The Ugly Truth of Ugly Produce
phatbeetsproduce.org
phatbeetsproduce.org
I grew up with a garden in the back yard. My dad hunted and some of the meat on our table was squirrel and deer he killed. My mother cooked from scratch.
I'm used to eating well for relatively little money. Most of the food at soup kitchens and food pantries fails to meet my expectations for food quality.
Food stamps (EBT) are a good program. You can use them to buy the same food from the same stores as anybody else and you get to decide what to spend it on. (Though the program could use more funding. They tend to last only 3 weeks of the month.)
Soup kitchens and food pantries tend to suck, even the better ones.
I'm not saying we shouldn't provide compassionate support to anyone. I'm just saying some programs for doing so would be acceptable to people with middle class expectations and some wouldn't be. For many reasons, including germ control, we need to be shooting for programs that fit middle class sensibilities and not act like "beggars can't be choosers."
Furthermore, if you are homeless, you are living without a fridge. Produce doesn't keep well under those conditions. When I was around a lot of other homeless people for a time, it wasn't unusual for free produce to go to waste, in part for that reason. Some idiot would give a homeless person some giant bag of apples. They could eat a few of them before they rotted, but not all of them. Maybe they managed to give the rest away. Maybe they didn't.
Last, I have serious reservations about creating systems to serve the poor instead of creating systems to help them resolve their problems. Systems designed to serve the poor tend to actively keep poverty alive, a la the Shirky Principle:
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle
Food stamps tend to suck for a lot of the same reasons food pantries do. You're still telling people what to buy. It's not as bad because there are more choices, but it's still the same general problem where you have a bureaucracy telling you what to buy instead of being able to buy what you need the most like anybody else.
Sometimes what you really need is food. Sometimes -- or some specific days -- you have access to food and what you really need is to save up enough for a working car or gas to put in it so you can go to job interviews. Or something else that the person in question knows they need but arbitrary politicians have no way to predict.
But if you give people food stamps, they'll buy food with it. Even if they already have suitable food, because it's free money that can only be used for one thing. Then it costs the taxpayer $1 and provides the person with $.05 worth of value, which they take because $.05 is more than $0.
Meanwhile just giving the person $1 cash would give the person $1 in value and cost the government less, because then it isn't necessary to administer a system to force people to buy the thing they needed less instead of the thing they needed more.
And eliminating that bureaucracy reduces the Shirky principle problem.
I'm not trying to imply that all homeless people are addicts (quite the contrary) but if I'm a crack addict and you give me money I'm not sure I'd be using it to save it up for buying a car one day.
I’ve seen a number of studies, reports, NGOs, etc. advocating for giving cash directly vs. inkind donations.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/07/5416096...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/we...
https://www.vox.com/2016/1/23/10810978/cash-transfer-givedir...
For example, food stamps may go to a family, where they are dealt with responsibly, in a way that money, which is very easy to grab and walk out to buy cigarettes with when things go badly, is not.
Obviously, it's not a full solution, and a cynical recipient could sell them, true... but we're not talking about individuals acting in isolation for purely selfish reasons; that's a contrived subset of the problem.
What's the alternative you're proposing?
Just hand out cash?
The research shows that people suffer severe difficulty in managing fiscal matters when under financial stress. It's the old 'why do people who are poor buy so many lottery tickets?'?
Money isn't the correct solution; and maybe food stamps aren't either... but they're a better solution, and don't think that's even in doubt.
...but if you have a different one, I'm happy to hear it.
Answer, all people buy lottery tickets at the same rate for tickets which might materially change their life. If you are rich, spending 20 bucks for a 1 in a million chance to win 10k is not going seem worthwhile.
The problem food stamps are solving is to keep a lid on the brow beating from taxpayers toward the poor. It is a mild form of punishment masquerading as help. It would be cheaper, easier, and more effective to just give cash (and because it would be cheaper, you could give more).
The main issue poor people have in managing money, is simply that they do not have enough.
Or if they inherit 50k, immediately go to Vegas and lose it all.
These are all real examples I've known personally.
The people you're describing exist but it's hard to imagine someone who is great with money staying poor for years and years, considering almost everyone in America moves between income quintiles during their life and most spend time at the top.
