Too bad many states will just refuse the money.
I don’t get this part…
The full details of the package are expected to be announced by Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, at an event at the White House later on Tuesday.
Why?! Biden should be doing this! He needs to be out in public looking strong and “doing things”! SMH This makes him look like everybody else is doing his job for him.
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The amount of outdated chobani I pulled off an end cap once would make your head spin.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.
$10 billion funded school lunches for a year during COVID and we should have kept it going. School kitchens are back to having to try to collect “lunch debt” again. So how is less than a fifth of that going to end hunger? This is just election posturing and empty promises. Look for more of these coming soon from the right.
Not American, making a number of assumptions on your system.
This 10 billion funded school lunches for everyone, at a multitude of different places. It was broad, unfocused, to cover something now.
How will this 1.7b be applied? Is it given, is it establishing ongoing sources, long term investment in assets?
Noble cause but they already spent 8 billion 2 years ago and there is plenty of hunger. I’m not sure how another 1.7 billion will fix it.
There is plenty of food but the distribution is a big part of the problem, hopefully they are addressing that.
I mean, his admin is ALSO currently trying to block the Kroger/Albertsons merger, for example. So this is clearly not the only thing going on.
Completely different group within his admin. FTC isnt gonna have a hand in ending hunger
The FTC price increases in foods due to monopolizing is absolutely having a hand in helping to reduce hunger.
Another thing I can think of off the top of my head the Biden admin and democrats are doing is fighting to increase funding for SNAP and resisting republican efforts to impose more restrictions on the program and make it harder to use.
Also the 8 billion isn’t already spent and nothing happened, it’s in the process of being spent and this is more being put on top.
While these are all fine and good, personally I still think a universal basic income would be the best way at reducing hunger. A totally unrestricted program like that though be very hard to push, despite all the evidence of their effectiveness, when there’s fighting over whether or not SNAP should be taking a fine toothed comb to exactly what foods people are or not allowed to buy with it.
The government spends hundreds of billions on infrastructure every year.
Have we fixed potholes permanently?
Also, $8 billion is a bit less than $24 bucks per person in America. Do you really think $24 is enough to permanently solve hunger in a country? Do you think that another $5/person is reasonable, a few years later?
Can’t wait to see Red States reject the aid for their hungriest constituents.
Oh, a couple of states already did it. Were offered funds to feed kids during the summer time off from school. Rejected for “Socialism”…
