Every day when I get off work and I go to a local gas station, I see them throw away a bunch of prepared food that passed shelf life. This is a chain, so hundreds of locations do this every day. Tons of food per year, tossed in the trash because it sat in the heat box too long.
Imagine how many people could eat that food. It makes me upset.
47There are serious ethical problems with a capitalist system, especially when it comes to the necessities of life, but there's also ample evidence that other economic systems in practice have been just as bad of not worse regarding food security, eg follow the history of the USSR from the Holodomor in the 1930s to empty grocery shelves and bread lines in the 1980s
41"There's an egg shortage!"
> High egg prices send profits at largest US producer soaring more than 700%
29From the Grapes of Wrath:
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
15Food production is one of the very few things the US government has been handling well. We give out tens of billions in subsidies to farmers every year to artificially inflate the food supply and have a nationwide SNAP program to help low income families afford food. As a result, we produce far more food than we actually need and far more than we would in a free market, allowing the US to be a major exporter of food globally and ensuring we have enough redundancy built into our food supply that the US will be the last country to starve in a famine
15"Dang-it Bobby! Have you been hanging out with the commies again?" -Hank
15I really don't get why we don't have "meal bars" or "human food" yet. Something that covers all basic calorie and nutritional requirements, can be mass produced, and easily stored at room temperature. Like "dog food" but for humans.
The real choice should be a normal meal or a "meal bar", not a normal meal or starving.
7Automation can conquer scarcity and reduce the amount of labor needed. People starve because we don't take steps to ensure our man-made economy doesnt suffer even a single dollar loss.
5Good King of the hill memes are like food in Soviet Russia: not everybody gets it
4Under "-isms": "-isms" must manufacture "it" to justify their existence.
'There is a man, a certain man And for the poor, you may be sure That he'll do all he can Who is this one, who's favourite son
Just by his action has the traction Magnets on the run Who likes to smoke, enjoys a joke And wouldn't get a bit upset if he were really broke
With wealth and fame He's still the same I'll bet you five you're not alive If you don't know his name'
3Anything is done to make profit. Otherwise people wouldn't have desired a salary increase. Not selling food is not profitable, so food producers don't want people to starve, they want food to be sold. People can starve if they have no money, which should be solved by the government, or they can starve because there is no enough food in the country or region, which should be solved by the government too.
1Except that's not really true. Western nations donate millions of tons of wheat and other food to poor nations and those hit by drought and other natural disasters.
https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/1-millionth-ton-american-wheat-relief-yemen/
0When its not profitable to feed people, we let them starve
As opposed to our hunter gatherer days, or subsistence agriculture days, where everyone just lounged around leisurely? Name one time in human history where life was not filled with hard work. You just said it yourself: our labor has conquered scarcity. Labor! I fucking hate this meme, jfc.
-2This argument would only make sense if you don't need food to work and that no one would buy food... Nither is a thing. Also you don't just produce food to feed people, many food products are a thing because they taste good, they are not very efficiently nutritious, so good tasting food is a thing impossible for communism as it would "waste resources"
-22