If free food is punishment please sign me up to be punished.
Also, I'm interested in the source for your lottery ticket info. It sounds fairly absurd in a world where many jackpots are over 5 million, which is enough to change almost anyone's life. I've never even heard of a lottery for 10k.
That is because you don't buy them I guess. Scratch tickets, poker machines, plus lots of small state lotteries that start at 5-10k and top out at maybe half a mill.
That's what we do in most (all? I can only find a handful of dated references to a program in the UK) parts of Europe. Seems to work fine.
It isn't really a comparable situation. Acting like it is doesn't do anything constructive for American problems.
Looking more at other countries is imho benelovant for the states.
Of course that's just another reason to implement universal healthcare, not to shame poor people with food stamps.
People in this discussion are saying "If you give cash to an addict, they will spend it on drugs." Well, most poor Americans have serious health issues. It is one of the things that makes them poor.
If you need medical care and you have to pay for it and it's very expensive, giving such a person money won't go to food. It will go to medical bills.
If you want to give Americans cash instead if food stamps, first you need to give them free medical care. We really need universal basic health care in the US.
I don't know very much about this topic and I'd love to see the research you're talking about. Are poor people worse at managing finances? Intuitively that sounds wrong to me, but intuition is usually useless in economics. Do food stamps result in better health outcomes than cash?
I wouldn't assume that, since food stamps aren't particularly focussed on the homeless.
In fact, the original purpose of the food stamp program was clearing agricultural surpluses (hence why the program was created in the Department of Agriculture and not the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare where you would have expected it to be if it were a welfare program and not an ag industry support program); you originally had to purchase food stamps, and for every dollar you got $1 of unrestricted (but still only for food) stamps, and $0.50 of restrictes-to-items-deemed-to-be-in-surplus stamps.
The exact restrictions and mechanisms changed over time in subsequent iterations of the program (and it's hard to find a clear purpose for many changes because lots were compromises between competing visions with fundamentally opposed goals.)
Unprocessed trauma coping circuits (aka addiction) highjacks intelligence to get the dopamine trigger, it doesn’t nessesarily eliminate intelligence.
You don’t solve trauma with cash, but you also don’t make it worse and the benefits to others seem to be greater.
A regulated nervous system is a need, and if someone never developed that capability and doesn’t have awareness or resources to develop it as an adult, it’s actually a pretty logical move to use drugs.
This!! I am always a little disappointed to see so many people on HN talking about gov't programs as though they are some form of altruism. They (usually) are not.
SNAP/WIC/EBT (what people are referring to as food stamps, which I don't think exist anymore; the 'benefits' are managed and distributed via a card provided by JPMorgan last I read) is a corporate welfare program.
Every time there's political talk about cutting the 'food stamp' program, the lobbyists come out. Whose lobbyists? Kraft, Walmart, JPMorgan, et al. If you use your 'Googles' you should be able to find a few articles about what % of revenue the program(s) account for some of these programs. One year Kraft said it was something like 14% (I have this on paper somewhere in my archive, but the info's available on the interwebs). Because of this, these programs aren't going anywhere.
This is also why, when you look at the food stuffs provided to students via school breakfast and lunch programs, they're often crap. Food nutrition is not the goal, getting Vitamin $ to companies (and maybe a few small farmers) is.
Meats and grains are heavily subsidized by the USG, produce not so much. IIRC this goes back to the doing of Nixon's guy, Earl Butz.
Drug addicts make up a negligible percentage of people getting a helping hand. The statistics show this and it has been born out by the states that introduced drug testing for assistance recipients: they cost more to administer than the money saved by kicking people out of the assistance programs because the numbers are so tiny. Even in SF where it seems like all the crazy homeless people are strung out or tweaked, well, that's a sample problem: indeed many of the crazy ones are, but they are a minuscule, though highly visible, percentage of the people in need.
If you're struggling to make ends meet you don't have time to take drugs.
Whereas if you start out OK, become drug addled and fall out of the system, you probably by that time are too out of it to ask for help.
A lot of people don’t realize that “food stamps” are just a debit card that you use to checkout at the supermarket, yes, even Whole Foods. There are some limits to what you can buy, but generally speaking if it’s unprepared food you can pay for it with the food stamp debit card.
