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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

About 7 years ago I remember in Australia we had a couple of bad years of drought and there was a food shortage.

I remember reading in the paper that this would put the cost of food up, in some cases because we would be importing but in other cases becasue of the simple fact that when things are scarce they cost more.

What was really striking to me is that no-one was going to go hungry - we weren't going to run out of food. It would just cost more. Therefore people would naturally waste less food I suppose.

So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away.

The same goes for virtually all resources: power, water, petrol etc. what the political debate always dodges here is that in order to reduce consumption the cost has to go up which means discretionary spending power will decrease and the economy will collapse.

The sooner the better.

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The reason you didn't starve wasn't that people just wasted less, but also that you had the capacity to import. The economy that you so hate is what prevented you from starving in the first place.

The countries that experience hunger are either too poor to afford imports or involved in a conflict.

If Australia didn't have the economic capacity to import there may have been a shortage to the extent that some poeple would have starved, but what would that really look like? Expensive food. Rich people wouldn't starve.

>So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away.

Wut

I guess he's saying that for food to be this cheap seen with our eyes, there needs to be a substantial oversupply. And since there are physical limitations to how much food we are able to actually eat, if there's an oversupply a bunch of it will be thrown away, whether by farmers, distributors or consumers:

Either they fail to sell the food, or the low prices gets consumers to buy more than they need.

Food only looks cheap at the point of consumption. Millions of tax dollars went into the subsidy.

Depends on the type, some food receives no subsidy. Meat tends to receive a huge subsidys.

http://farm.ewg.org/

2013 Farm Subsidy Database is above. Almost every crop is subsidized in one way or another.

"82 percent of farms in Washington did not collect subsidy payments - according to USDA. Ten percent collected 67 percent of all subsidies."

Relevant number is percent of food not percent of farms.

I never said anything about percent of food, my comment was based on type of food. We have huge subsidies for some types of food. That does not mean ex: pot growers get a large subsidy. It's really a fairly narrow group of foods which get the vast majority of subsidies and are then produced in truly mind boggling quantities.

There was a great corn documentary a while ago where a small processor kept making larger larger grain silo's for a while as productivity increased. Until, they simply gave up they now just have a huge pile with a tarp over it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_effect

Which is why corn sirup is in just about everything. Also, avacadoes for example had an indirect subsidy in the name of avoiding pests in imported Mexican avacadoes. Still, the unequal subsides on various food products causes all sorts of problems as substitutions are generally of a lower quality in some way. Arguably much if the obesity epidemic directly relates to subsidizing calorie dense foods instead of fruits and vegetables.

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