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Are there actually people who think capitalism is efficient? Like sure it’s not Soviet level beaurocracy inefficiency but I wouldn’t stake my life saving medicine on this system if I had any other option
Efficient at creating oligarchs and robber barons
Exactly, nothing about capitalism is efficient and it never was. Capitalism is brutally effective at producing large quantities of stuff, but that doesn’t mean the waste is mitigated at all. In fact, the waste correlates with production.
Food waste is good so we have more stuff than we need. Otherwise when the next volcano erupts it’s famine time again (just look it up, it has happened at least 10 times during the last 2000 years and each time it caused a famine).
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
That’s what a surplus is for not foodwaste.
Every food surplus is foodwaste and vice versa
My grocery store has a “imperfect produce” section, where they have funny shaped bananas, oranges that are not round, that sort of thing. Really cheap, and just as tasty.
That really sucks but “highly edible” is a very funny phrase.
I am too, highly edible.
Thankfully due to this show, at least Woolworths (Safeway) and maybe some other stores brought out a range of fruit and vegetables called “The Odd Bunch” that are cheaper and less “perfect”. It’s a small step, but at least it’s a start.
And for those who don’t know Craig Reucassel is also one of the founding members of The Chaser satire team.
My city (in Canada) mostly has Save-On-Foods that sells “Not-So-Perfect” frozen blueberries which are a couple dollars cheaper than normal frozen blueberries. Pretty sure Thrifties (Sobeys) sells the same.
Food waste is good so we have more stuff than we need. Otherwise when the next volcano erupts it’s famine time again (just look it up, it has happened at least 10 times during the last 2000 years and each time it caused a famine).
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Throwing bananas away doesn’t help us when we can’t grow anything.
there’s a continuous transition between growing current amounts of food and growing nothing at all. partial outage of sunlight doesn’t mean that there’s 0 food being grown.
I can see your reasoning, but I don’t see how with no sunlight and scorched earth, more land dedicated to growing food that won’t grow on it is helpful. In that situation only indoor hydroponic operations stand a chance and only as long as they can get clean water and maintain power.
Well how to put it … You know when a volcano erupts it will not be instantly and completely dark. It’s just dimmer like when it is cloudy. Therefore plants will still get say 50% light. If there rly is no sunlight, we will just freeze anyway
Here lidl has boxes of random fruit and vegetables that don’t meet the pretty standard for like 25czk now probably more. But now I see them rarely. They were great when I wanted to make soup or something.
Same here in the UK, it’s like £2 for a crate of fruit, most of the time there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, just looks like fruit to me
I wonder if i can buy cheaper fruit by asking them if i can buy the things that super markets don’t want;
I should try a day
That was the original gimmick behind the subscription service “imperfect produce”. I gave it a try for a while (back before they pivoted to being a normal grocery subscription) and found out that a lot of this “perfectly good” produce is also completely devoid of flavor. Another problem is that “minor cosmetic defects” often means the skin of fruits is splitting so they mold within 48 hours of arriving.
Devoid of flavor is just a huge problem with our modern farming practices.
But agreed that instead of getting perfectly good produce that looks funny it felt like I was getting stuff that had been crushed under the pallets and or had mold or splitting issues.
We just don’t have an actual infrastructure for getting actual bulk waste produce to people who could use it. We really need food halls.
It’s really crazy how cheap bananas are. They’re flown in from tropical countries and are at least half the cost of local in season produce. And they’re throwing away so many at every stage of production.
Bananas come by slow boat.
Assuming the front doesn’t fall off.
Yes, slow Banana boat.
unfortunately what efficiency means to these people doesn’t include no waste. i would happily buy a weird looking banana but many wouldn’t. and it costs money to transport banana and display them on shelves.
This is bananas!
oh banana, how i suffer with thee
Humans have produced enough food, and had the capability to feed every human in the world for over 500 years. Every famine you’ve seen in the news, all of them, has been caused by keeping food from being delivered to those that are hungry.
had the capability to feed every human in the world for over 500 years
Not 500, more like 120 or so years. First thanks to the invention of refrigerated logistics (essential for transporting foodstuffs without them spoiling during the trip) and then thanks to the Haber-Bosch process of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere, which is essential for industrial fertilizers.
Famines since ~1930 could’ve been avoided if the “waste” surplus was redirected
We’ve moved preserved food since the discovery of salt. Transport, refrigeration and fertilizer technologies just let our population explode within the last century. The population levels prior to those technologies was more than supported by the transportation and food production capabilities of the time.