I was on food stamps for a short while. While the value of the balance wasn’t literally cash, it was equivalent because I was spending at least that much on groceries anyway. You can also carry a balance forward from month-to-month so there’s never a need to spend it down wastefully. It’s only about $100/person/month so it’s never too much for just food.
Food stamps have low administrative overhead and low levels of fraud. It’s a government program I have very few gripes about, which is indeed saying something.
And it’s not a small program either, around $100B per year (less in the last couple years due to very strong employment numbers).
100,000,000,000 / 12 = would feed one person for 8.3B years.
Or a billion people for 8.3 years.
You can see where this is going.
$100B should be able to feed one hundred million people for 83.3 years. Assuming $100 / month could feed a person.
You can buy a lot of lentils, rice, and potatoes with $100.
But you're saying food stamps costs $100B a year.
Where is all this money going?
The latest numbers in Wikipedia say that SNAP costs $70.9B and distributes an average of $125/month to 44.2M people.
That means the cost is $133 to distribute $125, or an overhead of $8 per person per month.
Still not great but not nearly as bad as I was expecting, to be honest.
The average health insurance deductible is $4,358 and the average premium is $321 per month.[3] That means that on average US citizens pay $321 per month for (5237-4358) / 12 = $73.25 of expected value. That's a 4X markup over the expected value of insurance.
Health insurance companies might be reporting single digit overheads but they are providing $1 of value for $4 and are inefficient.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361028/
[2] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/11/05/when-your-shitty-...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/06/23/heres-how-much-the-avera...
I guess it's still a whole number factor sort of thing.
I also wonder if those numbers are accounting for Medicare and Medicaid (which add costs to the private insurance system).
>> To estimate lifetime health care costs, we employ a method based on a current life table, also known as a period life table model.
Thus, these costs are representative of recent costs.
In the next 80 years, both the expected value of insurance and the cost of insurance will change. Health insurance premiums are expected to increase by double-digits in 2019.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/05/26/whos-ready-for-a-1...
Your calculation makes no sense. Healthcare insurance pays out for catastrophic events, hence the deductible, not evenly every year. You need to know the distribution of payouts to get a meaningful result.
$100 billion / 12 months
= $8.3 billion per month
/ $100 per person per month
= 83 million people
so $100 billion per year could give 83 million people $100 per month.
This is kind of the point. In all the cases where the person is spending that amount on eligible food regardless, it's already equivalent to cash so it might as well be cash without the administrative overhead. They'll spend the food stamps on food and the cash they would have spent on food on whatever they want.
The only time it matters is when the person wouldn't be spending that much, i.e. they have an alternative source of food that doesn't take food stamps. In which case it only produces inefficiency. If you're content to eat free stale bagels and ugly produce every day so you can use the money for something else, you can't without breaking the law. Nor does it help you to try to stretch the money past the limit of the benefit amount.
So people go to the grocery store and spend all the money, because a fresh bagel tastes better than a stale one if you have to spend the money on that. And if you have a consistent way to get by on $80/month in groceries, accumulating an extra $20/month in food stamp balance every month still doesn't put gas in your car.
The same dynamic plays out in all the other assistance programs. There is money for low income housing assistance, but the natural thing to do there is to get together with multiple other hard off people, pool your resources and share housing. Which is not allowed. The programs generally prohibit methods of improving efficiency or stretching money.
Even if you're dead set on not letting people spend the money on vices, why is there a whitelist instead of a blacklist? You can't spend assistance money on alcohol or cigarettes, fine. But if there is food assistance and housing assistance then why can't you spend excess food money on housing or excess housing money on food? Why is there a ban on business cards and brake pads?
Well, no. A lot of them will sell the food stamps at a discount to people who do want food, but would like to pay a little less for it. The poor person gets money and so does the grocery shopper.
They're not physical stamps anymore and haven't been for at least a decade. It's a debit card that gets money deposited monthly. You can't sell the money without selling the card and your future access to the money going to the card.
In other words, the fraud you're all worried about has already been addressed.
And even though the public sector incurs real costs due to an approval process (you're not just paying the salaries of the overview bureaucrats, but also the salaries of the project workers who need to sit around and wait for funding to come in), it persists because it is viewed as more legitimate and more protective of legitimacy.
