• littlecolt@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • 4lan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

      • littlecolt@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • K Vinayak @lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      May be they are avoiding getting sued. If someone gets sick. Especially junk food, which is unhealthy to begin with

      • Dadd Volante@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • SCB@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      How do the robots own the means of production?

      This is just capitalism with slave labor you don’t have to feel bad about.

  • protist@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    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

    • fidodo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • sverit@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • SCB@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Crown corporations/co-ops/worker owned companies for essential needs, capitalism for all non essentials.

      Tada!

    • aname@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      I cannot comment on communism as there has not been a true communism in the world yet, but dictatorships sure have been bad.

  • blady_blah@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • SCB@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Thats just “under the concept of having any amount of people not be farmers”

    People were paying for food long before capitalism existed.

    • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • vertigo3pc@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Kes@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    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