Smashing Eggs, Dumping Milk: Farmers Waste More Food Than Ever
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
For all the moral posturing about animal treatment in factory farms and sustainability, which I can sympathize with, there is a massive army of illegal migrant workers that are invisible both legally and socially.
These migrant workers grow and harvest the food that Americans survive on every day. Not to mention cleaning homes, landscaping, and even raising families.
This is a major factor in why food is so cheap and abundant in America. Illegal migrant workers who are paid sub-minimum slave wages to feed the citizens of the United States.
Until we take a hard look at this labor system and widely acknowledge its economic role, these debates are empty. If you know your history, you understand why this system exists.
My understanding of illegal immigrant jobs was that they were centered more in the restaurant and construction/landscaping fields (and many others, I'm sure).
source: https://cis.org/Report/Unlimited-Cheap-Farm-Labor-Evaluating...
There was no "snark" intended. My response is just as serious and practical as "Compose [sic] them and grow new ones!".
Nothing wrong with snark, though! I upvoted your initial comment.
I imagine it's much the same at the packing and shipping places.
In all seriousness, I've been really disappointed with people who I respect who have consistently belittled anyone who questions the prudence of the lockdown. "Covidiot" is thrown around indiscriminately.
The other thing that has surprised me is how many people use absolute numbers rather than per-capita numbers in order to prove their points. I even found Neil deGrasse Tyson doing this on Twitter.
Regarding absolute numbers, in the early phase when we had a 2-3 day doubling rate, per capita numbers didn't matter very much because you only needed ~2 days for it to double, so any difference in per capita cases saw that gap closed pretty quickly. So for instance, I saw people downplaying the danger by saying "sure Italy has it bad, but the US has 5x the population". That missed the point a bit. It didn't take that long for the US to become the leader in absolute number of cases, then a bit more for it to exceed per capita rates of Italy. Probably both would have happened sooner had there not been any intervention.
It's just that opening the economy has also become politicized and the armchair social media "experts" have begun chanting "OPEN UP!" without any sort of nuance repeatedly multiple times a day and overwhelming the conversations and suggestions of the reasonable folks with data. So, by default, the initial reaction is assume someone making that suggestion is they're more likely to be an emotional appeal than a rational discussion partner.
I think this accusation is equally applicable for politicians though. There has been precious little nuance in blanket lockdowns that don’t acknowledge how vastly different in risk different activities are (e.g. sunbathing in a park vs clubbing). Seems to me like the shouts of “OPEN UP!” are simply a response to the knee-jerk “SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!” that everyone has had to live with for the last few months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_Dona...
Instead of leading the people, the authorities are fighting with them.
Absolute numbers are important,those are facts. This isn't a routine disease society has accepted,it can be contained and prevented,per capita does not help guage resource needs.
But if you do start a lockdown you can't half-ass it because that would literally be the worst option. The markets are ok because the shutdown is intentional. The markets would not be ok if spending and revenue loss was a result of people being fearful and panicky.the goal know should be a smooth and quick recovery at the right time, not a rough,rushed and messy one.
If someone actually has questions, they should ask them. Otherwise if they don't have the courage to own their political position, I don't consider them part of the conversation.
"I don't believe this long video I just posted. But it does make you think." No, I'm pretty sure you believe and are promoting said video.
"I'm just asking questions here." No, you clearly have an agenda and opinion and want to bait others who are unsure into a discussion with you.
For the rare folks with honest questions, we can have a real explanation. For honest people who want to discuss, we can have a discussion.
But being coy and "asking" when you already have a position you won't actually change seems extremely disingenuous.
Either we lock down, mitigate the effects of our already broken systems, or open up and accept that we will be killing citizens under "acceptable losses"
No shit, but 100% of restaurants would fail with zero capacity. A partial open is better than nothing.
> "and if things open back up and people don’t show, we’re going to have a very different economic problem on our hands."
What would that be?
South Korea recently reopened bars and clubs, and just shut them down again, because masks and voluntary social distancing aren't enough for this virus.
Do you think Americans are more, less, or equally capable of voluntary compliance to this sort of thing than Koreans?
[1] I'm comfortable enough to order takeout at the moment. If we go back to exponential spread, I'm going right back to bunkering down, and not spending a single dollar on anything but groceries.
What makes you think that the initial surge will stop? The reason the initial surge in March stopped was because we closed everything down.
What mechanism is going to stop the surge from lifting lockdown? What has changed since March, and why is it enough to bring R to 1?
