You are reading way too much into my comments. All I was saying that it's a common ecofascist talking point to say that the problem is the number of people, and used the link as a source to how wasteful our food production is.
Now you are trying to bend this into the most uncharitable interpretation you can think of. In addition you're also just completely making up what I think. Sorry but I'm not gonna start defending your strawmans.
It seems a little uncharitable to say that I'm bending things to be uncharitable when you look at what was said (or not said).
If you wanted to talk about how wasteful our food production is, then why not say that and actually talk about that. Talking about land use that produces animal products and then calling it wasteful is a stretch when many people use those products, including n-order products like organic fertilizers or white sugar. It's not wasteful to fulfill the wants of the people. It could be inefficient or excessive, but those aren't the same as actual waste.
I think you're confusing multiple separate issues here. Efficiency in production and total amount of production are separate concerns. You don't aim to lower total production numbers by decreasing the efficiency of production.
It sounds like you're unhappy with how much we produce. Not the point of the conversation. Looks like you're just shoe-horning your political agenda into a conversation which is barely tangential.
The bare minimum amount of food we could produce without starving is still more than enough to need very large farms to capture economies of scale.
That link (at least, the section you linked because I didn't read the entire page) doesn't say anything about it being economic, it just gives the numbers and even goes to show that we've apparently been making progress in reducing world hunger.
Also, it's kind of a good thing for economic causes to be producing excess. The other option is to be under-producing (because 100% efficiency is a pretty hard target to hit, you're either going to be over or under). If this was the case, it would drive food prices up. So even though there would be no waste, there would be even more want.
I'm not saying what the real numbers are because I don't know. My point is that the goal should be feeding everyone at minimal cost (environmental, political, and otherwise). The arbitrary numbers I made up were solely to illustrate that such analysis might lead to counterintuitive results that are nevertheless right. Or it might not; it depends on the numbers.
>Currently, worldwide food production exceeds 2,750 kilocalories per person per day [15], which exceeds the amount required to feed the global population. Although these data account for farm-level waste, they do not include the estimated 20% household food waste [44]. Hence, currently available calories are likely to be about 2,200 kilocalories per person per day, which is sufficient for the world’s current population [23].
Right under that they note that our food groups are out of whack, but in terms of calories, we could feed everybody... we just don't. It's not just a problem of profit motives; as GP noted, distribution is a real issue. Many places with famine problems also have issues with government stability, and dropping crates of food from the sky just gives food to the people with guns and vehicles who can secure it. If you think about this problem from the point of view of a legitimately charitable entity with tons of cash, it's still not entirely clear how to end world hunger without either propping up small dictatorships or undermining local sovereignty. The last mile is a hard problem. Edit: and obviously, some people eat too much, and we throw away food because of weird profit motives. I'm not trying to downplay those causes of human misery, just trying to point out that there are other hard decisions to be made on the path to feeding all humans.
I'm not commenting on the soundness of the above argument, merely trying to make sure its premises are correctly interpreted. :)
I think other comments, however, did address the discussion of people who struggle to afford food at current prices-- additionally, in the U.S. specifically, 40% of food is wasted [1]. Maybe just a decrease in U.S. food supply would be in order? Or specifically countries where food waste is that high?
>Maybe we should start at the most basic question. Is food-waste even a bad thing to begin with.
Yes. Having more than enough food is better than not enough, but to have obscenely more than necessary, and to have the excess go to landfill is 'bad'. To have that excess go to somewhere productive is 'better'. It might not defeat poverty, as the article points out, that is a systemic issue. But it can have positive environmental outcomes. e.g., if food is consumed more efficiently, we need less land for crops; we have waste decomposing as compost which releases less greenhouse gasses than as landfill.
The article does a good job of straw-manning attempts at making the situation better, including the grass roots collective effort of consumers to be more mindful (how is this a bad thing?), but there are coincident economic incentives and environmental outcomes to less waste, and that is a 'good' thing.
I think I agree with your general sentiment, but can you explain what you mean more precisely? It seems you're trying to tie together food waste, economic privilege, and global warming.
My apologies! I didn't mean the "Very confusing" comment as an ad hominem attack.
Seeing it from the production side I don't see that there is any attempt to suppress production. Everyone wants a good harvest and to produce as much product as they can. And, sometimes mother nature allows for it.
