A lot of that “destroyed food” is animals who lived their entire lives in tiny, filthy cages just so that they could be killed and rot in a plastic bag.
I consider that just morally outrageous. To kill something so we can survive is nature’s law of predator and prey… But to kill and not have it consummed seems like the cruelest evil.
I mean the cow probably doesn’t care if you needlessly killed it to throw away the meat or to eat it… both are unnecessary and both result in the same outcome for the cow. Both are also destroying the planet. “Predator/prey” is a great appeal to nature that I am sure many people use to justify themselves lazily shuffling through Walmart to throw frozen burgers into their cart.
i mean lots of wolves, lions etc only eat half the sheep … have you ever seen a half-eaten sheep? i have
Not even, there’s no biological need to eat animals or what they produce. We’ve established that much. It’s just a choice, a preference, a form of cruelty (“I don’t need to eat you, but I will chose to do so because it pleases me, now suffer and die without bothering me”). Throwing their corpses to waste is just the cherry on top.
Based on our growth as a species/taking over ecosystems, if certain animal populations in the wild aren’t culled (have a certain number of their population killed), it will be bad for the local ecosystem.
There are arguments that allowing animals to do this, instead of humans, will not always guarantee the impact we want, either.
(Fun wolves in Yellowstone video in case you like video essays and want to go off on this tangent: https://youtu.be/Y9sQdMrEX2g )
Personally: I don’t hunt and I rarely buy meat, but I still eat it from time to time and am upset when it goes to waste. I don’t like the idea of a factory farm, but “here we are.”
Final thought: the best way to decrease meat consumption is to make the alternatives easy to prepare and alluring to more of the population.
Final thought: the best way to decrease meat consumption is to make the alternatives easy to prepare and alluring to more of the population.
I learned long ago that ethics won’t win out. It comes down to cost and convenience. Alternatives need to be cheap and easy.
Nothing cheaper and easier than a can of pulses. And yet…
Alternatives need to be cheap and easy.
I agree. We’ve created quite the fast paced and frantic society. A cheap an easy alternative could shift our consumption if we scale it properly. I’d argue it should be a primary focus of anyone passionately against factory farming. We can worry about moral messages as an aside: busy, poor, and hungry families will respond better to successfully launched vegetarian and vegan fast food options at existing establishments. We’re not culturally there yet.
Based on our growth as a species/taking over ecosystems, if certain animal populations in the wild aren’t culled (have a certain number of their population killed), it will be bad for the local ecosystem.
This isn’t relevant to farmed animals. Farmed animals can’t overpopulate because we are the ones controlling their population.
This isn’t relevant to farmed animals.
I agree. If we could replace that system with something healthier for the planet, and our species, we would stand to benefit.
If we could replace that system with something healthier for the planet, and our species, we would stand to benefit.
So you agree we should replace animal agriculture with plant based agriculture?
Yes (with some exceptions like eggs, milk, and other animal products like wool).
It makes sense environmentally. I would change my mind on this if there was some need to eat meat that couldn’t be replaced by a vegetarian diet. I don’t see the point in eating them, though.
It’s not going to change until it becomes more lucrative/economical to do so, though, of course.
Fuck that. To CREATE something and force it into a state of lifelong dependence is even more evil.
There is NO law of nature that says a human has to kill a single bird, reptile, fish, or mammal to live their best and longest life. That is a rule that has been brainwashed into your head by capital.
to kill someone
Ftfy
capitalism is responsible for that we can easily establish ethical farming
I think unethical farming is present in every large system, no?
Yes. This isn’t a “capitalism” problem, this is a “see animals as products” problem.
It’s two different problems. We started seeing animals as beings fairly recently, and the movement to actually not make them suffer is fairly new. In previous generations the reason we didn’t do it properly was mainly “we don’t want to”, now enough of us do want it, and profit driven reality prevents it.
The same can be said for it all. Big grocery is a cancer. But so are over priced farm to table country stores. We need pricing to make sense because in the end we all lose.
I work returns in a Costco. In fact, I’m typing this on my phone in the little office we have in receiving.
Food either gets sold or gets pulled for various reasons. Pulled food goes first to the local food banks. What can’t go to them goes to a farm, a local pet rescue group, and to a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation group.
Anything left over from all that goes into a bin to be turned into high grade compost, which gets sold for $5 for a 20lb bag.
It takes time and money to do this, and it gets done anyway because the will is there.
Me when there are Costcoposters
TBH though I love Costco. They actually pay their employees well, value their customers, and do things correctly. It’s living proof that things could be different it’s just a group of around 300 people set the incentive structures and propaganda used to program everyone and everything…
Well, before Costco I worked at Walmart. You can imagine the difference in environment
Yeah that would be like going from working in the 19th century to working at Costco
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
I recently went to the store to buy some pastries before closing—you can already know where I’m going with this. The pastry cupboard was empty so I went to check the lady who cleans them out. They were all in three big boxes stacked on top of each other, filled with soon to be thrown pastries. I took two and paid full price, knowing how ridiculous this is in contrast with the rest having been thrown in the trash 10 minutes later. I’d much rather go a day or two without food knowing that nothing gets wasted and no one goes hungry than what shameful consumerist nonsense we have now.
