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Food should not be a commodity
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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To make more food to stockpile and force people to buy or watch rot you silly billy!
Seriously though. Its one thing to want to sell the food, I get that people gotta get paid, but the fact that in a lot of places we just throw away the unsold food to rot in the rubbish is ridiculous!
Like seriously, we're just gonna throw away this food rather than even attempt to give it to those in need, and fire anybody who tries, cause it might slightly eat into profits?? That's just psychopathic levels of corporate apathy.
There are places where the trash bins of supermarkets are locked so homeless people can't take thrown away food from them
Most supermarkets have compactors.
Nutrition cubes
The excess is also insane. When people can't afford or won't afford the high beef prices, will the corporations who make it produce less or take it to market to be used in more sustainable products? As a society we've moved to not just make sure enough food is available but that everyone has an opportunity to purchase anything they might want. With fresh foods that means guaranteed waste, which means higher prices to make up for that waste.
My great grandparents ran a grocery store in a very small town. My grandfather ran a butcher counter that he got regular deliveries for and everyone in town knew the schedule, once the meat was gone, that was it until the next delivery. They grew produce in the summer and always canned any excess. There was always enough food for everyone who cared to buy it, but there wasn't so much that everyone could get everything at any time.
So, here's a problem: food logistics is a massive, complicated morass of infrastructure. Getting food from the area where it's produced to the area where there are people who want to eat it is difficult. A lot of individual steps have to go right for a bell pepper grown in Coahuila to show up in a grocery store in Tokyo, unspoilt and ready to eat.
The timing of when the pepper is picked, how fast it will ripen and how long until it spoils is built into the steps of the supply chain. The cost of the logistics system for distributing food, and the overhead for managing and containing the chaos, is probably substantially higher than the cost of actually producing the food.
The point being, when the bell pepper is at the store it is now ready for consumption. It will be there 2, maybe 3 days, and then if it is unsold it is at least halfway to rotten. Now at this point you want to try to redistribute it, which will require another supply chain, but there isn't time to figure out where to send an overripe bell pepper or who would want to eat it, or to pack it and ship it and then unpack it and hopefully use it before it's completely rotten.
Refrigeration is a wonderful technology that has brought massive reduction of food waste, but it has limits. You can't un-ripen a fruit. Trying to re-ship food at this point would not be worth the cost, and ultimately would create environmental harms that would outweigh any benefit.
Always buy local, as much as you can!
Okay, that's true for fresh produce with a minimal shelf life. But we also do that for shelf stable (like dried, canned, jarred) foods which can much more reasonably be donated after their display date.
And that's assuming some sort of centralised donation scheme, and not just mandating the stores donate to a local foodbank or such - which would make it a bit more feasible to donate some fresh produce.
As far as "buying local", there's no reason why we shouldn't be seed-bombing food plants everywhere. Destroying the soil to grow a field of peppers for example, to mass produce and mass distribute them across the world, is not sustainable. Why should food even be "bought" local or not? How are we not lining the streets with fruit trees? Why are urban environments packed full of shrubs and bushes that aren't growing food? Why are we using lawns to just grow trimmed grass? Why aren't we utilizing natures impeccable clockwork of self-maintaining edible gardens and forests? We have all the food energy we need raining down from the sky, why aren't our rooftops being used? We could be living in an abundance of food, all local, all free. Human societies have done that for thousands of years both before and after the so-called "agricultural revolution." We know it's possible. We figured out how to turn deserts into forests by just digging a bunch of semi-circles and waiting for a bit.
But we don't because number go down instead of up. There's no money to be made in that, so even the most altruistic of investors will be deterred from the lack of monetary ROI and not the ROI of a better world. It's like the world is stuck in Dark Ages Europe, where people couldn't imagine how the world could function without the Christian god, the gospel, and the divine leadership of Kings and Queens. Now we're in a dark age where people can't imagine the world functioning without money, economic models, and the divine leadership of investors and CEOs. Thinking otherwise makes you a heretic, and considering how they used to burn thousands for the heresy of atheism much like we kill thousands for the heresy of environmentalism.