If you ask the public whether they would prefer for a public program to cost $100 million, including $20 million which ended up being embezzled into private pockets, or $150 million spent entirely legitimately, most members of the public would rather spend the $150 million for a legitimate program, even if you could show them how the additional taxes needed directly affected their personal bottom lines.
The reason why we don't give poor people cash directly is simple: even if 99%+ of beneficiaries will use the money responsibly, a tiny minority will not. That tiny minority will get written up in the press, and the perceived unfairness will politically doom the program. How public money is spent is, unfortunately, important.
If someone who's dependent on EBT money is spending it on caviar and filet mignon, they're going to go hungry for most of the month. Restrictions just add administrative overhead without benefit. (They also make the program more paternalistic and potentially stigmatizing, but that's a different argument.)
I lost several dress sizes by eating things like organic beef. I have a medical condition that causes malabsorption. It is routinely treated with expensive prescription digestive enzymes, plus large amounts of prescription drugs.
I'm a former military wife. Technically, I should be able to get the $100k/year or more worth of medical treatment I am supposed to need for free, at taxpayer expense.
Eating right is vastly cheaper, saves all kinds of tax dollars and also gives me a hugely higher quality of life. Win/win/win.
Does anybody thank me for doing the right thing here? No. Instead, I am frequently attacked for any number of reasons, some of which seem to be rooted in this idea that poor people aren't entitled to eat well, and their health be damned.
You have no idea what that person's needs are. Being able to see that they weigh a lot and what they purchased on a particular day doesn't really give you enough information to know if they were spending wastefully on frivolous purchases or not on that day.
Grocery Outlet and WinCo often have hydroponic LiveLettuce for cheap that keeps for a long time. Apples and some citrus last. I wish I had fresh tomatoes, they’re so good. Fresh tomato, basil, onion and garlic salad is to die for: see FrenchGuyCooking on IG. If I had a solar-powered hydroponic greenhouse trailer, I’d grow all of my own vegetables. One modern adaptation is some farmer’s markets take EBT and offer extra incentives... which all well-and-good if you have refrigeration.
The bigger problem in the produce industry is the parallels with swipe dating apps: optimizing for looks, but not taste or nutrition... hence why store-bought vegetables taste like cardboard. As an example, a former coworker had a job at one of those fruit stands. Blemished fruits and vegetables were fine to eat but wouldn’t sell, so they went into pies and soups. It seems to me shrewd farmers and shoppers would find a way to rate/compete produce, shorten the supply chain and deliver naturally-ripened food.
Finally, a Russian hustler friend of mine fregans all sorts of stuff: steaks, salads, takeaway meals, whatever. I should do that more TBH because expiration dates are very conservative.
https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2014/08/l...
Best.
Is that the appropriate word for that person?
https://www.wordnik.com/words/idiot
The hypothetical person is certainly not offended, and previous usage as a medical diagnosis is considered archaic.
Yes?
If you aren't homeless, no one expects you to sit and eat a giant bag of apples all by yourself within one to three days. People in housing who are gifted a large amount of produce or whose gardens overflow will post questions to forums concerning creative uses. They will can, pickle, etc the excess -- the amount they can't reasonably eat fresh. People expect you to eat an apple or two in a day, not twenty or thirty of them. Unless you are homeless, I guess. Then suddenly you should be grateful for 30 apples instead of revolted at the idea of trying to finish them by yourself before they rot in the heat.
Canning, pickling etc is beyond the means of a homeless person. So I have no idea why any middle class person would think giving a huge bag of a single type of fruit to a homeless individual in hot weather would make any sense whatsoever. I cannot fathom it.
If you give a big enough bag of even a hardy fruit to someone with no means to preserve it, it will rot. Even apples.
...
>Imperfect Produce is only able to make a profit by working with the larger global agribusinesses, not the picturesque small and mid-sized farms they project in their marketing campaign.
Can someone explain what I'm missing? They get their produce from small farmers, Imperfect Produce gets their produce from large farmers, where is the overlap?
>it certainly doesn’t help small, local farmers or address the source of waste: overproduction by industrial farms as they produce the perfect produce sold in supermarkets.