To my shame I worked at a supermarket bakery in my early 20s I would empty all the bulk bins into a garbage bin and into the dumpster every night. I complained multiple times that it could be bagged and donated, they relented and let me pack up expired prebagged breads to a shelter but never the bulk stuff.
I would at least eat as much as I could as I threw it out but there was only so much I could do.
it’s probably wise not to patronize places like that if possible.
I totally agree, but not with its feasibility. Wouldn’t this only be possible in a non-globalized world with far fewer humans where everyone could grow their own food and be self-sufficient within their communities? I’m pretty sure I can’t get my lentils locally. Similar reasoning my other foodstuff; waste is pretty much the standard. Or I’m just making excuses because I’ve grown accustomed to the convenience of getting all my stuff in one place.
Yes, yes and of we made everyone who makes 250k/yr pay 3865$/mo for ubi income of 1800$/mo for everyone in the country it would work out. It would take like 5 years for a solid treasury/trust to accumulate. It would be able to happen though.
In my country I used to work at one of the largest supermarket chains and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that we donated any food that didn’t sell to our local food bank called “Nourished For Nil” which would then take the ingredients and cook some meals and then you could go get a box of food from them once a week for free, no questions asked.
Supermarkets destroy food if it doesn’t sell. We can always feed the world. We just don’t.
Somehow, I dyslexic speed-reading misread that at first as:
Supremacists destroy food if it doesn’t sell. We can always feed the world. We just don’t.
I’ve always called it first glance dyslexia
It is not that easy. It is not a question of can we feed people but can we get the food to them. Produce that doesn’t sell is not going to last shipping again.
There are starving people outside the grocery stores…
Who will not eat fresh produce. It takes a lot of work to prepare a healthy meal from scratch; with employers not giving us enough time and money to invest into healthy, tasty, varied meals, people resort to eating fast junk.
Those are not the people fucking dumpster diving for food, what are you even talking about
It absolutely is that easy. In every city there are organizations which will gratefully accept food donations and distribute it to humans that need it.
Don’t worry, I’m sure that there are kitchens less than a day’s drive away
If we build centers for distributing food people will come.
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We have a couple of services where I’m at now, where as food approaches its best before date, it goes into the app where you can order it at a discount and then go pick it up in store. If it can be frozen, they’ll also freeze it to prolong its shelf life, like if it’s fresh sausages that aren’t selling.
I once got a large box of like 50 frozen burgers (frozen by default, not fresh to frozen) for like 80% off because they’d reached the best before on the box. They weren’t freezer burned or anything like that, they were perfect.
A lot of places would have just thrown that out.
There are 26 billion chickens, a billion pigs, a billion and a half cattle and bison, and another almost six billion sheep, goats, and ruminants living in human captivity, and they all get fed. We feed them more than the total human population of the Earth can possibly eat. We inflict actual atrocity on these billions of vulnerable individuals, because using their bodies to refine cheap, safe plant food into harmful, addictive animal products makes a sociopath more money than just selling the plants.
I worked at Panera bread (not a grocery store at all) in college and we would donate the leftover baked goods at the end of every night to a food pantry thing. Also they would let us take some home too. It was pretty nice.
I think they are some kind of regional franchise though so it could have just been ours
When I’m president, I’m going to spend every dicking dollar on education, so the masses understand that a single person doesn’t make as much difference to 360M people as those 360M We the People do to themselves.
My twelfth grade English teacher told me the machines are broken, they just don’t know they’re broken, so the bigger machine made of machines grinds on. There’s a scene in the matrix about this, how the average person is so dependent on the matrix they will fight to defend it.
What truly is possible to the human form? Society is 1776 updated to 2026. What if we just started fresh, what would we make and be then? Would it be 1776 2.0, or something else entirely? I think of democracy afforded in the modern day where only a republic was good enough before with the communication potential available then.
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Heaven forbid right?
At least one local hypermarket does sell food at discounted price before they go off. Some poorer families rely on them.
Supermarkets should be able to write off the expenses (transportation, stagging, etc) related to donating soon-to-expire foods to food banks. And not just normal income deductions, but actual direct deductions from taxes. That is, if you spend $1000 loading and shipping expired food to the food bank, you pay $1,000 less in taxes.
Truly incentivize giving food to the poor.
It sounds great on the surface, but you just know there are total assholes out there who would exploit the system with artificially inflated shipping costs to the point where they’re hardly paying tax at all. This, as is commonly said, is why we can’t have nice things.
Yeah, there’s solutions to this problem and the idea that all of them don’t do this a failing of the store’s management.
France had to pass a law that banned food getting thrown out that could be given away.
I also noticed that Costco started offering more prepared chicken foods after it became more well known that their cheap rotisserie chickens would fill dumpsters at the end of the day.
My tiny local market does 40% off and then FREE for products near expiration.
Fred Meyer (owned by Kroger) sells close dated food at half price. Produce with blemishes is set aside and sold in reduced price bundles. I am sure they still throw away plenty of food, but the reduced prices do seem to attract buyers (myself included). Some items just never make financial sense at the regular price, but half price? I’ll take it.
Hypermarket? How does that compare to a supermarket?
