural land and more wild terrain (forests and the likes) if possible).
Oh, for sure transporting food across the world is a disastrously inefficient way to solve it.
I may be wrong about this, but I dont think there are many (if any) food-poor countries that are that way because of a lack of local fertile land.
I don’t think waste and excess are really the issue, but rather misallocation of resources, like you mentioned, raising cattle (or growing coffee/cocoa) over primary foods for profit over basic needs.
Something-something-communism, I suppose.
That’s true
but where’s the profit in that?! /s
