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there’s a big difference between “food waste” as in “farmers destroy tons of food to avoid exceeding quotas” or “supermarkets throw away this much edible food because it doesn’t sell”

and “food waste” as in “it is not actually within the capacity of humans to perfectly predict and track household food consumption, so a certain amount of food per household inevitably goes bad and has to be thrown out every year”

the idea that food waste is the product of thoughtless consumers rather than corporate greed is really insidious

Truuuuuuuueeeeeee, other large sources of food waste:

– Restaurants. The fact that the rich expect restaurants to have every article on their menu available at all times means every restaurant has far more food than they need and throws a lot of that shit out. 

– Big inhuman organisations with intense bureaucracy. Think hospitals, schools, prisons, refugee camps and the army. Organisations that provide food for a very large group of people but are not allowed (and/or can’t be bothered) to give that food away if there is too much of it. 

Some of the most spectacular food waste I’vepersonally witnessed was an army training camp that threw away 250 sealed lunchboxes because the training ended one day early, and a refugee center than threw away over 100 loaves of bread while people in the center where hungry because regulations stated that every refugee got two slices of bread for breakfast.

And I’m supposed to feel guilty about half a tomato rotting in the garbage? Nah, that’s not food waste. That’s just life. 

Shifting the guilt to the consumer is an intentional marketing ploy. The same was done when soda companies switched from bottles to cans

Originally soda machines had a place for you to return your bottle which the company would collect, sanitize, and re-use. Consumers paid a deposit when they bought the soda, then got it back when they dropped the empty bottle in the slot. Bars and restaurants also had to pay the deposit and redeem the bottles for a refund

Then companies decided it’d be cheaper to use disposable aluminum cans. Soda is something people often consumed in public places like parks and in front of stores. Increased public trash led to a litter problem. Environmentalists pressured the soda companies to fix the problem by bringing back the deposit and recycling programs. Instead, the companies started anti-liter campaigns that placed the guilt wholly on the consumer

This was decades before curb-side recycling existed. Recycling plants were few and far between, and consumers would have to save up cans then cart them to one of these facilities to recycle them, which few individuals had the time and transpiration to do. The ad campaigns led to people demanding more public garbage cans, which did reduce liter, but those were purchased and maintained at city expense and the contents went to landfills. It also led to the general public believing littering and landfill problems rested squarely on the shoulders of consumers even though the corporations had a perfectly good recycling system that they could have continued

Big business wants you to blame yourself and each other for problems they caused, and they’d rather spend money on guilt shifting ad campaigns than use that money for something good