Why didn't South Korea think the same way that you did, and just decided to let infections surge, and see if they stop on their own?
Same as the first -- voluntary social distancing. I think you missed my point, which is that I don't believe the government is really in control, at least not in western democracies. I think people are choosing for themselves to isolate, and I think they will continue to adjust that decision based on their perceived risk.
I think there would be a surge at first because there is some pent up demand for things people feel like they need, or they really want to do and they don't perceive a strong risk. So these people would cause a surge, it would hit the news, and most people would then panic themselves right back indoors, then a month or so later we'd do it all again.
Someone released a study a few days ago suggesting that if we could actually achieve nearly universal compliance with mask wearing in public indoor spaces (I think they said 80%) then a slight improvement over our current masks (better than the homemade cloth or disposable surgical masks, not necessarily N95 level though), we could push R0 below 1.0 without really doing anything else different from normal everyday activities. I don't think we can expect that compliance rate, though.
If your thing is going to bars, and all the bars are closed, you're not 'choosing' to self-isolate[1]. I mean, yes, you are choosing to stay home instead of aimlessly wandering the streets, but most people don't care to do that. If the reason they want to leave their home is not there, they won't leave the home.
Re-open the bars, and suddenly all those people who 'chose' to self-isolate will start 'choosing' to go out to drink and mingle.
Also, you are vastly underestimating the number of people who, for good reasons, or bad, don't give a shit about their personal risk. They will be actively getting people who are actively trying to minimize personal risk sick, because the latter can't avoid essential social interactions.
When your personal risk includes liability for anyone else you get sick, I'll be more than happy to let you frame this entire conversation as personal risk. Until then, what people taking 'personal risk' are doing is shirking personal responsibility.
[1] The bar owner is 'choosing' to comply with the shutdown order, but that's because his personal risk[2] profile is completely different to that of his patron. His personal risk profile has to account for externalities caused by operating his business. He can be fined, lose his liquor license, etc. His patron's doesn't care about those externalities, because when the patron's irresponsible behaviour gets someone else sick, nobody goes after the patron.
[2] The fact that you're even talking about personal risk is why re-opening can't work in America. This is, and has never been about personal risk. Personal risk isn't something that legislature needs to control. The problem with epidemics is social risk, and patrons are in no position to accurately access it.
This is not a good faith argument, why are you trying to frame it as some kind of moral good vs evil dichotomy?
In the US, we're "opening back up" while many states are hitting daily records. Our lockdowns were a disaster and "opening back up" is going to cause an explosion in cases.
If our lockdowns had been done right we would be able to reopen the economy now with little risk
Is it any wonder? Look at the comments here. Look at guys like Elon Musk breaking quarantine for economic reasons and getting praised for it. Conspiracies abound.
This didn't happen in less partisan countries. Like absolutely everything else in the US, the lockdown became a political issue, for and against it.
Where I'm from, everyone took it seriously and in a matter of weeks we got down to ZERO active cases. Then again, we don't hate people who have different politics.
When your president is one of the richest men in the world its hard to convince leadership to shut down the economy.
And the US is pretty much unique with the whole "corporation is a person" nonsense
NYC is about the only hospital system that came close to being overwhelmed and even they made almost no use of the temporary hospitals.
The record numbers of cases we see now coincides with record levels of testing- with such limited availability of testing prior to the lockdown, the majority of cases- those not needing hospitalization- were never counted.
Comparing it to someplace like Taiwan or Singapore doesn't make any sense.
Comparing to those countries doesn't make much sense either because US is much wealthier. We should be doing far better than both, and we're not.
In the US, any and every death of someone who had the virus, and many who did not, are still counted among the death tolls. The recent case of the guy who died from alcohol poisoning comes to mind, though I personally know of others who died from other causes, and were counted even though they hadnt been tested.
Conversely, there is good reason to be skeptical of China's accounting as well- both due to government interference and the simple fact that they were not able to reliably test the majority of cases.
If US has twice the test positive rate as another, they're only testing half the cases.
The fact is no matter what metric you look at, the US is doing worse with our response than almost anywhere else.
And we don’t know how China is really ever doing about anything. We need to stop confusing statements from China with transparency.
Not to mention the human toll of quarantine- I live surrounded by a few hundred acres of forest, my cousin in a studio apartment. My daily life has hardly changed since I also work from home. She lives in or near paris, I think, and couldn't go 10 feet past her apartment door without a permit, and mostly got that only for groceries. Even still, she managed to catch it (or a similar disease, since she was refused testing).
