this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
472 points (98.8% liked)
Political Memes
2034 readers
541 users here now
Non political memes: !memes@sopuli.xyz
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
They might make an efficient distribution system, but they do not make an equal one. They efficiently choose to send more to rich places as that returns them greater profit. The problem here is not efficiency, it's intent.
Not necessarily. If ever producer sent their stuff to "rich places" there would be an excess in those places causing a reduced price.
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
It's not 1/3 of a banana. It is a batch of bananas that are slightly brown. It is 4 unsold donuts at closing. It is unsold merchandise they throw away to make room for new product.
It has NOTHING to do with logistics. The food is already at the store. The only difference is the store manager being forced to say YES at the end of the day when a hungry employee asks to take the unsold food that would otherwise go into the dumpster home.
You're only looking at retail and you're discarding what I've said about household food waste.
Globally, the majority of food waste, around 61%, occurs in households
From Wikipedia: "Food loss and waste is food that is discarded or otherwise lost uneaten. This occurs throughout the food system, during production, processing, distribution, retail and food service sales, and consumption. Overall, about one-third of the world's food is thrown away, and a similar proportion of calories is lost on top of that by feeding human-edible food to farm animals. A 2021 meta-analysis by the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that global food waste amounted to 931 million tonnes annually (about 121 kg per person) across three sectors: 61 percent from households, 26 percent from food service and 13 percent from retail.".
More sources https://www.usda.gov/about-food/food-safety/food-loss-and-waste/food-waste-faqs#%3A%7E%3Atext=In+the+United+States%2C+food%2Cfar-reaching+impacts+on+society:
And
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=43836&v=0 check the summary PDF
Utilizing household food waste is a matter of getting uneaten food to people who would eat it. It's incredibly difficult, this is the challenge that I referred to as logistics.
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