Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.
Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.
I’d argue that the largest source is actually grocery stores followed by restaurants. I’ve worked a few grocery stores including target when they added pfresh. The food that gets tossed by deli/bakery alone will piss you off. Second harvest would only come around once or twice a week so the rest of the time tons of bread, fried chicken, cakes, etc would get tossed in the trash. And thats not even accounting for the vendor trash. At least once I rescued a ton of little debbie stuff from a dumpster, it was all still boxed up and in date, the boxes had been smashed by something so the vendor tossed it.
The amount of outdated chobani I pulled off an end cap once would make your head spin. I filled up an entire shopping cart once because the idiots who were supposed to be running pfresh just kept stuffing it full without rotating stock or checking dates.
Oh and ask me about the pallets of bananas that tgt would throw out because they were shipped too much, didn’t sell enough, etc.
One bread vendor I knew would take the close dated bread to the nearest good will so it had a chance to sell but I’m not sure about others.
You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you’re factually just plain wrong.
You’ve seen the centralized waste. But you haven’t picked through a neighborhood’s worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.
I work with a massive network of food pantries, some larger some smaller. Every grocery store in our area is engaged with it and we receive massive amounts of day old product. I would guess that either your experience was many years ago, or you just worked for a shitty store.
This right here. We don’t have a food scarcity issue or even a price problem for most things. What we have is a logistics problem. Way too many people live in what are called food deserts. If they have easy access to “food” it’s usually of the convenience store variety, overpriced and extremely bad for you.
I know not everyone can afford it but those that can should look at misfits marketplace. They sell the oddball produce that most people won’t buy so it doesn’t make it your local store, when a design changes drastically or is printed wrong, etc.
Tackiing hunger in this country will take money because money makes thing happen but it will also take more than just buying a bunch of food and handing it out. It’s going to take a push for more community gardens, maybe allowing agriculture inside limits where it isn’t at the moment, etc.
Almost half of food waste is people buying food that they let go bad before they eat it.
That’s substantially a price problem, in that people are more willing to let a cheap banana spoil than a prime rib or lobster. Food being cheap makes people more willing to let it expire.
But fixing residential food waste by making food more expensive would make hunger worse.
I have seen some videos on things like vertical gardens in shipping containers that seem like they would be a great way to bring produce to urban areas that is both fresh, and nearby in terms of logistics.
This looks like a decent article about it from a few years ago on a company in Denver. There are a growing number of companies working on this also, and maybe with some government funds it could spread faster, and in areas most in need first.
This is definitely one of the ways forward. Many, many, many, many moons ago I attempted to run a blog about growing fresh produce in an urban environment. You can’t feed a family on what will fit in a window box or on an apt porch but you can have tomatoes for a salad or on a burger, lettuce for that salad that is actually good for you and more.
If we are talking feeding the most people at once from a central location, hydro and aeroponics is what is needed, combined with leds of varying colors and you can cut the growth time down by 50% or more, that means 90 day tomatoes in 45 or so with aeroponics and 60ish with hydro iirc.
I’m a proponent of multiple avenues. Do the vertical farming and focus on community gardens where kids especially can get their hands dirty and learn something about the planet we live on.