So in this context, the over production is being considered "waste" but once Imperfect Produce uses it, it's perfectly good food that food banks and soup kitchens no longer have access to.
Also, there is a lot of implication that all of the food waste going to support communities is being utilized effectively. But certainly they, too, discard some portion of food, not to mention issues with quality or sanitation.
Clearly I'm missing something. That, or they really called it on the "sour grapes" thing.
The argument would be: IP took a large chunk of customers away from these farms, which also supplied PB.
Not that I buy it necessarily, but it is in keeping with the common theme of manipulating conscious but ignorant consumers. (E.g., how some companies might say "Our crazy amounts of single use packaging are totally recyclable")
There are valid arguments to be made against high-input agriculture. None of them are discussed in this blog post, which seems to be not so much a case of sour grapes as one of rigid ideology.
As an aside, a valuable lesson here about what matters to consumers: people buy things to address their own needs. The business that makes it easier for consumers to feel good about themselves wins. 'I eat ugly vegetables' is an easier, even more fun consumer story than 'I help fight entrenched societal ills by buying vegetables from bad neihborhoods.' All else being equaly, IP would still dominate here based on resonating with more consumers.
What has shocked me is that I expected ugly food to get turned into processed food. You know, lopsided potatoes made into soup or Pringles. Weird looking apples into fruit juice.
What I get instead is oranges the size of grapefruit, grapefruit the size of oranges, and a reality check. The food I’m picturing is made on machines. Machines like to work with uniform inputs and usually can’t cut out bad bits. So maybe they’re turning all the apples that are between three and four standard deviations below normal size into applesauce, but they probably aren’t turning giant or scabby grapefruit into my breakfast beverage.
It does kind of make me wonder if there’s a market for making machines that can do that though. We have to be close to building that sort of tech at a competitive price.
It’s probably more of a cost thing for the large companies. Just cheaper to only use a certain grade to entire their product is consistent.
Like no one would can any tomatoes that were harvested for retail, because those canned tomatoes would suck.
What’s surprising to me is that the alternate market for such outlier food evolved. It would seem cheaper to just compost it. I actually wonder how much of the market is genuine economically driven vs “feel good”/signaling.
Do we know for certain that fruit sizes are a normal distribution? If not then you can’t estimate sigma the way you did. Most of our tree fruit comes from genetic clones, with a different root graft tuned to soil type. So size is going to come down to weather, health and inputs (water nutrients and sun), but not really to genetics.
Compost should be the third or forth option for this process. The one cull we did, all of the rotting fruit went to compost, and the too far gone or gouged fruit went to a farmer for his cows. Pigs should work just as well (better, really, since pork is much more efficient than cow, caloricly speaking).
Maybe free range chickens too. My friend who is somewhere between overachieving gardener and homesteader gives her spent cider apples to her chickens. And I know of small scale chicken farmers who collect restaurant waste and let their chickens forage on the piles. But at industrial scale it probably goes to compost.
But even compost and manure can still have a life if the right people are involved. We should be doing more of that.
New Belgian Brewery (a B Corp), last I heard, double composts their spent grains. First anaerobically to get methane to fire the boilers, and a second aerobic composting which gets spread on the property.
And one voice in the permaculture community, Mark Shepard, rotates his cows and chickens so the fly spawn on the cow patties are in the larval stage when the chickens arrive. Good protein and the manure is dispersed “for free”.
Even the food we don’t eat can do good.
I've been chewing on this for a while. Who's in charge of setting up a social safety net? Whose responsibility is it to make sure people don't starve in the streets?
I thought I paid taxes to my government to socialize the issue across my representative district, but my government (in the USA) has disagreed with me - that money is to be spent on fighter jets (to quote the executive branch), while the churches are responsible for taking care of the homeless. And by the way, the homeless are responsible for policing themselves (to quote my mayor).
A couple weeks ago Domino's Pizza filled a bunch of potholes and stamped their logo on the asphalt after. I thought that would cause a national discussion. I thought at the very least, the city that it happened in would be humiliated enough to make the foolish mistake of maybe trying to slap back at Domino's for putting their logo all over the street. Nope, business as usual.
In other words, why suddenly are people starving again because imperfect produce found a capitalist way to reduce waste?
