The lie of expired food and the disastrous truth of Americas food waste problem(vox.com)
vox.com
The lie of expired food and the disastrous truth of Americas food waste problem
https://www.vox.com/22559293/food-waste-expiration-label-best-before
14 comments
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
Have you tried stilltasty.com? I believe they have signs to look for to determine its bad. I’ve found their guidelines quite valuable!
Wow! Thank you! That's exactly the kind of resource I was looking for. It says what happens over time to the food and what signs indicate that it's no longer safe instead of just past its prime. I'm certainly going to be referencing that site from now on.
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.
"Malnutrition Hits The Obese As Well As The Underfed"
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/12/23/7855667...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/12/23/7855667...
Blaming obese people's food choices is like blaming spoons for making you fat. If you can afford to become obese, you most definitely can afford to purchase fresh vegetables and healthier options all around.
It's not the same thing as malnutrition because you're starving. One is death because your arteries are clogged. The other is death because you're body can't sustain itself.
It's not the same thing as malnutrition because you're starving. One is death because your arteries are clogged. The other is death because you're body can't sustain itself.
Long but very interesting. I have read multiple articles about the problem, and this is probably the best one.
I agree - long, but definitely worth reading
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.
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 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.