Some people on HN love to hate on rural life, but I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.
That was in fact the prediction for Georgia, see for example the expert predictions here: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/infectious-disease-expe...
Of course it turns out not to have actually happened: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/georgia-coronavi...
With that said, my own reading prior to this point has suggested we'd see the uptick starting in this coming week, through the next two weeks.
The panel of experts estimated about 1k/day during the week ending May 16, ranging 579/day to 2292/day.
And while so far there aren't that many cases reported today, the data isn't complete due to the lag in testing results. In fact the lag is for 14 days. So we're still in a wait and see point.
Basically by following absolute numbers, and commenting on them as if there's a failure on the state's part, you're punishing states for increasing testing.
I'm a broken record talking about how nytimes/etc. will always pick the more sensational data to sell ads, and how it doesn't matter for them if they're wrong (and how they actually have a financial incentive to be wrong). Maybe it is all just an accident though.
It’s one of the things that public health officials have been warning about pretty consistently: as testing increases, positive cases will go up, but that shouldn’t be looked at as a bad thing.
Number of new cases per day is steadily increasing every week! A month ago the daily new cases were half what they are this week
I said this elsewhere but this is something health officials have specifically warned against. Yes case counts are going up, but that is because testing is increasing. The metric that matters is the testing positive rate.
There is no avoiding reopening. General availability of vaccines will take a very long time, simply because manufacturing 1 billion of anything is nontrivial. It is simply not feasible to ask people to put aside their personal lives and business for 18-24 months. We can do so reasonably safely with clear common sense guidance, without vacillation on the effectiveness of masks or distance or precautions.
In the least we need to stop issuing blanket orders that apply over broad geographies like entire states. The risks are different for different people and different circumstances. For instance, the infection fatality rate (IFR) is so low (less than 0.1%) for those under 50 that they should be permitted to go about their business. I am very much in favor of individuals assessing the risks to themselves in choosing which activities they participate in. From https://reason.com/2020/04/15/people-not-politicians-will-de...:
> Who has the best information to weigh these risks, the costs and benefits of each trip out versus staying home? Not a governor or a president, but an individual. Different people may have different tolerances for risk. For some people that trip to a restaurant or a place of worship may be a risk worth taking. For others it is not. For sure, each individual decision can affect other people—one person who takes too much risk and gets sick means one fewer hospital slot available for someone else. But that is true in many areas of American life, and it hasn't until now caused the country or states to be locked down.
Those people, unfortunately, are still able to spread to those who do have a much hight mortality rate.
The point of having society, and of having governments, is that cooperation allows us all to lead longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives. You can't just discard the necessity of cooperation in specific instances where the benefit you personally receive is lower than the amount of effort you need to put in.
Thats pretty much the entirety of laws that involve safety. My right to drive 150 mph is curtailed for the benefit of people I might kill.
Yes it has, in the 1918 pandemic. This is a false equivalency anyway, and can be made an anti-vaccination argument, where parents decide upon the lives of their children
We NEED contact tracing so we can dynamically quarantine.
We NEED enforcement of the new rules(6ft, masks) because they're not being followed where I'm at.
We NEED financial support for those who are immuno compromised or those who have to take care of the immuno compromised.
I have one of these and have sanity checked it against another mouth thermometer I have from CVS and the readings agree with one another.
(There have been reports of Chinese-made thermometers lying about their readings)
Looks like there are also a bunch on amazon that will arrive to me anywhere between two days from now and a week from now.
False. People in AZ are waiting in their cars for hours to get tested.
Also YMMV. I did not have to wait at all for my test. I made an appointment at sonoraquest labs (which I believe is part of lab corps) and I was the only person there at my slot other than the staff.
I did have to “wait” in the sense that I scheduled my appointment for the next day after calling them.
If the answer is no to any of those questions then there's not enough testing to help prevent the spread of disease. Seeing there's no meaningful herd immunity to the virus and no vaccine available if there's no controls on infections the hospitalization rate of the virus will overwhelm hospitals.
The reason for shutdown orders is to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. COVID-19 is really infectious and has a high hospitalization rate. These two factors combined can very quickly cause ICU resources to hit capacity. Once that happens people die at even higher rates than otherwise. A lot of people in Italy died because ICU resources hit capacity.
You can test a million people today but unless all of those people are quarantined from the rest of the population you'll need to test them again tomorrow as they may have become infected in the meantime. Even if COVID-19's mortality and hospitalization rate was low it's still a serious illness and mass infections would still shut businesses down. A majority of causes people are down for weeks with the disease. They're not going to be able to work so if you have a cluster at a meat packing plant it'll still be effectively shut down.