I don't know anything about either of these groups, but the article says that this is simply the marketing of Imperfect Produce that doesn't bear out in reality. Do you have information contradicting their points that you decided not to share?
Article asserts: "That food wasn't being thrown out it was going to food banks and homeless shelters."
So while IP is almost certainly helping the farmers by paying them for produce they can't normally sell they certainly aren't reclaiming mountains of food otherwise destined for rot.
They don't. They wont. The article is nonsensical and ignores basic economics. Suffers from "we know better" attitude.
Small farmers are struggling. If the ugly produce helps them become little more profitable it is both good for them and also good for the food security of the nation. More available food would mean food will be cheaper for everyone. Will the world be better place if small farmers are out of business and a large businesses like Amazon takes up farming ?
Personally do not think there is anything ugly about ugly produce.
Note: I am not a rich techie. I earn less than $10K a year.
Regardless of how you feel about the ethics of the above, it's at least part of Imperfect Produce's identity. If they are marketing to conscious consumers, this article helps those consumers consider more broadly their social impact.
For my own value judgement, I feel like I'm missing some important data: - If IP is taking waste produce from larger farms, are they actually competing with BeetBox for the supply of produce? - Downstream of above, has IP's activity actually reduced the amount of food donations being made available to food banks?
If IP is mainly competing with BeetBox for the "conscious consumers" that subsidize their charitable work, maybe BB can focus efforts to marketing their distinction from IP. Maybe this article is the first step.
Alternatively, if the BB folks are prioritizing social impact, have they tried to convince/train IP to work with the same social gaps they fill? If IP is more efficient in extracting conscious-consumer dollars, they have more surplus that could be poured back into the community.
No. Feeding the poor is important but there must be a better way than that.
If you look at the formation of a lot of Western welfare systems, most had a focus on dignity. It's no fun to be the one kid with the ugly produce, or explicitly going to something that's for the poor kids. We see it a lot with adults as well - how many people don't take advantage of benefits they deserve, because they don't want to be people that have to take these benefits. If we can support a culture that says produce doesn't have to be perfect to be socially acceptable, then I think everyone benefits.
While I'm sure Phat Beets do good stuff, I'm not sure if their constant refrain on helping the poor and marginalised is helpful in the long run. In my view, a good local grocery store that sells fresh produce at an affordable price is going to be a massive help, and I think both they and Imperfect Produce do the same thing.
Finally Phat Beets only deliver in the East Bay. Imperfect Produce also come to San Francisco.
Commoditising ugly fruit and veg is good. We should stop treating perfectly good food as reject and we should stop assuming the best use of ugly food is donation to the poor.
Poor people need jobs and state intervention not food banks
These services should be provided by the local government rather than charities.
No...that's literally exactly what they are addressing. They are creating demand for the imperfect produce. That was the problem in the first place, lack of demand for imperfect produce and the inseparability of imperfect produce production from perfect produce production.
Being transparent about where the food would have gone might make people think twice before lowering their quality standards, but in aggregate, I think the technology to route second-rate food to bargain hunters is a genie that won't be easily rebottled.
So, if private enterprises have no responsibility (because of free enterprise), the state has no responsibility (because of small government) and charities are strictly voluntary yet still compete against enterprises, then who actually does have responsibility?
I also don't own a car, and having services like this helps me continue the car-free lifestyle.
I am sympathetic to phatbeets' criticism. Despite leaning towards not changing my consumer habits, I will have to mull over their points and evaluate my priorities.
At some point though, I need to eat and if the service fits within my overall lifestyle but I care about community hunger, maybe I can donate a box of produce to a food shelter through IP?
Our startup movement, more so than any other segment of the global economy, embodies the idea of the "American Dream" that if you work hard you can be successful and move up the social ladder. It's not perfect, and clearly it's not a pure meritocracy, but to claim that the VC world is "the most important driving force of rising inequality" is very inaccurate in my judgement.
It is true that silicon valley style tech companies are more and more becoming an important part of the economy, but the types of startups which are part of the tech startup eco system are creating jobs and are disrupting existing industries as part of a healthy capitalist process.
