The war on food waste is a waste of time

We would likely be better off if we put all focus into the big things and completely ignored the small things.

Which eventually will enable new policies that do a better job of changing the big things.

Such as - I guess that the biggest, environmental, advantage of an electric car is signalling that hey, I'm willing to put many thousands of dollars and tolerate an reduced range - partly because I value the environment.

Doesn't matter if an electric car actually is better for the environment (buying a new car seldom is) - it signals a will and desire. Both of which are paramount for policy-makers.

This is immeasurably important.

It’s always been when resources are constrained. For all forms of life.

Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars.

Although, I might agree that it’s best (at least for me) if people don’t realize this or think about it in these terms en masse.

Poverty was rampant and people lived in a feudal society, but people were by and large comfortable. The minimalistic Japanese esthetic that exists even now is a carry over from that period. People's dwellings were very small, but in comparison to European standards things were incredibly clean. There are numerous writings from Europeans who almost universally remark on both the level of poverty and on the surprising level of happiness.

There is an interesting book (the name of which escapes me at the moment) where the author tries to enumerate some of the things that the Edo period Japanese got right and that could be used as a model going forward.

One of the things that I think we, as a more affluent generation/society, often get wrong is that we equate prosperity with comfort. Indeed, we also equate comfort with being better.

A friend of mine was eating grapes that he brought with his lunch. "You know how sometimes you eat a grape and it's got this amazing flavour and sweetness, but sometimes you eat a grape and it is virtually tasteless? I mean, even with the same variety of grape. Why is that?" I had to explain to him that eating grapes in February is not necessarily going to lead to tasty grapes because they aren't really in season anywhere.

Why are we flying unripe grapes from half way around the world? And why are we ever trying to buy and sell grapes that are over irrigated and over produced so that they no longer have any flavour? Well, the answer is that people want to buy inexpensive grapes in Canada in February.

But, is this actually a good idea? As a society, perhaps we would actually be better off if you could only buy grapes in Canada in September or October. Maybe you would have culturally relevant food as well, instead of fulfilling every whim of every person in society.

And maybe we don't need cars everywhere. I mean, how many families have 2 cars? How many have kids and therefore have 3 or 4 cars? Are we actually better off this way? And do you actually need air conditioning in most parts of North America? And do we need to keep our houses at 22 C, and have remote car starters so that our cars idle and are sitting at 22 C for when we dash into them and we have giant underground tunnels all heated to 22 C and we don't have to walk outside when we are shopping, and all the parking garages are heated so that we don't even have to run to our car and don't even get me started about taking a bus, or walking out of doors: It's winter out there!

Which is not to say that I am idolising the noble savage and thinking that we're all going to turn into Tarzan and swing from tree house to tree house on vines in a wonderful magical world where we don't need anything. It's just that I don't think the pursuit of riches is necessarily going to enrich our lives and culture. I've been rich and I've been poor and I've got to say that the rich are often the ones missing out.

I do believe that first-world, middle-class living standards, circa 2020, are globally possible ... just not in 2020.

By the time that those standards are globally possible without unpaid debits in the form of environmental externalities, there will be a new "first world" standard that we will then decide whether or not to borrow from the future to pay for ...

If everyone lived like the average american we'd be in deeeep trouble. We went way too far past equilibrium and the only reason we're still able to make somehow it work is because the majority of the world hasn't make it as far as us.

I don't know about the rest of your comment but there's no question that current first world standards are not possible for all people. It's a very simple math problem. If everyone ate beef and drove cars and consumed carbon and participated in wanton habits at the current levels of the first world then the planet would be utterly and irreversibly ruined. It's not even close.

I understand acknowledging our unsustainable habits makes us uncomfortable. But for better or worse that doesn't change the truth.

Entirely unnecessary. Native population growth rate is negative in every affluent country in the world, and they maintain their populations only via immigration.

Focus on improving the quality of life in third world nations (via investment, education, etc.) and growth rate will naturally fall, like it has everywhere else.

We have been using plastics for less time than fusion has been “just around the corner.” Going back to a plastics-free lifestyle will be easier than magicking up fusion power.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/19/bolivia-i...

The majority of human history takes place in the mode of production of the hunter-gatherer society. This is before the agricultural revolution and the advent of agricultural civilization.

Economists describe this as early communism. The definition of this model is based in large part on the study of the Iroquois Confederacy. This, along with evolutionary models of food sharing, highlight a meat sharing system that is enforced communally. There is personal property, but private ownership of land and essential resources is nonexistent. The community owns the means of production as well as essential resources, and they dictate their distribution by need and not by profit.

In modern society, this would manifest as collective ownership of the means of production by the working class. The means of production are capital that is used to produce goods. Land, water, corporations, factories, etc. As workers exist worldwide, collective ownership would take the form of a global socialist state owned by the workers. This is the purpose of the world revolution.

As communities become organized around sustainability using vast amounts of capital created by workers under capitalism, the global state becomes redundant. At this stage, the economic structure returns to its original state, which is communism.

