So, here’s a problem: food logistics is a massive, complicated morass of infrastructure. Getting food from the area where it’s produced to the area where there are people who want to eat it is difficult. A lot of individual steps have to go right for a bell pepper grown in Coahuila to show up in a grocery store in Tokyo, unspoilt and ready to eat.
The timing of when the pepper is picked, how fast it will ripen and how long until it spoils is built into the steps of the supply chain. The cost of the logistics system for distributing food, and the overhead for managing and containing the chaos, is probably substantially higher than the cost of actually producing the food.
The point being, when the bell pepper is at the store it is now ready for consumption. It will be there 2, maybe 3 days, and then if it is unsold it is at least halfway to rotten. Now at this point you want to try to redistribute it, which will require another supply chain, but there isn’t time to figure out where to send an overripe bell pepper or who would want to eat it, or to pack it and ship it and then unpack it and hopefully use it before it’s completely rotten.
Refrigeration is a wonderful technology that has brought massive reduction of food waste, but it has limits. You can’t un-ripen a fruit. Trying to re-ship food at this point would not be worth the cost, and ultimately would create environmental harms that would outweigh any benefit.
Okay, that’s true for fresh produce with a minimal shelf life. But we also do that for shelf stable (like dried, canned, jarred) foods which can much more reasonably be donated after their display date.
And that’s assuming some sort of centralised donation scheme, and not just mandating the stores donate to a local foodbank or such - which would make it a bit more feasible to donate some fresh produce.
As far as “buying local”, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be seed-bombing food plants everywhere. Destroying the soil to grow a field of peppers for example, to mass produce and mass distribute them across the world, is not sustainable. Why should food even be “bought” local or not? How are we not lining the streets with fruit trees? Why are urban environments packed full of shrubs and bushes that aren’t growing food? Why are we using lawns to just grow trimmed grass? Why aren’t we utilizing natures impeccable clockwork of self-maintaining edible gardens and forests? We have all the food energy we need raining down from the sky, why aren’t our rooftops being used? We could be living in an abundance of food, all local, all free. Human societies have done that for thousands of years both before and after the so-called “agricultural revolution.” We know it’s possible. We figured out how to turn deserts into forests by just digging a bunch of semi-circles and waiting for a bit.
But we don’t because number go down instead of up. There’s no money to be made in that, so even the most altruistic of investors will be deterred from the lack of monetary ROI and not the ROI of a better world. It’s like the world is stuck in Dark Ages Europe, where people couldn’t imagine how the world could function without the Christian god, the gospel, and the divine leadership of Kings and Queens. Now we’re in a dark age where people can’t imagine the world functioning without money, economic models, and the divine leadership of investors and CEOs. Thinking otherwise makes you a heretic, and considering how they used to burn thousands for the heresy of atheism much like we kill thousands for the heresy of environmentalism.
We credit the Enlightenment era for getting us out of this braindead mindset, yet little has really changed. Whether you call it capitalism or socialism, we’re still draining water tables and making land uninhabitable, then turning the land into gravel and call it “development” or “productivity”. The whole universe is open to this sort of insanity. We really need to go back to the ideas that inspired the Enlightenment and opened European minds to something other than their death-cult religions, like the indigenous critiques of Native Americans.
I’m an atheist to people who believe in money - I just go one God further.
So, here’s a problem: food logistics is a massive, complicated morass of infrastructure. Getting food from the area where it’s produced to the area where there are people who want to eat it is difficult. A lot of individual steps have to go right for a bell pepper grown in Coahuila to show up in a grocery store in Tokyo, unspoilt and ready to eat.
The timing of when the pepper is picked, how fast it will ripen and how long until it spoils is built into the steps of the supply chain. The cost of the logistics system for distributing food, and the overhead for managing and containing the chaos, is probably substantially higher than the cost of actually producing the food.
The point being, when the bell pepper is at the store it is now ready for consumption. It will be there 2, maybe 3 days, and then if it is unsold it is at least halfway to rotten. Now at this point you want to try to redistribute it, which will require another supply chain, but there isn’t time to figure out where to send an overripe bell pepper or who would want to eat it, or to pack it and ship it and then unpack it and hopefully use it before it’s completely rotten.
Refrigeration is a wonderful technology that has brought massive reduction of food waste, but it has limits. You can’t un-ripen a fruit. Trying to re-ship food at this point would not be worth the cost, and ultimately would create environmental harms that would outweigh any benefit.
Always buy local, as much as you can!
Okay, that’s true for fresh produce with a minimal shelf life. But we also do that for shelf stable (like dried, canned, jarred) foods which can much more reasonably be donated after their display date.
And that’s assuming some sort of centralised donation scheme, and not just mandating the stores donate to a local foodbank or such - which would make it a bit more feasible to donate some fresh produce.
As far as “buying local”, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be seed-bombing food plants everywhere. Destroying the soil to grow a field of peppers for example, to mass produce and mass distribute them across the world, is not sustainable. Why should food even be “bought” local or not? How are we not lining the streets with fruit trees? Why are urban environments packed full of shrubs and bushes that aren’t growing food? Why are we using lawns to just grow trimmed grass? Why aren’t we utilizing natures impeccable clockwork of self-maintaining edible gardens and forests? We have all the food energy we need raining down from the sky, why aren’t our rooftops being used? We could be living in an abundance of food, all local, all free. Human societies have done that for thousands of years both before and after the so-called “agricultural revolution.” We know it’s possible. We figured out how to turn deserts into forests by just digging a bunch of semi-circles and waiting for a bit.
But we don’t because number go down instead of up. There’s no money to be made in that, so even the most altruistic of investors will be deterred from the lack of monetary ROI and not the ROI of a better world. It’s like the world is stuck in Dark Ages Europe, where people couldn’t imagine how the world could function without the Christian god, the gospel, and the divine leadership of Kings and Queens. Now we’re in a dark age where people can’t imagine the world functioning without money, economic models, and the divine leadership of investors and CEOs. Thinking otherwise makes you a heretic, and considering how they used to burn thousands for the heresy of atheism much like we kill thousands for the heresy of environmentalism.
We credit the Enlightenment era for getting us out of this braindead mindset, yet little has really changed. Whether you call it capitalism or socialism, we’re still draining water tables and making land uninhabitable, then turning the land into gravel and call it “development” or “productivity”. The whole universe is open to this sort of insanity. We really need to go back to the ideas that inspired the Enlightenment and opened European minds to something other than their death-cult religions, like the indigenous critiques of Native Americans.
I’m an atheist to people who believe in money - I just go one God further.