Here are two factors which I consider to have a much more significant influence than VC's on the global trend of rising inequality:
1) It is well understood that middle class families keep on average the majority of their wealth in the form of a house which they own. The housing crisis, which was fueled by wall street excess, wiped out an incredible amount of wealth from poor and middle class families and the bailout and shorting transferred this wealth to the top 0.1%
2) Approximately 3 trillion is collected by the US government every year in taxes, and approximately 1.5 trillion is borrowed by the government, for a total budget of approximately 4.5 trillion. This money is handed out by congress members to powerful banks and corporations from their state as a form of quid pro quo for campaign donations. The budget deficit is then used to justify a never ending cycle of cuts to social safety net programs.
>A Case of Sour Grapes?
I thought there was going to be something interesting but no, that's only a header no content afterwards to answer that rhetorical question.
Also I am kinda bothered by the repetitive use of small farmers of color. This also surprisingly seems to be mentioned nowhere else on their pages. Why not just Precarious ? local? Engaged for affordable quality or whatever? Is really color the most accurate and essential way to describe the farmers in this project?
I already have no sympathy for this organization after reading what should be an unfair case that could help to bring traction about them.
I don't know anything about it, but I'm skeptical. I would have thought that an ugly carrot would end up as carrot juice or sliced up into bits and put into soup.
Also, what happens when Imperfect produce gets big enough that there isn't enough ugly produce to source. This is a problem with investor driven, profit hungry companies. Other example is SeatToTable which claimed to deliver fish from local fishermen to your doorstep was actually sourcing from other parts of world.
In the software development industry, there is a similar problem; SaaS services have been replacing free open source solutions even though they are expensive and they take away flexibility from those who use them.
Advertising has become too powerful - It allows for-profit companies to use big VC funding to fund campaigns to trick people into making bad decisions. They end up paying more for the same thing.
In effect, they're changing the world for the worse but they're packaging it nicely.
What are some examples?
Even at several thousand/month (approaching thr salary of a sysadmin), the economics can work out fine as you're being more productive and the sysadmin can be working on the really custom things that are core to your business like specific CI pipelines or monitoring and optimising our own software. It's the same argument as AWS. EC2 is really expensive, but it's still usually cheaper than actually running your own hardware at the same service level as AWS can provide.
Scale of operation changes things, but the vast majority of companies are small enough that spending money on SaaS and IaaS is usually better than building a local team of commodity staff doing nothing unique for the business.
Often, those companies would actually have benefited from being able to integrate their backend systems more closely.
Regarding back end services; I've used various Amazon AWS services at different companies and, every time, it made development and deployment way more complicated - For example, one corporation I worked at, there was only 1 person in the whole company who had the full knowledge to work with our Lambda setup; this person worked very slowly (probably not their fault) so they were blocking all other teams in the company. It would have been much faster if the company operated the server themselves.
Because it's now obvious that this is not true, for-profit companies have resorted to focusing their marketing on the idea that it's "too much effort to manage and scale" open source software.
It's not free, it costs money to setup and keep running. It's also often abandoned and unmaintained.
Remember just recently there was a Chinese browser that received shit tons of money and turned out to be just Chrome browser?
There are plenty of shitty startups out there and this is an obvious case that Ugly Produce is one of them.
Look: I live in Canada. I've never heard of phatbeats OR Ugly Produce, so it's fair to say that I don't have much of a horse in the race. However, it seems like your ultimate conclusion (UP is a shitty startup and they should DIAF) is based on logic that isn't nearly as "obvious" as you've decided that it is.
Please, feel free to add more information. I find this topic genuinely interesting.
20 years ago, I was a 20y/o radical activist. I spent a significant amount of my time, energy and money participating in street-level activist organizing - all while holding down a job as a software developer by day.
I have protested the KKK (the Ohio police put us in a big cage while robed Klansmen hung out with a PA on the courthouse steps). I have personally been involved with shutting down white power skinhead concerts, which often involved physical confrontation. I wasn't "in Seattle" but I was "in Washington", for those of you old enough or inclined to catch the reference. I've held placards at Free Mumia rallies. I almost got arrested for jabbing Fred Phelps (the God Hates Fags asshole) with an umbrella.
I offer this - if you're willing to trust me - not to brag or signal virtue, but to offer some context when I say that holy fuck the language that they use in their call-to-arms manifesto is irritating to me.
