[HN Gopher] The lie of expired food and the disastrous truth of ...
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The lie of expired food and the disastrous truth of Americas food
waste problem
Author : DocFeind
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-07-10 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vox.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vox.com)
| ziml77 wrote:
| I wish there were good resources on identifying if products are
| still safe to eat. Not just guidelines on how long they are
| likely to last, but also what indicators to look for to know that
| you should definitely throw the food away. And also things that
| are known to happen to the appearance of food over time that
| doesn't actually affect its safety.
| aliasEli wrote:
| Long but very interesting. I have read multiple articles about
| the problem, and this is probably the best one.
| bnajdecki wrote:
| I agree - long, but definitely worth reading
| wrycoder wrote:
| Tell them and tell them and tell them. I persisted, but
| finally gave up.
|
| We donate food that's close to expiration to the local food
| pantry. They will take it after expiration, but they treat it
| separately and usually put it in the "free" table.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| This feels like a problem that doesn't need to be solved. Solving
| it might even be worse than not solving it. Do we really want our
| food production system to become "just in time"? Delivering
| exactly how much we need exactly when we need it. Overproduction
| feels like a safety net for when things go wrong. We really don't
| want a food shortage the same way we had toilet paper shortages
| or gas shortages. Food shortages topple governments and empires
| the way other shortages don't.
|
| The obvious solution is to keep production at say 150% of demand
| but if we are going to do that then we are going to be 'wasting
| food' just like you waste time with all those database backups
| you never needed. The only difference is we went though all this
| hoop jumping to make the end user not waste so much food just to
| push the waste back down the line to the producers (which as the
| article points out are already throwing away a bunch of food
| themselves under the current system.)
|
| All in, I would say this issue is close neighbors to the US
| switching to the metric system completely. Just not worth all the
| fuss and cost of doing it even though it has some feel good
| reasons for why getting to the other side of that big initiative
| would be worthwhile.
| sfink wrote:
| I think you need to take the water consumption and greenhouse
| gas production into account. This isn't a small amount of
| overproduction. I agree that a healthy buffer is necessary and
| good, but we are way way beyond that. Producers do not need to
| overproduce at the current scale. Demand is not wildly
| unpredictable.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Maybe the solution is to overproduce on things with longer
| shelf life, which can be stored and transported without
| refrigeration, so any excess past the target 150% (or other
| figure) can be donated easily to other parts of the world?
| gruez wrote:
| >Maybe the solution is to overproduce on things with longer
| shelf life, which can be stored and transported without
| refrigeration
|
| Then you get people complaining it's "ultraprocessed"
|
| >so any excess past the target 150% (or other figure) can be
| donated easily to other parts of the world?
|
| The logistics of this probably makes it more expensive
| overall than just donating bulk corn or whatever.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Food waste is not an issue. The whole point of an industrialized
| food system is that we all can eat. Being able to throw food away
| should be considered a good thing compared to the rest of history
| before the 1940s. People back then often ate what they could get
| and were skinny cause they couldn't eat. Obviously in a perfect
| world we'd consume things to the max percentage possible, but
| it's not a perfect world. This article comes from a pretentious
| first world view that forgets most of the world starved in a pre
| industrial era for most of their lives. Having people become
| obese is very weirdly a good problem to have since it's a lot
| easier to resolve than having to figure out how to equitably get
| enough food for your people to be satiated.
| igouy wrote:
| "Malnutrition Hits The Obese As Well As The Underfed"
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/12/23/7855667...
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| It depends on the definition of waste. Excess food that no one
| wants, or food that is thrown out that someone hungry could
| eat.
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(page generated 2021-07-10 23:02 UTC)