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The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement

newfoodeconomy.org

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Re: The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement

#71

Post by gizmo686 »

sithadmin wrote: post #10
jdavis703 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when I was a kid my family made use of food banks. Now that I'm doing better in life I give a cut of each paycheck to my local food bank (The Alameda County Food Bank). I don't feel too bad about ordering from Imperfect Produce, it's convenient way to get produce delivered to your door, and I still wind up buying some things from the farmers market and co-op. On that note, it is good to know what consequences new…

>I don't feel too bad about ordering from Imperfect Produce Stunning cognitive dissonance going on here. Simply redirecting a portion of one's personal funds towards a local food bank doesn't absolve one of the moral wrongs associated with participation in a scheme that systematically undermines access to food for the least advantaged.

The marginal effect of 1 person buying ugly produce is that that set of produce does not get donated. In other words, a marginal decrease in inkind donations to foodbanks. This can be directly offset by a monetary donation.

Re: The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement

#72

Post by ajkjk »

gowld wrote: post #53
kazinator wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see nothing wrong with: selling something if a paying market is found for that, instead of giving it away for free. I do see something wrong with: creating that paying market by lying. I suspect most of those conscientious people who think they are helping farmers and reducing food waste would not be paying for this produce if they knew that it was being taken away from poor people.

In that case, you should never buy anything, because anything manufactured might be donated if you hadn't bought it.

That's hyperbolic and absurd. The objection is against the deceptive marketing.

Re: The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement

#73

Post by ItsMe000001 »

gowld wrote: post #59
forapurpose wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't like seeing groups shoehorn welfare into other areas. If you've got an income (or cash welfare) problem, fix that. I'd prefer a better solution, but when one isn't available (and likely not forthcoming), needs of real people outweigh my economic principles: These people need food. It's the same in engineering: As much as we would wish otherwise, sometimes the 'right' solution isn't available and we need to…

You aren't disagreeing. People need food, so fund a food bank . Don't create absurdly contorted markets to preserve unnecessary waste streams to be reprurposed for food banks.

In the same line and as an anecdotal aside, here in Bavaria we are soon going to have state-wide elections (i.e. for Bavaria). One party that is known to be a kind of comedic joke party but nevertheless actually managed to get someone elected for EU parliament put up posters all over town that are not all that funny down deep: For background, here in Germany quite a few retirees walk around town and collect deposit bottles out of trash bins, to make a little bit of money on top of their meager pensions. The poster ad suggests as election slogan of "Die Partei" ("The Party") to increase the per-bottle deposit in order to decrease poverty, so that retirees get more money from rummaging in trash bins.

The poster: https://www.wuv.de/var/wuv/storage/images/media/bilder/die_p...

I think that's a similar variant of the twisted logic that you call out, but while it probably isn't intentional in the example discussed here (looks more like an emergent property nobody planned for) they use it deliberately to make a point, to make people think.

Re: The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement

#75

Post by gizmo686 »

sithadmin wrote: post #36
maxerickson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We waste food because we can. If industrial agriculture and distribution were less effective, there probably would be less food waste. And there would probably be lots more hungry people.

You're not wrong, but just because we possess technical capabilities to produce a surplus of goods such that the economy can tolerate high levels of waste doesn't mean that we should . This is an area where we should be making incremental improvements, not only to increase the efficiency of how and where we distribute goods, but in the interest of things like public health.

Food waste is slack in the system. We have a lot of CPU waste because we let the idle most of the time to be able to serve peek traffic.

Simmilarly food waste is really just surpluss production of food, which makes us much more resiliant to unexpected drops in production.

Re: The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement

#76

Post by thinkloop »

kazinator wrote: post #48
horsawlarway wrote: post #24

I... see absolutely nothing wrong with this. Imperfect produce has managed to create a market for food that was previously not able to be sold. Good for them. Does this mean that we may have to restructure social programs as that food becomes sold rather than donated? Sure might. That's ok though. I'd also like to clearly point out that the author misquotes their source for the amount of food donated. The California…

I see nothing wrong with: selling something if a paying market is found for that, instead of giving it away for free. I do see something wrong with: creating that paying market by lying. I suspect most of those conscientious people who think they are helping farmers and reducing food waste would not be paying for this produce if they knew that it was being taken away from poor people.

> conscientious people who think they are helping farmers

But they are helping farmers, they are giving them money they otherwise would not have gotten. Why should the burden of providing food for the needy solely come out of farmers' incomes?

