• Jhex@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    How is this a captialism problem? Food gets thrown away because it’s expired. Selling expired food carries legal risk because people might get sick from eating it.

    Food is overproduced, knowing full well it will be wasted, because marketing shows people rather see full shelves. Nobody buys “the last watermelon” as they assume it must be the worst of the bunch. On the flip side, food is thrown away instead of donated because markets fear they will lose a bit of revenue from people who rather wait and eat food that is close to expiry because money is tight… so they rather throw away and bleach perfectly edible food lest they miss out on any revenue

    How does <your preferred system of government> solve this problem? Are expiration dates less strict? Are people less able to hold entities responsible for selling unsafe food?

    There should be a heavy tax on wasted food. That would incentivize supermarkets to not fill the shelves solely for marketing, discount food that will go to waste soon or even give it away rather than throw it in the garbage

    The problem is complex under capitalism but this would at least put incentives in the right place

    Like, I’m certain whichever store had to trash entire pallets of bologna food doesn’t want this to happen again. They’ll reduce their order next time🤷‍♂️

    Only if they think the reduction will not lead to any loss of revenue… they are not concerned about the wasted food, they just want the bottom line to go up forever

    Idk what im missing, assuming this post was in good faith

    Check this very old TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/tristram_stuart_the_global_food_waste_scandal … TLDR: we produce about twice a much food as THE WORLD needs to feed everyone and chose to throw away about 50% of it because the incentive is to make a profit, not feed people

    • brambc@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      I once was responsable for orders in a small city grocery store. When I ordered less meat, and the fridge didn’t look overfull, we just sold less and threw out only a little less. I took the liberty of just making the part of the fridge with relatively fast expiring meat smaller throughout the day and noticed sales go up cause the fridge didn’t look as empty. Just my very anecdotal experience…