It's not a ideological debate, calling someone Marxist is as redundant as calling a physicist a Newtonian or a mathematician a Pythagorean. Capitalism itself as we know it was defined by that era of economic science. Of course we should remain skeptical and critical, as many ideas from that era turned out to be wrong. What's difficult is constantly working against decades of Cold War era propaganda and disinformation.

The primary American defense against the words socialism or communism is the idea that society is somehow built around personal character flaws and not laws of economic and political science. The capitalist is not inherently greedy, he simply follows the forces of economics. Communism is not some "ideal society" that works on paper but is undermined by human greed. It describes the majority of human history, and it requires a world revolution to exist again. Any nation that describes itself as "socialist" yet participates in the global economy is simply capitalist and masquerading as something else.

1. Doing less stuff 2. Doing the same amount of stuff with fewer negative side effects.

In the long run we'll get 2, and in the short run we'll get 1. And simply applying the tax will allow that transition to be seamless and efficient.

Theoretically it (or something like it) could create a viable market for the food whose cost goes below market price or is not pretty, but it would have to do it at the wholesale level. Not cases of produce but dozens of truckloads a week.

In their particular case they are trying to make produce a D2C product so they have two challenges: a) build a market for a good and b) make D2C perishable profitable. For reference on b, see Blue Apron.

You can almost think of Asian produce markets as farmers markets.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981063 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14248585.

'Regarding the losses before produce reaches consumers (the 40% mentioned) ...' might have been a little clearer, if a bit unwieldy.

The duplicate/misleading use of the word 'rate' at the end of the sentence also added extra confusion.

English can be a surprisingly tricky language sometimes :)

Just shake it all through some progressively finer screens and blow the remaining plastics off the tops of the screens with a blast of air.

Perhaps the plastics would gum up the food-shredder?

However, I'll stand by my point that it's anything but trivial. The city may offer organic waste pickup in theory, but not to my apartment building or any I've ever lived in. I've never even heard of it residentially.

So spending, say, 20 minutes a week saving it and hygienically transporting the incredibly smelly contents on your subway commute, all for a small bag of apple cores, orange rinds, wilted greens and meat trimmings and such... seems like kind of an insane level of effort for a tiny return, no?

I only see composting happening realistically at scale if a law is passed requiring every apartment building to provide a compost receptacle. And I'm honestly not sure how that could be made to work hygienically. Until then...

I’m pretty sure I’m at a greater risk of throat cancer now, and other than that I’m not too sure why you would want them.

I'm not aware of any studies confirming or denying their advantage in the era of modern food safety standards.

Now, they're shamed for or outright prevented from using the accessibility devices that allow them to actually, y'know, consume necessary and lifegiving liquid.

Straws in the ocean were dumped there by careless people. Since you care about the environment, there's no way you're using a paper straw so you can continue dropping it into the stormwater drain without the problems that you used to cause when you dropped plastic straws into the drain. The very people who choose paper straws are the ones that can't make any difference because they weren't the problem in the first place.

No, they're not. Full stop. It's not just the production of the straws that matters, it's their post-use effects. They can choke birds and fish, pierce stomachs or guts, and eventually become microplastics that get eaten by plankton and fish since the plastic doesn't degrade on a timeframe relevant to human or even generational lifespans.

My kids are so indoctrinated into these habits that my four-year-old asked me which trash bin to use for a tiny spec of crust from her eye (compost was the correct answer). These habits—even over a lifetime—will have a negligible impact. But I'm confident that my kids will factor environmental issues highly for decisions (such as voting) that actually do matter.

Well? Do tell. While hand washing or eliminating plastic bags or eliminating plastic straws might not be the end-all be-all of good environmental stewardship or good health practices, I'm a bit dumbfounded how they can be seen in a negative light. It's flu season, be cognizant of hand washing and cover your mouth when you cough - how's that a harmful message again?

Also, Cash for Clunkers was as much (or more) an economic stimulus program as an environmental program.

Straws and plastic bags are targeted because they are the low hanging fruit that is easy to change. Because people are highly resistant to change, even when it's just a mild inconvenience, and addressing a small part of the problem is better than doing nothing at all.

That sounds like an economic failure. On one hand we have futures and maple syrup reserves to keep prices up during shortages, but we dont have reserves to address "0% safety margin for a supply shock (aka famine)"?

I would expect excess farm production to be stored for famine, as a stability control function of government. The farms still produce, still get their money, and the government has a safety net for keeping the peace during chaos.

I don't have much to add at the moment, but do still think that reducing waste (reducing the numerator, in the calorific viewpoint you suggest) is a reasonable goal - both in the supply chain and in consumer behaviour.

The lead times concern (especially during a food supply shock) is valid - the only analogy I can think of just now is backup stored energy; i.e. considering canned food as 'batteries'. Enough to survive off-grid for a while in an outage (and ideally rechargeable over longer time periods).

For the sake of this discussion, it seems odd to include forestry with agriculture, but in any case agriculture is a more substantial part of global emissions than I thought.