Maybe it's true, what they say about getting old making you conservative. Maybe this post is giving me an existential crisis. And yet, I don't think so. What I actually think is that perhaps East Bay food activists are just guileless in their messaging and are completely tone-deaf to how incredibly elitist that this kind of intentionally polarizing propaganda actually sounds to anyone who might not shake their fist at the concept of capitalism still existing in the bathroom mirror every morning.
Ranting about how a startup is stealing your thunder / community groups because they are gasp effective is the literal definition of sour grapes. It has nothing to do with capitalism, which is true regardless of how many comments you delete.
Seriously, phatbeats: when did you get so scared to innovate? You don't have to do it in a capitalist framework, but you have to get creative and try new things or you won't have a legitimate argument to make to 99.9% of the population. Even Canadians who are moved to tears by Bernie Sanders find your tone to be grating.
I want so badly to support people who spend their energy making the world better for people. Maybe these Imperfect Produce folks really do have blood boys and drink the tears of orphans. But my knee-jerk reaction to your post, as life-long self-identified progressive, is to cheer for them. That should not be what's happening, and it's not just because I got old and sold out.
Meta: I am genuinely impressed at how civil this discussion is. We HN commenters often get a bad rap. We often++ deserve it, but today, we can have nice things.
Maybe all of my ideas suck and would fail. My point is I didn’t hear one word about what they’re going to do about the situation they find themselves in. They’re just whining that their business model has been disrupted.
And the key thing about their messaging. They’re not building themselves up, they’re tearing someone else’s thing down. That’s never a successful strategy. Though I am thankful for the reveal about Imperfect (who are greedy assholes)...I think hey would have done a lot better shopping this story to SF Gate or SacBee. And then using those stories as a touchstone for their new launch of how they’re going to overcome this issue.
The ugly truth is that perhaps the most real problem these folks have is the need to decide whether they are prioritizing fighting capitalism or feeding poor people.
It's quite likely that they cannot effectively do both at the same time, but would benefit from focused priorities.
I still can't believe they wrote "gentrifies food waste" with a straight face
Here are some facts for you: In 2017, Feeding America reported that they received over 1.47 billion pounds of produce. As a reference, Imperfect claims to have recovered 30 million pounds of produce to date. Feeding America and the NRDC also reported that over 6 billion pounds of crops go unharvested or unsold ever year. This study was based on 7 key crops so the total is likely much higher, but let’s assume its 6 billion to be conservative. This means that even if Imperfect went through 100 times the amount of ugly produce every year that they’ve recovered to date, they would still be using less than half of the available supply. Phat Beets, your math doesn’t add up! Provide meaningful statistics and facts to back up your argument or everyone will see through your emphatic nourishment of the outrage machine of social media for the reactionary
Zooming out, there’s also a huge aspect of this that’s a messed up apples to oranges comparison. Imperfect is a business with a social mission related to food waste, not a nonprofit solely focused on ending hunger. It’s great that they are making a difference while also making money but it’s not fair to ask a company to overthrow capitalism. Do you expect Lyft to overthrow the freeway system, or ask the computer that you wrote these words on to end exploitative mining practices that provided the copper for the circuitry? It seems like you’re making the good the enemy of the perfect and in so doing ignoring the reality of the situation which is much more nuanced than you portray it. Isn’t there a way for community CSAs to work alongside companies like Imperfect? It seems to me that these two groups are working towards admirable, but very different goals at different scales and this is actually a good thing. There is plenty of work left to be done and there is clearly more than enough food for both of you to achieve your goals and then some. Save the abstract critique of capitalism for philosophy class, the rest of us live in the real world where we have to make compromises and embrace the grey areas.
My sources- Feeding America report: http://www.feedingamerica.org/assets/pdfs/feeding-america-pr... NRDC report: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
Yep sounds about right
TFA smells like anti-capitalism, upset that someone is doing something profitable with the source of their charity work... And double upset that capitalists might have a (gasp) positive impact.
Personally, I am angry and upset at this Phatbeets, for taking food waste away from the hard working farmers who would otherwise use it for compost. But I'm also angry at the farmers who, by using ugly food for compost, are stealing jobs from the good folks of the waste department. Stop undermining our social systems, you capitalist farmers!