Re: The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement

#77

Post by grawprog »

azrael49 wrote: post #70
gowld wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, you should never buy anything, because anything manufactured might be donated if you hadn't bought it.

In the majority of cases, retailers trash their products (sometimes after physically destroying them) that go unsold. Even for used items, most people are too lazy to donate even things in perfect condition

Yup. Canadian Tire does this. They have a fence around their returned product smashing area. Any product returned that's not resellable is smashed and thrown away. And their criteria for what's resellable is fairly strict. Most returns just end up smashed. Employees aren't allowed to take or even purchase at a discounted rate or anything. It's just obliterated and trashed. I know someone who used to work there. Employees had ways of taking things(however you feel about it...i understand it's to stop scamming and such but I still feel like it's better than just trashing perfectly good things.). But they still destroyed hundreds of perfectly good stuff while they worked there.

I gotta admit the grocery store I worked at back in the day was pretty good. They left their old produce for people with animals to take. Employees could take expired stuff that was still good but going to be thrown because it was past the date.

I dunno I don't like wasting things that are good. There's always a better solution than just throwing things away and destroying them.

Re: The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement

#78

Post by MrEldritch »

arkades wrote: post #5

"Our venture, and ventures like ours, which rely on redistributing food waste, cannot succeed if people waste less food. So please waste more food." Talk about putting the cart before the horse. I have no problem with saying, "that food isn't really waste, let's redistribute it if it's going unused." But someone's got their head turned right around if they think that a logical corollary is, "and that food should neve…

I think there's a way to think about this that does actually make sense...

"As long as people are only willing to buy pretty produce, then because actual produce inherently contains only a certain fraction of pretty produce, a demand for pretty produce inherently creates a surplus of ugly produce which can then be redistributed. In effect, every purchase of pretty produce hides an invisible tax which goes to buying ugly produce for the homeless. If paying customers no longer demand pretty produce, then stores will be able to only order as much produce as they need for paying customers, and the ugly-food surplus - that virtual tax on produce customers - will disappear. So, in effect, the ugly produce movement is the equivalent of advocating for a repeal of a tax on produce purchases which is used to buy produce for the poor."

And phrased that way - "do you support or wish to abolish the produce tax and the social program based on it" - it becomes a political issue which one can reasonably have opinions supporting the tax on the basis that it helps the poor. Especially as this tax and feed-the-poor social program has been created without government intervention or regulation - they're an emergent product of unforced consumer preferences, and there's no administrative overhead involved in keeping track of the taxes and organizing food purchases because it's just an automatic consequence of spending money to buy produce.

Re: The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement

#79

Post by dominicr »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #73
gowld wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't disagreeing. People need food, so fund a food bank . Don't create absurdly contorted markets to preserve unnecessary waste streams to be reprurposed for food banks.

In the same line and as an anecdotal aside, here in Bavaria we are soon going to have state-wide elections (i.e. for Bavaria). One party that is known to be a kind of comedic joke party but nevertheless actually managed to get someone elected for EU parliament put up posters all over town that are not all that funny down deep: For background, here in Germany quite a few retirees walk around town and collect deposit b…

Funnily enough in Norway they’ve just doubled the bottle deposit, to the benefit of people who search bins for empty bottles (mostly immigrants).

I think they were actually hoping less people would throw bottles away but it’d have to be a lot higher to stop that.

Re: The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement

#80

Post by kazinator »

gowld wrote: post #53
kazinator wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see nothing wrong with: selling something if a paying market is found for that, instead of giving it away for free. I do see something wrong with: creating that paying market by lying. I suspect most of those conscientious people who think they are helping farmers and reducing food waste would not be paying for this produce if they knew that it was being taken away from poor people.

In that case, you should never buy anything, because anything manufactured might be donated if you hadn't bought it.

Anything manufactured, non-perishable that is donated will just be flipped online for a profit. If it still doesn't sell when being flipped, then that confirms that it absolutely is junk that nobody wanted.

I'm just opposed to the lying; don't tell me that unsold goods are going to the landfill if they are really being donated. I will still buy it; I'm not going to join some hand-out lineup to try to get it for free, which won't even happen if the stock moves.

The overriding problem with the analogy is that we can't compare manufactured goods for which there is a demand to stigmatized produce that is viewed as inferior and met with low demand.

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