How should those things be enforced in your opinion?
The easiest way would be to hire inspectors to go around and inspect places during business hours and close them down if they're not in compliance.
That or a federal jobs program of "safety enforcer" paid for by the fed and placed in every business of X size or whatever. The former seems more likely.
California and Washington are both running massive deficits due to their harsh quarantine measures and will literally be out of money in a few months. Many cities are already running out of money.
Seattle, San Francisco, LA, NYC... all are heading towards bankruptcy or massive layoffs.
Many cops and teachers are about to be laid off. Prisons will be releasing prisoners to make budgets meet.
And here people are talking about a whole new squad of police that do nothing but enforce distancing and mask-wearing. With what money?
https://www.usmayors.org/2020/04/14/cities-report-pandemic-c...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-cities-...
https://www.dailybreeze.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-la-cities...
This is like the old line about education ("if you think it's expensive, try ignorance").
There isn't any such thing as "ending lockdown" without certain cooperative measures. Either we'll take the necessary collective steps to control spread and coordinate recovery behavior... or we won't, and we'll have both the uncontrolled spread and the second order uncoordinated responses including large portions of people sitting out economic participation in order to manage personal risk.
Maybe it'll take some kind of civil enforcement to do this. Maybe most people will cooperate.
Maybe the federal government will lend local governments money to help. Or it won't, or it will, but will come with stipulations designed to weaken the ability of local institutions to act counter to partisan ends of those in control of the Senate and executive.
But anyone on team "end lockdown" should hope there is cooperation, and enough enforcement to encourage it at the margins. And if funding is a problem, then private and public entities alike at least in theory have some incentive to come up with a way to solve the problems that need to be solved to support higher levels of activity.
Especially when lifting the lockdown, I would have lifted lockdowns strictly for people who have no violations during the lock down. And prioritize scheduling based on age and medical exceptions. Maybe have hours of the day strictly for vulnerable people with hard restrictions and a separate time for people that have already recovered.
This seems like a missed opportunity for a "service" business that everybody seems to be clamoring for.
We're still in quarantine in the Bay Area and I'm seeing _more_ people not wearing masks or social distancing.
The next thing people need to hear is "quarantine is over" when they're associating quarantine with COVID still being "around." Once that happens, it's game over; I think a majority of people will just go back to normal without being careful.
Not that I don't want quarantine over but I just don't think most people understand the message it would send.
We've known about masks and temperature checks since the beginning of the pandemic, and every reasonable scenario requires them. We can check on the progress of thermometer production and mask availability.
I have a hunch that developing the capacity to implement your proposal will give us enough time -- a few months at least -- to see how voluntary self isolation is working in the regions that are already ending the lock down.
So for every person who puts forth their strategy I get curious, why? So here's a few questions to you.
Can you explain your position?
Can you tell me your social context, what state and city are you in? What is the opinion of your friends and family?
Did you weigh the numbers for predicted economic impact and predicted deaths and health issues and contrast them? Did you consider factors such as that even pre-lockdown the economy was slowing and restaurants closing because a lot of consumers voluntarily avoided putting themselves at risk?
Without you putting any answers to these, or specifying your qualifications, the amount of time you spent thinking about the problem, the edge cases, etc. I can't trust your judgement anymore then I'd trust a coin flip.
You seem to know better than the experts.. not sure what qualifies you to believe that.
Which ones could we not?
For example, I found out that my country, Portugal has the highest number of houses per inhabitant (6 million houses for 10 million inhabitants). It's natural that now that large-scale tourism has collapsed it's not possible to make more houses.
We must therefore not only question whether we can change the means of production to a smaller scale, but whether these means of production make sense.
The problem is the creation of work but then we could think of other forms of wealth distribution such as universal basic income.
we should not put all the eggs in the same basket even if our quality of life changes.
Regarding quality of life, this economy based on material wealth can only give a sense of well being up to a point.
Outside of the bubble that is HN tech workers - wages have stagnated. The wealth being generated is severely concentrated at the very top. I think your average person walking down the street would gladly exchange their $2 gallon of milk for a $4 gallon of milk if they had a $40k/year salary vs. their current $7/hr.
Cost rising isn't the fault here. It's costs rising faster than wages (especially minimum wage).
That relationship was broken, but not the assumption that if you are poor, you are lazy.
