Every day when I get off work and I go to a local gas station, I see them throw away a bunch of prepared food that passed shelf life. This is a chain, so hundreds of locations do this every day. Tons of food per year, tossed in the trash because it sat in the heat box too long.
Imagine how many people could eat that food. It makes me upset.
I worked at a Dunkin for a summer and they had us throwing away two large trash bags full of food every night. It had to be 50lbs of food.
I started giving donuts to teenagers and an elderly Asian man that was always ecstatic to get a big bag of donuts and bagels. I didn’t have a car to transport it to a shelter, and this was in a rich area. It was disgusting
I once tried to buy a rye loaf from a local grocery store and the cashier couldn’t ring it up because it was one day expired. I said it looked fine to me, but she said the system won’t even let her.
So I said okay, don’t ring it up, just give it to me.
Another guy jumped in and took it, said no, it had to be thrown away.
They were literally not allowed to give me trash I was willing to pay for.
Capitalism is so efficient though! /s
There’s a right wing argument for deregulation lol
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May be they are avoiding getting sued. If someone gets sick. Especially junk food, which is unhealthy to begin with
Italy made it illegal for supermarkets to throw away food and forces them to donate it. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than wasting truckloads of food every day because they didn’t sell it in time.
This has been long debunked. Laws have passed that protect owners from this.
I used to work in a sandwich shop that made it’s own bread fresh daily. At the end of every day the owner started donating the leftover bread and explained how it’s an urban myth.
People just don’t like to share.
I’m sad to say that you’re so correct, I wish I could give you three upvotes…
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Absolutely. Binding any basic need to profits is atrocious if you think about it.
It’s already non profitable to feed people, that’s why it’s said that hunger is a problem of logistics and not problem of production capacity.
it’s already non profitable to feed people
what a goofy thing to lie about. every restaurant and grocer in the world is just losing profits daily?
lol…Nope.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/business/food-prices-profits.html
https://time.com/6269366/food-company-profits-make-groceries-expensive/
https://www.vox.com/money/23641875/food-grocery-inflation-prices-billionaires
Between 2021 and 2022, the food and beverage industry recorded more than $155 billion in profits, according to Forbes. Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, increased its gross profits last year by almost 3 percent to $46 billion.
https://civileats.com/2023/05/22/food-prices-are-still-high-what-role-do-corporate-profits-play/
logistics are certainly part of it, but not the crux. we produce way more food in the US than we consume, then we have laws against giving it away. https://time.com/4463449/food-waste-laws/
It’s a complex problem, but profit is not the issue. Plenty of parties are making WILD profits.
That’s just the point though. Food is only made profitable by pricing it high enough that half the world can’t afford it (by which I mean the global south)
Don’t forget farm subsidies, illegal labor in awful conditions, terrible animal treatment, externalizing climate damage from carbon burned during processing and transport, health damage from added sugars and hyper processed nut and seed oils, and I’m sure many other things I’m forgetting.
@sigfried complained it’s not profitable. that’s a lie.
your secondary concerns aren’t addressed by my response because it wasn’t the premise I was disagreeing with, it’s the lie that food production isn’t profitable. it is.
IT SHOULDN’T NEED TO BE.
These are separate arguments.
You put in all that effort into misunderstanding something.
put a bit more effort into not lying and I’ll leave it be.
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How do the robots own the means of production?
This is just capitalism with slave labor you don’t have to feel bad about.
slavery is (by definition) an ownership of a person. Robots are not people nor beings with intelligence.
This addresses 0% of my point
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Labor has not conquered scarcity. Dear lord.
It actually has. The U.S. produces enough food to feed the entire world three times over. It’s a matter of distribution and no one is going to invest in that because it’s not profitable. .
We grow enough corn to feed the whole world and then some, but we use it to feed cows and chicken in inhumane enviroments for “better food”.
Not a vegetarian or anything, just pointing out the awful nature of the meat industry
I generally agree, but the industrial corn grown in the us actually isnt really all that edible. Like yes, you can eat it, but it tastes like sawdust. It was grown specifically to be processed.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sweet-corn-vs-field-corn_n_596f6718e4b0a03aba868f75
Just because there’s a lot of it doesn’t mean it isn’t scarce
Please expand
This is essentially the “anything finite is scarce” argument. Since there isn’t an actually unlimited amount of food available it’s still scarce even if there’s more of it than humans can use.
