65
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
65 points (97.1% liked)
Ask Lemmy
40833 readers
1399 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Free food. We throw away billions of pounds of food because if it doesn't sell, they toss it.
Literally nobody should ever go hungry.
We can't have this because companies see giving away products as lost profits, and politicians see it as some handout.
Making sure a struggling human eats a warm sandwich does not change the billionaire eating lobster truffle caviar.
What are you really saying though?
Here charities do sell a lot of this food, where it's possible and viable to do so.
You can't sell food which is out of date because there's a high likelihood it will be harmful.
Yes, there is a lot of food waste, but IMO that's the inefficiency of logistics rather than greed or trust.
While some of the food waste is because of logistics, the majority of it is not, and one could argue that food shortages are because of logistics; they are one and the same.
When you have food deserts and grocery stores gauge how profitable they are by how much food they throw away, then it's more than "well the food went bad".
A major part of the "inefficiency of logistics" is caused by greed. It costs too much to distribute... because it doesn't make them enough money to do so.
I agree that there is the liability argument to be made that no company wants to deal with regarding food. That's why they spend the effort to recall products when they find something wrong with them, en masse. That's why in places like Wal-Mart, responsible associates take damaged food products like dented cans and give them to claims to be proceeded. Because nobody deserves to buy that kind of stuff.
However, there should be a point where if a grocery store or Wal-Mart for example, know that food product isn't selling as fast as they thought or that they just aren't seeing sales for it. Then yeah, they could do something about that than just mindlessly tossing it, like they could strike deals with food banks and charities to give those out with the understanding that they are about to go bad soon.
it's not that simple.
food has lots of costs of transport, storage, etc, those all get saved when you toss unsellable product.
also if you give stuff away for free, the market price would collapse. people would just wait to get it for free and then never buy the fresh product.
the issue with what you are talking about, is that while a single business might do this, it doesn't scale.
unless you make food production and distribution a controlled market and that has a boatload of new problems.
Tossing food might make those listed costs disappear... if it's tossed, or rather never harvested or collected, at the source, like on a farm or tree. Wait no even then there's costs associated.
Just kidding, stopped reading at "market." That word's a near sure sign that someone's definitely swallowed a lot of somethin that ain't food.
cool, then why don't you work for free then? since the market and money are just all made up concepts that don't exist.
and clearly material reality has no limits or restrictions.
by the way, nobody is stopping you from giving away ever penny of your own to feed hungry people... but you aren't doing that... i wonder why...
Proposing an individual solve a systemic problem is disingenuous. They're saying that society could fix the problem if it cared to; we are choosing to let kids go hungry as a culture because it "costs too much," as if the starving child isn't a too-high cost that we're already paying.
They're saying that we need to reevaluate our society's social priorities, and you're saying they should give up everything themselves if they care so much— as if that would solve the systemic problem instead of creating another starving person.
systematic problems exist because of individual choices.
you are society. you are traffic, etc.
it's pathetic, lazy, and shitty to be like 'someone else should solve this problem, but i can't do anything about it'.
when you absolutely can. you can absolutely volunteer or donate to a food pantry.
instead of wringing your hands on the internet about this 'ideal world that should be' while you do nothing to contribute to it. because it's easy to sit on your ass and day dream. it's a lot harder to go do the boring unrewarding work of actually making the world a better place, because when you do that you quickly realized how insignificant you are and how the 'need' never ends.
further, if you want to talk about systematic issues of hunger, then you shoudl do that properly and in detail instead fo this high concept moralizing shit. you should actually get into the gritty of how food is produced, shipped, and the numbers involved, but oh no, that's WORK, that's difficult and scary. we can't do that.
The irony is half the idiots who think there should be no world hunger, also don't understand the implications for what that would require, like a massive expansion of resources, of monoculture, and factory farming. all of which have huge negative externalities.
but again, it's EASY to sit here and bitch and downvote and idealize and distort a complex reality into a feel good tag line. and it feels good.
understanding how our food supply worlds and the tradeoffs in how it's structured and the incentives for what things it produced an dhow they are distributed doesn't feel good. and further, hunger has little to do with any of that and a lot more to do with power and corruption. but hey, why understand any of that when you can just blame grocery stores and farms as selfish evil greedy devils or something, when most of our food supply is a product of government policy.
Who blamed grocery stores and farms? I said it was a SYSTEMIC issue, which implies the SYSTEM is to blame, and that we should change that.
Nobody said it'd be easy, just that it's worth doing despite all the FrEe MaRkEt bloviating.
But keep fighting those straw men, you're so good at it. Meanwhile, I think we can absolutely afford to feed everyone because it's demonstrably true.
For someone who started their spiel with "it's not so simple..." you sure throw out a lot of extremely simplistic suggestions and examples to try and prove your point. Irony.
Also, you think I work a "job"? I suppose in your small simple world anyone who doesn't clock in and clock out is either homeless or uber rich and successful. Amazing what capitalism can do to brains.
like convince weirdos on the internet they are superior beings because they think 'capitalism bad' when they don't understand how anything works in the real world? because it's complex and difficult and that hurts their feelings?
anyway, keep daydreaming if that what gets your rocks off.
You sure hate mondays, huh?