Labor is much more expensive than food waste in the US.
So this only works at a very high cost or donated labor (which probably won't scale).
So this only works at a very high cost or donated labor (which probably won't scale).
You fix it by making food expensive. I doubt anyone’s too keen to do that.
The problem is that ~20% of the population has food & housing insecurity when we're supposedly ridiculously rich.
I'd argue that the problem is labor is artificially expensive - which prevents all types of things like this from happening - because you can't buy labor for less than $15 an hour after taxes in most cities.
So you can't serve people that make less than a certain amount of money effectively.
People could be employed, making money working in these places - rather than people donating labor - and these same people working jobs like these would have access to these cheaper prepared meals, too.
But, we'll never get that. Nor will we get boarding houses back, because instead of having "slums" we'd rather have a homeless problem and high housing "costs".
And food being very cheap is definitely why there’s so much waste. There wasn’t, within living memory, and it’s because food cost a way bigger share of the median wage than it does today. Talk to some folks who grew up poor in the 40s and 50s about their cuisine, and they’ll tell you about what low-food-waste living looks like.
The goal isn't to reduce the cost of labor.
The goal is to unlock low-cost labor that is currently priced out.
We only have ~60% workforce participation.
The ultra-poor community could be served BY the ultra-poor community - and then a large percentage of them could go from ultra-poor to regular-poor, having a place to live and struggling to make ends meet instead of being homeless & hungry.
But that's not possible. Because we decided if you're not worth $15 an hour - you're worth nothing.
Montgomery, Al is known as a "poor" area - and yet there are only ~330 homeless people in a city of ~200k people (0.165%). In SF you have about ~8800 homeless people in a city of ~880k (1%).
If you're looking at somewhere like Rural PA - you're already not going to be able to employ people at low wages - because you're going to need to pay them almost $4 per hour just to get to and from work.
These are my people, and it gets worse than that. Rural America is shockingly poor. The cost of living’s low because nobody there can afford to pay more, and because they have no local public services to speak of.
[edit] the reason, specifically, there aren’t more homeless those places isn’t because it’s better, but because 1) nobody moves in, so 100% of people have family ties of some kind, at least some background that gets them access to a hovel or something, and 2) if you’re actually homeless there, you get picked up and shipped somewhere they can actually serve homeless people (or just go to prison), or you die.
And yet unemployment is lower than in places like SF, and homelessness is also lower, so is hunger.
I think you're forgetting how shockingly poor the entire world is.
I'd have to imagine that police in Alabama are probably a lot more aggressive in "running off" homeless people.
YMMV.
You can barely buy labour for $18 an hour. If there were a ton of surplus labour with the limiting factor being the law, labour would be priced at $15 an hour and unemployment would be high. But it seems to be priced well above that at the moment and unemployment is low.
Child labor laws are also fudged a bit for that specific category. Like, by law, they are, not just by convention.
Certain farm laborers have a lower minimum wage, and all farm laborers are federally exempt from overtime pay.
If food is inexpensive compared to labor and, therefore subject to be wasted, that seems like a good thing overall (at least as compared to the alternatives) rather than a thing that "must be fixed".
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2022/01/24/food-waste-and-it...
You fix it by making people aware and asking them to act responsibly.
Recovering waste in production and transportation is labor costs. If it were cost-effective, they’d already do it. Recovering waste at the grocery stores costs labor and/or loss of sales in excess of the cost of the risk of waste. Same at restaurants. Again, if it wouldn’t cost them more to avoid that waste, they already would.
Admittedly, at home, it’s mostly a time cost, but good luck convincing people to spend even a couple more hours a week in the kitchen and meal planning and pantry organizing to save small amounts of money (and really cutting home food waste takes a lot more than a couple hours a week)
Here is an idea: Move food subsidies from farming industry to people needing it.
Now people needing it most can afford non-crappy food. And industry have to care about wasting now-not-so-cheap food.
They’re not next to expensive grocery stores real estate but they do receive donated food and labor.