It's the mass production and constant availability. (Also logistics.) Subsistence farming works great until a drought.
Put another way, the waste lets the fresh produce be cheap. (That doesn't mean we can't do something better with it than drop it in a dumpster.)
> If everybody paid the dumpster price the supermarket would fail. It would be cool if there were business models where this was made more explicit.
If everyone paid the dumpster price, there wouldn't be any food in the dumpster.
Maybe we should do this by default and fall back onto the global supply chain when there is a drought.
Some people don’t get enough food, many more do but would rather spend less and not be picky. They would be happy to take the remaining leftovers before they spoil, especially food like produce (whereas junk food, fortunately in this case, tends to last much longer so it doesn’t get wasted).
A lot of places actually do this, which shows that it’s a real solution; I don’t really see why all can’t.
Grocers offset some of this risk by processing some of the food onsite, selling precooked meals, premade salads, etc.
If it was more profitable to further reduce costs, then they would, but there are diminishing returns on end of the line food processing, since the kitchens and packaging required are generalized for a broad range of foods instead of being a specialized operation that is more efficient.
It sucks, but it's the system that capital built, and pretty much the only thing we can do if we don't like it is to focus on buying local, or electing politicians who will target food waste as a policy.
Fresh food spoils. Always has. Happens less now with readily available refrigeration, salt, and fast long-distance logistics. Those supply chain improvements make it more feasible to produce a lot of it and have a wide variety available almost without regard to season.
Ever since people farmed, they put in all the labor and got out only the portion of product that they could use without spoiling. That's how we got canning, bread, cheese, beer/wine, and other means to preserve the caloric content of agricultural products.
If the goal is to be pedantic, then technically the "biological reason" is that nature gave humans the ability to alter their environment in ways that allows the north eastern United States to eat fresh oranges and pineapples in December.
If you're just gonna throw em out I'll take a whole sack of potatoes and put them to use.
You paid for the food you bought, plus the convenience of it being there when you wanted it.
Which means you also paid for the cost of the stuff that was left on the shelf at the end of the day too.
If you want to be able to walk into a supermarket at closing time and still have a choice of things to buy, then you want supermarkets to have waste.
A few cents per page and can use curl: https://www.phaxio.com/features/
Go to any supermarket across the river in New Jersey and you'll have vastly higher quality produce.
But they do often have "sales" for fresh goods even as good as buy one get two free which if you look at the goods on "sale" its sell by dates are all within a day or two. But hey, buy a big thing of berries and invite some friends over.
Many people don’t know about them because they are not their target market.
When people say things like this, or about how expensive it is to eat healthy, I feel like I'm in a twilight zone episode where the grocery stores I walk into exist in an alternate universe from their own.
Buying produce is the cheapest way you can eat, it's the cheapest food in the grocery store. Cheaper than anything in the frozen / processed foods aisles. Fresh produce is one of the cheapest things you can possibly buy period. For the price of one bag of chips you can buy enough potatoes to feed you for a week.
What you're really paying for is the ongoing development of Jira.
(Not looking for hate on Jira - just an example).
luck has nothing to do with it at all.. There are many kinds of landfills and many jurisdictions. Every person in every part of the world reading these words has services related to that. Methane release, and the economics of the waste services, deserve, no demand, intelligent insight right now, despite low-economic incentives.
That's true. It's also true that growing your own greens at home could probably cost even more, all things considered. Weird paradox.
Fresh produce was historically a delicacy. Most agrarian diets consisted of preserved food. The modern phenomenon of year-round fresh produce is a luxury. (Albeit a welcome one.)
There is a website that I cannot remember off-hand that shows you if you make more than like $5 a day you are in some top echelon.
There is another that shows you what different material objects (plates, toothbrushes etc) look like across the world at different income levels. If anyone knows do share.
Could that be Dollar Street? [1]
Nothing stops farmers from transporting it themselves and capturing that part of the value chain.