What this is really doing is providing welfare to all the companies paying below-poverty wages - the taxpayers pay for benefits to allow the workers in those positions to live, while simultaneously increasing corporate profits.
The portion of GDP going to wages has almost never been lower than it is now [1]
It is about corporate regulatory capture redesigning the economy for corporate wealth extraction and not for the benefit of the citizens.
I swear I've heard this before.
I really hate when people do this. Those are totally different scales, and it's not obvious how they compare.
According to this converter [0] (and ignoring specific differences between wage and salary like overtime), using the defaults of 40-hour work week and 50-week year (to account for holidays):
* $40k/year is about $20/hour
* $7/hour is about $14k/year
Keep in mind that in this situation, the goal is to ensure that already-grown food isn’t wasted and is able to be processed, not necessarily meeting the perfect market demand that you’d see in normal economic conditions.
"What I cook for myself at home" and "what I order in restaurants" are two pretty disjoint sets.
I'm not even sure the total number of calories will come out 1:1; are people eating less because they're not commuting or working? Eating better because they are cooking? Eating worse because they are depressed? I can't even guess.
Think fancy cheeses. Some dairy cows make excellent milk for cheese. The input into this market is raw milk. When that market disappears due to restaurants closing, it's a serious problem.
Say you've got a bottling plant that sells exclusively to commercial suppliers. The cost to retool to produce consumer packaged products is non-zero. Your shipping is all geared to commercial suppliers as well.
If you decide to reorient to produce consumer packaged goods this takes some amount of time. The farmers that supply you have a batch of milk right now they're storing and a batch coming up next week. If you can't take delivery, you don't have infinite cold storage for milk after all, they need to dump their milk because they've for another batch on the way they'll need to store. You may also have milk stored in your refrigerated tanks waiting for you to be able to reorient for consumer packaging. If your tanks are full you're not going to get new supplies.
There's a lot of supply chains that have a lot of momentum and they've been optimized for throughput because that's what gives everyone involved the best margins. When demand drops it takes time and money to slow down or adjust the supply chain because of the momentum. Things like milk can be more difficult because they need not just storage but refrigerated storage and shipping.
You might have milk and I might want milk but we're far apart and if you can't get it to me (safely) I'm not going to buy it. That's not to say it's good farmers are dumping otherwise good food. Dealing with perishable things is not the same as dry goods. You can't just add more trucks or warehouses and problem solved.
Presumably, if you have X food being produced by farms across the country, and people eating it, but split between restaurants (Y) and home (Z)... I would expect X to roughly equal Y + Z.
I would also expect Y + Z = total food eaten and not see any change in the value of Y + Z regardless of how food shifts between the two.
So how can you take away Y, but not increase Z at the same proportion?
Guesses: 1) Restaurants use a lot more ingredients? Seems unlikely since margins are so low.
2) Consumers reduce waste because they are not balancing getting food from two sources and are more likely to eat everything in their fridge? (My wife, son and I experienced this after we found out our son has food allergies to more than nuts and we basically only eat home cooked food), but I don't know if that is big enough.
3) Something else?
My gut tells me we are seeing a reduction in food waste which is due to less supplies, people being more careful. IDK.
If you're calculating demand based on ability to pay (which is how markets work), it might be helpful to take a look at the pictures of food bank lines across America[0]. Tens of millions of people have filed for unemployment in the last several weeks, and demand at the food banks have skyrocketed. But since food banks don't operate as typical market, we don't pay attention to them. With so many millions at risk of starvation, we need to rethink how we understand demand in the context of food consumption, because millions of people waiting for several hours in order to get a bag of food tells me that the demand is there.
0: https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/04/these-photos-show-t...
Based on the emptyness of my local store shelves over the past couple months, demand isn't the problem. Supply chain capacity is.
Millions upon millions of Americans are at risk of starvation, and a central goal of an initiative like this is to make food as available as possible so that people don’t starve.
0: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/17/837141457/thousands-of-cars-l...
I.e. the question isn't "do people still need to eat" it's "will the shift in food demand type from commercial to consumer good create shortages".
These disturbing images have stirred outrage around the world. But here’s the surprising part: the world may not actually be wasting more than normal, when a third of global food production ends up in landfills.
producers > stores > consumers.
The same waste would happen in the system. but now it moved all to the first step.