I feel there are honest attempts to feed people with that remaining food. And, there is the issue that sending food constantly to another country in need doesn't really address the problem. To paraphrase an old proverb, "Give a person a fish and they will eat for a day. Teach them to fish and they will eat for a lifetime." Ultimately, the food should be grown locally as much as possible to meet at least basic needs. Everything imported beyond that should be mere excess. That is how we will one day feed the world.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, my guess is the reference to COVID.
The earth is currently overpopulated for the system we have in-place to feed it. We are very inefficient in resource usage and waste over 1/2 the food we produce each year. COVID isn't the answer to this problem, but your point is valid.
The food production system as a whole produces more food than humanity as a whole consumes. If you can and freeze your leftovers as an individual it does not change this.
At a system level- farms, silos, and grocery stores have no interest in storing any more stock than reasonable, and continually stuffing a growing stock into a larger warehouse/silo is wasteful.
If wide swathes of citizens changed their behavior to habitually can and freeze more leftovers, and waste less, it would be a good thing, and farms would decrease production, I agree. But it misses the point I made.
Food is perishable. The population rises exponentially. I don't personally believe anyone is purposely destroying food for political reasons that I'm aware of. A great deal is shipped to 3rd world countries in an attempt to help feed their populations where possible. And, even here at home many grocery stores attempt to redistribute food that is about to expire to homeless and poor communities. More can be and should be done. I don't mean to come off as confrontational. If you have some articles that point to this I'd like to read them. That is clearly wrong and shouldn't be happening if it is.
Edit: I'd like to point out though, it seems odd that you are arguing for limiting/destroying production by turning farmland into parks. But then go on to suggest that OECD countries are attempting to limit production unfairly? Very confusing.
Edit 2: My dad was also part of a charitable group that helped provide seeds and training to other countries in need in an attempt to help them to establish their own self-sustaining agricultural industry.
Overproduction of food by about 20% is by design in the west, as I understand it. Because you'd rather have a bit too much (which isn't a big problem), than too little (which would quickly be an enormous problem). The problems we're facing now are not caused by that overproduction of food, so I think it isn't a good argument.
I also hate food waste, because it seems to dumb. But I think it is there for a reason - at least to some degree.
Hunger is not an efficiency problem. Hunger is a political problem. Handwaving that away to propagandize for an industrial food corporation is… not good.
"The demand for ‘perfect’ fruit and veg means much is discarded, damaging the climate and leaving people hungry"
I mean, you can make a case for damaging the environment, but the thrown away food is hardly the reason people are hungry. We clearly don't have a shortage problem.
I see many good points to think about, but it seems pretty strange to have a whole article on food waste and to talk about a “shitty system” without a single mention of meat, which is by far the largest source of food inefficiency in our system...
> There is a rosy assumption that wasting less food would make it back up the supply chain in the most impressive game of telephone ever and signal to farmers to grow less food. But that seems unlikely in an agricultural paradigm staked by subsidies that incentivize the overproduction of four or five commodity crops
It’s a decent point that we have incentivized a few crops and over-produce it. However, it’s not like supply and demand is magical. A reduction in demand can and will telephone through the system and lead to less production, it’s not an assumption or particularly impressive, it happens routinely.
There are lots of hungry people, in lots of places. Please have some sympathy for their plight. Capitalists tell us that they can properly distribute the food produced in a few nations to everywhere, but they have so far largely failed to do so. Invariably capitalists and their useful idiots invoke "market failures" as reasons for capitalist-owned politicians to take even more freedoms from producers and consumers than they've already taken. It beggars belief to complain about a strictly hypothetical "monoculture" (resulting from new crop varieties!) when giant firms like Cargill, Tyson, JBS, etc. control so much of our society.
It has in most cases been far more reliable, resilient, nutritious, environmentally benign, and just to produce and consume food locally, rather than burning fuel to ship it around the world while it's still edible. We put up with lots of externalities from agriculture, because it's important that humans have food to eat. We can't dismiss completely benign ag tech out of hand, for essentially religious reasons. I make no particular claim for these particular crop varieties, but your objections are ridiculous.
You're simply wrong about this, and it's not "disingenuous" to say so.
Now you are trying to bend this into the most uncharitable interpretation you can think of. In addition you're also just completely making up what I think. Sorry but I'm not gonna start defending your strawmans.
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