Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015)

thewalrus.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–59 of 59 posts

Re: Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015)

#51

Post by nickff »

tatterdemalion wrote: post #47
nickff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, street food and restaurants were very common historically, (at least) going back to Ancient Greece and Egypt.[1] In those times the poor often did not own kitchens or cooking implements, and spent so much time working that they did not have time to cook. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopolium [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_food#History

Both of these narratives are incomplete - in other contexts (e.g. any primarily pastoral society) the poor did not eat meals prepared by people outside of their kinship group almost ever. The reality is that the relationship between food preparation and class have been very different in different food cultures; you can perform a comparative analysis to critique our food culture, but a narrative of a "historical shift…

I am referring to the history of the cultural antecedents of the western world, which have also had a dominant effect on the vast majority of the human race. I am not trying to address the history of Rapa Nui.

Re: Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015)

#52

Post by tatterdemalion »

nickff wrote: post #51
tatterdemalion wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of these narratives are incomplete - in other contexts (e.g. any primarily pastoral society) the poor did not eat meals prepared by people outside of their kinship group almost ever. The reality is that the relationship between food preparation and class have been very different in different food cultures; you can perform a comparative analysis to critique our food culture, but a narrative of a "historical shift…

I am referring to the history of the cultural antecedents of the western world, which have also had a dominant effect on the vast majority of the human race. I am not trying to address the history of Rapa Nui.

You're going to have to tell me how much street food was eaten by the manorial serf of Europe, or the American homesteader, or a native person under the encomienda. Don't be smug, western history is full of food cultures in which the poor prepared their own food.

If your scope is restricted to the food culture of the urban poor, its worth pointing out that the American urban poor today largely do not prepare their own food, for much the same reason as in historical examples, with seriously deleterious health outcomes.

Re: Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015)

#54

Post by contingencies »

Interesting to me as recently I founded Infinite Food[0], which hopes to leverage macro-trends like urbanization, apartment living, and the internationalization of culinary consumption patterns to provide cost-effective, highly efficient, fresh and automatically prepared meals on demand. While our initial markets are in Asia (higher population density, less of an established car-commute/supermarket norm), it is interesting to see people attacking the same problems from alternative angles in the west.

One sentence that struck a chord with me in the article was "She insisted we begin serving ourselves at dinner, in order to get our own portion sizes right." as the habit here in China is that people serve themselves from communal dishes. We plan to offer custom portion sizes, too.

[0] http://8-food.com/

Re: Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015)

#55

Post by _cbsz »

The article seems to assume that food that is now wasted by consumers would instead be distributed to needy folks. I don't see why this is the case. From a business perspective, why do food producers care whether the food they sell is eaten or thrown away? It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of business. Then again, maybe this is why I'm an engineer, not a businessperson.

Re: Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015)

#56

Post by xbmcuser »

sndean wrote: post #12

> Suddenly, for many Westerners, the problem with food was that there was too much of it. Whenever eating around some friends from South Asian countries who grew up just barely on the positive side of starving, I always make a point of eating everything on my plate (or all the meat off the bone). Because lots of times I've gotten the comment "you eat like a white person." But I wonder how much of that is cultural and…

One of the big reasons for waste is the expiry dates I feel many people in the developed countries are willing to throw away good food. Another reason in the developing countries people don't mind eating, buying or selling (ugly ie natural foodstuff. Which is thrown away by the supermarkets in the west.

Re: Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015)

#57

Post by onion2k »

greenshackle wrote: post #13
ftvbffg wrote: post #6

Food waste is very small problem. If it was eliminated there would be 1.5 times as much food. Bigger problem is eating out (restaurants, fast food) where 90% of money is wasted. Or buying expensive ingredients like meat or very processed foods. 10 times more food can be bought if choosing wisely. I pay maybe 4$-5$/day for food and I routinely throw away half. That's 2$/day wasted. But eating at restaurant wastes so m…

How much time do you spend grocery shopping and cooking? If you make 100$ per hour it doesnt take long before eating out is more economical.

Only if you're actually paid $100 more by working instead of preparing a meal. Most people on that level of income are paid a fixed annual salary that doesn't change with more hours worked, so whether you spend the time preparing a meal or working makes no difference to your earning.

Re: Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015)

#58

Post by fennecfoxen »

_cbsz wrote: post #55

The article seems to assume that food that is now wasted by consumers would instead be distributed to needy folks. I don't see why this is the case. From a business perspective, why do food producers care whether the food they sell is eaten or thrown away? It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of business. Then again, maybe this is…

> It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of business.

No, a widespread shift to selling food which would otherwise be turned into waste would represent an increased supply of edible foodstuffs, reducing prices across the entire food-market, making it less profitable for any one farmer to produce one unit of food, and probably increasing the quantity of food consumed in worldwide markets (depending on the precise elasticities of supply and of demand involved - and it doesn't have to be the same food that was rescued, if vegetables get cheaper people can eat less vegetables than bread and grain farmers can export the grain. Or they can pickle or freeze the vegetables for future consumption. And some farmers could switch crops. There's a lot of options.)

That's Economics 150.

(No, I had it as Economics 150, not 101.)

But an individual food seller is already incentivized to reclaim and sell as much would-be food-waste as possible before it becomes unprofitable to do so: it is likely cheaper for the food owner to dump food than to turn the would-be waste into food somewhere else. (Historically, food recycling of last resort would probably have taken the form of feeding it to local hogs or turning it into compost, but shifts in population and farming patterns have moved the farms away from the food consumption centers where the waste takes place.)

Re: Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015)

#59

Post by QuasarLogic »

sakopov wrote: post #2

This guy [1] made it across the US on a bike with no cash by simply dumpster-diving and eating nearly fresh fruits and veggies thrown away by grocery stores. Here [2] he is dumpster-diving in San Diego. It's amazing how much foods gets wasted. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7QO-4NjgjQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Gn_T1zQFc

Dumpster diving is a lot of fun! I love it since it strokes my anti-capitalist tendencies in just the right way
Post reply on HN