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Comment by alexeisadeski3 | Hacker News Reader

>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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