But that doesn’t make sense in this context.
That’s exactly what that means, “more than enough” is the opposite of scarce.
Say, why don’t you take your hair-splitting somewhere else? Preferably a place that allows you to comfortly fuck yourself as well?
Okay, but why this image?
Bobby’s been thinking the deep thoughts ever since Hank stranded him on Mars for disrespecting propane.
Because Bobby Hill is a based commie. Why did you think Hank was always yelling?
His narrow urethra?
There are serious ethical problems with a capitalist system, especially when it comes to the necessities of life, but there’s also ample evidence that other economic systems in practice have been just as bad if not worse regarding food security. Trace the history of the USSR from the Holodomor in the 1930s to empty grocery shelves and bread lines in the 1980s, for example
I view the problem as us treating a tool as a system of government. Capitalism is an incredibly powerful tool for increasing efficiency (real capitalism as in a healthy free market, not monopoly bullshit). But we should be using that tool to our benefit, not having that tool use us. We can use it as a tool without it being our basis of society. Also, capitalism is not self regulating. That’s a bullshit myth created by elite monopolists. Unchecked capitalism leads to monopolies and monopolies are the antithesis of capitalism. We used to know that. We used to bust monopolies. We need to learn when and when not to use capitalism. Certain things need to be monopolies. Like transportation and the power grid. Since healthy competition cannot prosper we cannot make them capitalistic. We already need to recognize that capitalism is a tool for us to use. It’s ok to break capitalism in special circumstances for the greater good, because the good of the people is more important than perpetuating capitalism. I think abolishing it leads to apathy and inefficiency, but worshipping it leads to inhumanity, and we’re not even worshipping it properly because again, monopolies are not capitalism. Like all things in life it’s about balance.
Yeah, the problems are just different. A mixed form would be ideal, where basic needs would be handled socially and the rest may compete in a capitalist way. The difficulty is where to draw the line exactly.
Food.
Shelter.
Education.
Healthcare.
I miss anything?
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Well it wasn’t so much a problem to Russians because their centralized economic system allowed them to simply starve away those they didn’t like
Crown corporations/co-ops/worker owned companies for essential needs, capitalism for all non essentials.
Tada!
I cannot comment on communism as there has not been a true communism in the world yet, but dictatorships sure have been bad.
You know you guys are a meme out here in the real world, right?
Meme doesn’t make it false
“There’s an egg shortage!”
> High egg prices send profits at largest US producer soaring more than 700%
Ew an amp link
I really don’t get why we don’t have “meal bars” or “human food” yet. Something that covers all basic calorie and nutritional requirements, can be mass produced, and easily stored at room temperature. Like “dog food” but for humans.
The real choice should be a normal meal or a “meal bar”, not a normal meal or starving.
Thats just “under the concept of having any amount of people not be farmers”
People were paying for food long before capitalism existed.
It’s capitalism vs government programs that can feed the starving, not capitalism vs anything else. That was an era before the modern state. We’re talking about with today’s systems, not with systems that are no longer relevant.
Also, self sustaining communities shared food with their own at numerous points in history. People were giving food to eachother for the common good long before Karl Marx.
Capitalism n government programs coexist. They are not opposites
True, but I was trying to highlight relying on capitalism to feed people, vs using government programs at all. I didn’t mean to imply that they are mutually exclusive.
Automation can conquer scarcity and reduce the amount of labor needed. People starve because we don’t take steps to ensure our man-made economy doesnt suffer even a single dollar loss.
Good King of the hill memes are like food in Soviet Russia: not everybody gets it
Food production is one of the very few things the US government has been handling well. We give out tens of billions in subsidies to farmers every year to artificially inflate the food supply and have a nationwide SNAP program to help low income families afford food. As a result, we produce far more food than we actually need and far more than we would in a free market, allowing the US to be a major exporter of food globally and ensuring we have enough redundancy built into our food supply that the US will be the last country to starve in a famine
