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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

My grandmother had a plum bush about 12 feet high that would produce thousands of plums every year. We would eat a few hundred, but about 90% would be “wasted”. Of course, they rotted back into the soil and provided nourishment for other living things.

Luckily, the bush is dead now, and all that food is no longer being wasted.

How much fertilizer, pesticide, labor and water from underground was applied to this bush? Were the fruits diverted to landfill after or composted? How much fossil fuel was used to transport the plums from her back yard to a sort facility, to a grocery store, to someone’s house and then back to the landfill? Landfills btw emit significant quantities of methane that are not present in aerobic composting.

This is a silly response that misses the forest for the trees if you will.

It beggars belief that the difference between industrial agriculture and ornamental plants is lost on you. Especially since my focus was on animals not plants - with a particular focus on water use.

Your average grandmother by the way (in the 70s), wasted 50% as much food as the average American wastes today so it might be worth a follow-up conversation with gammy about why that was.

What's your point?

>Almost 40% of all food in the US is wasted each year and that's enough to feed every hungry person on earth.

You have a feasible plan to distribute all the wasted food in the U.S. to all the world's hungry people that you'd like to share?

Easy: eliminate the zoning restrictions that forbid corner grocery stores.

When you can walk five minutes to the store, you can buy just what you need for today (and maybe tomorrow). Then you will eat it and not throw it out.

It will cost more per, but since you are not wasting any of it, you still pay less.

dont grocery stores and restaurants throw away the most?

and then you also need like daily delivery trucks for these spots...

im not against bodegas and more grocery access. just not sure its gonna solve anything here. but idk

43% from homes, 40% from restaurants, grocery stores and food services combined. [1]

Makes sense, restaurants are businesses whose focus is on reducing their food costs. Restaurant soup is yesterday's scraps - in a good way.

[1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/

Nope, but we can reduce waste by raising prices for instance by ending farm subsidies. We can mandate the removal of (or at minimum the regulation of) expiration dates on food. Also, educating people about food. People assume that milk goes bad the second the clock rolls over on the unregulated 'best-by' date, so there's incentive to goose the numbers to raise sales. Further, slightly sour milk can be used as a substitute for buttermilk in baking, for instance, but people have to learn that. [1]

Any competing plans you'd like to share that allows us to avoid losing unfathomable quantities of limited fresh water and raising a ton of animals so they can be hucked onto a landfill?

[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/spoiled-milk

I fail to see the connection between raising prices and better affordability/access of food for the poor. Certainly you could make food as valuable as, say gold, and most would be loath to waste a single gram of it.

If they're throwing out 40% of the food they buy, then raising prices slightly and not throwing out 40% of the food should be accessibility-neutral no? Instead of buying 2 milks and throwing 1 milk out, you buy 1 milk for 2X the price and throw out 0 milk. At the end of the day you still drank 1 milk for the same effective price.

They already have significantly more than they need. Americans already pay less as a percentage of their paychecks for food than any other nation on earth.

What they're running out of though, is fresh water. Having two extra Colorado rivers' worth would be pretty nice in the southwest! [1] And that's just from beef. Don't get me started on the gallon of water it takes to grow a single almond in the California desert while asking people to skip showers [2]. [edit] While the Utah governor literally prays for rain. [3]

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colorado-river-water-level-60-m...

[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-05-29/californ...

[3] https://governor.utah.gov/2021/06/02/gov-cox-invites-utahns-...

It seems the year 2022 is a sort of "experiment" in terms of testing this theory. Food prices have inflated ~10% this year, nice round number although lower than your suggested "2x the price." Do you think this resulted in less waste?

> At the end of the day you still drank 1 milk for the same effective price.

Why don't then people just buy 1 milk today at today price instead of buying 2 and throwing one away? They'd still have drunk 1 milk, but for half effective price. Why aren't people already doing that?

People often make fun of economists with their very specific mathematical models of perfectly round customers, production functions, etc. They often have a point. It is important to not forget, however, that the popular understanding of economics is even worse, and your comment is a great example of that.

Because they hope to drink the other jug of milk tomorrow, and sometimes it works, sometimes, sometimes some of the milk gets sour.

The problem is that spending an hour to drive to a grocery store and an hour driving back also costs something, in fuel and labor / time, so it totally makes sense to buy milk with some excess just in case more would be needed.

As said upstream, eliminate most zoning restrictions, make living more densely more accessible. (I line in NYC and the fact that I can walk most anywhere I need is great.)

If you wanted an answer to your question you could google “sources of food waste USA” however if you’d like to make a proper counterpoint instead of a glib remark I’m all ears :)

> They'd still have drunk 1 milk, but for half effective price. Why aren't people already doing that?

I think I've already mentioned expiration dates and education around them, no? [1] My secondary argument is that people value things that are cheap less, and are more likely to waste them.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1114335397/expiration-dates-l...

You are assuming that there are no families that can barely afford what they need and really can't afford the waste or can afford the price increase.

Fasting is healthy but I'd rather it not be done because you can't afford to eat.

It'll please you to learn that cows pee.

The 40% waste figure is exaggerating the waste, since cheaper foods will be wasted more than expensive ones (like meat).

The biggest single category is dairy, which isn't the cheapest. But of course it doesn't exaggerate the waste, its 40% by weight of marketable good - but if you figure in the weight of the grain and other feed used to raise animals the number gets worse not better. If anything it understates the waste.

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