This is not saying that this is OK. This is just highlighting a problem that was always there and nobody cared/cares :(
From my understanding, the bottlenecks are in the processing plants due to massive shift in demand preferences. Restuarants take their orders differently than consumers, often buying whole sections of an animal or at different style cuts, or in the case of flour buying it in 25-50 lbs bags. Consumers widely prefer more processing of their meats (meaning boneless skinlesss chicken breast rather than a whole chicken) or smaller purchases sizes.
Honestly, I don't think this will get worse in the US in the short of mid term. The biggest issue is that the food prices being offered farmers/ranchers right now are terrible, so if we see a demand spike post recovery (due to restaurants reopening) we may not have the supply.
The experience for consumer-packaged flour differs a lot by region, but it seems it was mostly about the capacity of consumer flour packaging facilities than the capacity of flour mills or wheat farmers. Similar thing with toilet paper: people were pooping at home more, so they needed consumer-packaged toilet paper, thus there was a temporary shortage of consumer-packaged toilet paper while facilities adapted to demand.
RE flour: here in Hamilton, Ontario, flour in consumer packaging was a rare find for about a week, until retail prices rose slightly (10%?) and now things are basically back to normal in terms of availability.
There was a real demand issue on TP as well- lots of people who used to only buy 1-6 roles at a time started panic buying 4x the amount.
It is not simple to retool a commercial bulk TP supplier into a consumer TP supplier, they at least need some different inputs.
IME it has also varied greatly by location. I couldn't get any for months at my store, but I later found out a different location of the same chain had it in stock routinely. Also, restaurants near me are selling flour now. Presumably they had large quantities that they just need to repackage.
To support the local economy, I started buying from a farm that used to supply restaurants and chefs. That has resulted in its own kind of headache. I can put together a decent meal, but I have few ideas how to go forward with nasturtium petals, begonia leaves, edible succulents. Micro-greens are very pretty scattered over a Michelin-star plate, but looks awfully stupid on a spatchcock roast chicken.
The shortages are here. So far they're not so bad that people will starve, they will just have to transition to alternative food choices. How far it will go is anyone's guess.
Here's another interesting example with flour.
King Arthur flour sales increased by 2,000% in March. > https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/king-arthur-flour-sal... leading to problems like retail flour manufacturers running out of packaging to put flour in. https://www.businessinsider.com/flour-shortage-baking-quaran...
Since suppliers to commercial kitchens aren’t able to easily switch production to support consumer-facing customers, he argued that the Federal Government should subsidize restaurants based on a percentage of typical revenue (say 80%), and then use the kitchen staff to make prepared meals that can be sold via takeout, or CSA-style boxes that customers can take home and cook themselves. This way, restaurants get to employ staff while using their commercial kitchens to process food that consumers/food pantries could actually use.
This would help stabilize the restaurant industry while we wait for a vaccine and keep at least some staff employed while performing an essential task (converting food for consumers)
For example, say that the chicken supply has outgrown its demand. A coordinated food production effort between suppliers and restaurants could ensure that supply of chicken is sent to a restaurant to be processed and sold directly as a raw ingredient, which isn’t something you typically see in a takeout situation. Or the processed chicken could go to a community kitchen or something. Either way, the food is successfully processed and sold/donated instead of being wasted.
Demand generation is needed because people aren't going out, because government told them not to.
Now the government needs to do it's part to keep the economy going - massive stimulus.
My local restaurant: Norms in southern California has been offering bundles of mostly uncooked food to purchase since the lockdown began in plastic covered trays.
They have been making money off this to stay in business and employ people.
Restaurants in communities that are financially healthy enough to support takeouts probably don’t need as much help, but this isn’t true for much of the country.
I find it ironic that restaurants fired most of their staff just in time for schools to close and charities to beg for volunteers to help make and deliver basic meals to children.
Does anyone know why this is happening in the US and whether it is also happening in other countries? It certainly isn't happening here in Norway. We had short term shortages of flour and yeast but that is over and now there seems to be no shortage of anything else.
Edit: By "really happening" I mean shortages of foods in the stores and not the dumping of food.
The demand was artificially inflated and now that it's dropping due to lower waste at home, because people are afraid stores won't have what they need, what was made expecting inflated usage, can't be delivered and used.
We brought this upon ourselves. Even worse, we won't learn from it. Once things are back to normal, the rest of the world will copy / continue copying the american gluttony making us susceptible to another situation like this.
I wish stores like Target and Walmart would stock pallets of 40lb flour sacks and just sell them like any other product.
Even things like 50lb sacks on onions could be sold, and let people figure out how to split it up with neighbors, etc. People are smart, they'll figure out what to do.