We credit the Enlightenment era for getting us out of this braindead mindset, yet little has really changed. Whether you call it capitalism or socialism, we're still draining water tables and making land uninhabitable, then turning the land into gravel and call it "development" or "productivity". The whole universe is open to this sort of insanity. We really need to go back to the ideas that inspired the Enlightenment and opened European minds to something other than their death-cult religions, like the indigenous critiques of Native Americans.
I'm an atheist to people who believe in money - I just go one God further.
Dumpster diving is fun and easy.
Isnt eating food from dumpsters unsafe?
Meat/eggs/dairy, definitely.
Vegetables, maybe, depending on what else they've touched.
Dry/canned goods, probably not unless they're wet (e.g if it's in a cardboard box or paper package and it's damp, it's not worth the risk - if we're talking about grocery store waste then for all you know that was water used to wash the butcher's work station or mop the floor).
Bacterial contamination is your primary concern, and after that mold. Salmonella could just end your life.
Caveat on canned goods: avoid bloated cans if they contain any meat. Bloated fruit cans contain alcohol.
So you're saying bloated fruit cans are the ones to look for? Got it, thanks!
Provided the seals are intact, it's unlikely they contain anything worse than alcohol.
If they contain any meat at all, assume they're a biohazard.
But good luck finding them at all. Most places that sell canned food have compactors nowadays, and it's been that way for some time.
Oh yeah, good point, avoid any cans that look bent, dented or expanded.
Are dented cans a concern? I thought it just meant someone dropped them
The problem is that the seal around the end of the can might be broken in a not-obvious way. If air can get in, bacteria can start to grow inside.
TIL good to know
dented can ruin the seal
Unsold food that is given away creates a liability if it causes problems. Food banks are the middle man in that respect, where they can toss things that aren't going to stay good and provide for people with the rest. So here's where government, regulation, and socialism comes into play. Companies should be encouraged with money to do something other than toss that food. Better systems should be in place to move that food to the food bank. Better regulation there to make sure that the food is being examined well enough. More places for all this to happen.
This ignores fixing the real problem, profit driven consumption, societies where people aren't able to provide for themselves, etc.
So by itself you aren't going to get unsold food to the needy, the risk and cost is too great for companies.
Actually, this is completely false for US based companies.
They limited liability in 96
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Emerson_Good_Samaritan_Act_of_1996
Correct to say that’s the law the lawyers you pay will have to cite to defend your company in a suit? Which a big corporation we would hope would treat as a cost of doing business, of course.
Imagine some businesses are ignorant of the law and some are super paranoid about even baseless litigation.
Idk how widespread it is but I've volunteered with organizations that get massive shipments of unsold food that's then repackaged by them and then given out or sold at a substantially lower cost, so this does happen. This is backed by federal laws limiting the liability of donors, and at least in my state there are also laws limiting food waste to incentivize participation in such programs.
Make it easy for the corpos. Criminalize destroyed food. The financial disincentive needs to be very punitive like some percentage revenue first offense. Then jail time for execs and boards. Those companies may need to hire community coordinators to deal with the near expiring foodstuffs to avoid the criminal liability. Capitalists might assume people would stop buying food and just wait for it all to be near expiring, but the reality is, those with means will take the convenience of a purchase over a long, uncertain wait, potentially queuing hours or even the night before the food banks would open. It might depress prices as they get desperate to trade some of the remaining margin before being required to give it away. Oh no, what will we do if the rich people are slightly less rich!
Do you think industrial safety standards that companies spend tonnes of money on maintaining every year just popped out of thin air or the good will of companies?
Hell no. The mega-corps at least would be chucking children into factory machines 7 days a week like back in to early 20th century if they thought they could get away with it.
If you want companies to do something they're otherwise not incentivised to do, you regulate it into existence. Force their hands just like Governments did in the past, and have now become increasingly less willing to do because of blatant corruption.
The easiest path in my mind is a one-two combo...
Firstly you give minimal liability to the food donor, so as long as they made a good faith effort to check the food wasn't bad before handing it over you can't be sued (I.e. if you're giving a batch of cans, you'd check them for defects like bloating or cracks/dents).
Secondly, you create criminal liability for throwing away non-defective shelf stable foods (such as dried, canned and/or jarred foods) for companies over a certain size (to prevent from screwing over small businesses that may not have the logistics to ensure consistent donations).
Those two things create a pathway by which donations can be made with minimal risk, and disincentivise the route of least resistance (aka. Throwing it all away).