I’d assume that intercontinental food shipping would have been rather difficult in the 1500s.
Swallows could grip it by the husk?
It’s not a question of where they grip it, it’s a simple matter of weight ratios!
Wouldn’t have been needed, production was distributed enough with populations. And crop collapses were contained to regional problems.
That’s just historically untrue. 500 years ago we didn’t have much of the technology needed for reliable harvest. Many farms were still highly dependant on rain. No rain, no crops. A late freeze, no crops. Locusts, no crops. You starve.That simple.
This doesn’t include the absolute necessity of artificial fertizlier in maintaining the modern population.
Maybe your statement could be true if we had the ability to move crops from areas not expirencing a disaster that could have fixed it, but would have been very difficult and required a global effort. So technically humanity may have produced enough food, but there was not a real way to move it. Even ignoring profit incentives that control logistics and assuming a altruistic system of redistribution, it could take weeks for messages to arrive in areas that did have food. Then it would take weeks to move it. No refrigeration, the fastest you could move is horse.
Seems very unlikely
The fastest you’d need to move is by horse or ship. Food preservation has been a thing since the discovery of salt. And we didn’t need artificial fertilizer centuries ago, because we didn’t need to support this many people on limited land, that’s a very recent problem. Also cities grew near water for a reason, that’s how they got their food. Ships moving food supplies.
Right so how are we increasing salt production? You’ll need more workers, which leaves less people available for farming. Could salt production even be scaled to match that demand given the technology? You’ll now need an increased network capacity to move the extra salt. More horses, more pots, more baskets, more drivers.
What about places without access by water?
Artificial fertilizer does however allow for a reliable surplus. Something necessary for a redistribution network. You need some kind of fertilizer and natural sources for scalable farming are rare.
You’ve created a fictional understanding of logistics that sums up to “just move the stuff” without considering the consequences.
You’re misunderstanding my statement, there is no need for increased production, because it already existed. There is no need for an expanded distribution system, it already existed. There is no need for more of anything, because it was already sitting there, just going to somewhere else. The only changes needed were which wagon, or which ship, the only consequences were who made how much profit, and who got credit for it.
Oh no I understand your statements, it’s just they are inherently wrong.
Honestly if you said in the last 200 years (maybe even 300) we wouldn’t be arguing. I think you’re severally over-estimating the surplus created by pre-industrial farmers and the amount of the economy engaged in luxury or profiteering. Most people then produced what they needed and little more. Yes there were portions of the economy tooled to serve the needs of the elite, but I’m not convinced that is enough labor to completely eliminate hunger even if redistributed to production and logistical networks.
We’re not even getting into how common slavery was for agricultural production. If we are creating a new system to ensure everyone is fed how do we deal with that?
I’ve made a simple historically verifiable statement, if you had any case what so ever, you’d be able to point to a counter example.
I’ve made a simple historically verifiable statement,
Can you provide a source then?
Imagine if they actually sold the whole crop to stores. Bananas would be $0.10 a pound. You would never be hungry.
It wouldn’t decrease prices quite as much as you’d think, since so much of the cost of a banana is transportation, which they don’t do with the ones they throw out. They should still do it, obviously, and then transport them on trains to reduce transportation cost as well.
iirc transport on ship is actually cheaper than trains i think due to not needing rails and also ships being fucking huge which means low surface area to volume ratio, so you need less steel to build them.
also how do you build a train line from south america to europe?
Bananas are already pretty cheap. I think they are the cheapest fruit in the grocery store.
Good old artificial scarcity
See, you’ve found the issue they’re trying to avoid.
That and buyers preferring “pretty”/consistent produce, which means supermarkets only want to buy produce to spec because the other stuff won’t sell as well, shelf space is limited and it costs the supermarket more to waste unsold food than to just not buy food unlikely to sell. There are online markets out there that sell “ugly” produce that’s not to spec, but they aren’t broadly popular enough to make a huge dent in waste.
*buyers with money. Poor and hungry folk dont get a shit of the food isn’t the perfect shape.
Capitalism (free markets really) optimize for low cost and price. Waste is not something it optimizes for.
Capitalism being efficient is doubtful, but it certainly is effective at producing a lot of bananas, so you can buy cheap bananas around the globe all year long.
