Food waste is a super-weird thing for people to worry about, IMO, because it’s directly related to food being very cheap relative to labor. As you point out, the labor-cost of saving this food really doesn’t make sense.
You fix it by making food expensive. I doubt anyone’s too keen to do that.
The problem is that ~20% of the population has food & housing insecurity when we're supposedly ridiculously rich.
I'd argue that the problem is labor is artificially expensive - which prevents all types of things like this from happening - because you can't buy labor for less than $15 an hour after taxes in most cities.
So you can't serve people that make less than a certain amount of money effectively.
People could be employed, making money working in these places - rather than people donating labor - and these same people working jobs like these would have access to these cheaper prepared meals, too.
But, we'll never get that. Nor will we get boarding houses back, because instead of having "slums" we'd rather have a homeless problem and high housing "costs".
Reducing the price of labor isn’t gonna bring that food insecurity rate down.
And food being very cheap is definitely why there’s so much waste. There wasn’t, within living memory, and it’s because food cost a way bigger share of the median wage than it does today. Talk to some folks who grew up poor in the 40s and 50s about their cuisine, and they’ll tell you about what low-food-waste living looks like.
> Reducing the price of labor isn’t gonna bring that food insecurity rate down.
The goal isn't to reduce the cost of labor.
The goal is to unlock low-cost labor that is currently priced out.
We only have ~60% workforce participation.
The ultra-poor community could be served BY the ultra-poor community - and then a large percentage of them could go from ultra-poor to regular-poor, having a place to live and struggling to make ends meet instead of being homeless & hungry.
But that's not possible. Because we decided if you're not worth $15 an hour - you're worth nothing.
I highly doubt the minimum wage is the cause of these issues. In places like urban Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage is still 7.25 USD, there's hardly any jobs that start at $7.25. The real issue with labor participation is no one can survive on $7.25/hr, so it becomes more realistic to sit at home and collect disability. The government should be subsidizing labor at the low end -- maybe paying workers an additional $5/hr under a certain wage -- to incentivize work
You don't tend to have high amounts of ultra-poor people in low-cost-of-living areas (which also have lower minimum wages than the high-cost areas with the higher minimum wages).
Montgomery, Al is known as a "poor" area - and yet there are only ~330 homeless people in a city of ~200k people (0.165%). In SF you have about ~8800 homeless people in a city of ~880k (1%).
If you're looking at somewhere like Rural PA - you're already not going to be able to employ people at low wages - because you're going to need to pay them almost $4 per hour just to get to and from work.
Have you… lived in those kind of places? One side of my family’s from not even that bad of one, and there are tons of the ultra-poor. They’re the ones living in a house with a blue tarp on part of the roof, three broken cars in the yard, overgrown weeds right up to the foundation, et c. The land’s owned by some family member (all three crappy acres are worth $2,000 total—the house is worth negative dollars—so it’s not like they’re giving up a fortune to let them stay there) or is an illegal rental. They often have one or two even-worse-off buddies living with them. Income and hand-me-downs (clothes, anppliances, old cars they’ll break and not be able to repair within a year which’ll join the front yard scrap pile) are from family and churches. Income, if any, is government assistance (lots of vets) and odd jobs. They have a bunch of health problems and are probably addicted to something. If they don’t have family to get them to the hospital 90 minutes away, they do without. They die decades younger than they might.
These are my people, and it gets worse than that. Rural America is shockingly poor. The cost of living’s low because nobody there can afford to pay more, and because they have no local public services to speak of.
[edit] the reason, specifically, there aren’t more homeless those places isn’t because it’s better, but because 1) nobody moves in, so 100% of people have family ties of some kind, at least some background that gets them access to a hovel or something, and 2) if you’re actually homeless there, you get picked up and shipped somewhere they can actually serve homeless people (or just go to prison), or you die.
> Montgomery, Al is known as a "poor" area - and yet there are only ~330 homeless people in a city of ~200k people (0.165%). In SF you have about ~8800 homeless people in a city of ~880k (1%).
I'd have to imagine that police in Alabama are probably a lot more aggressive in "running off" homeless people.
> I'd argue that the problem is labor is artificially expensive - which prevents all types of things like this from happening - because you can't buy labor for less than $15 an hour after taxes in most cities.
You can barely buy labour for $18 an hour. If there were a ton of surplus labour with the limiting factor being the law, labour would be priced at $15 an hour and unemployment would be high. But it seems to be priced well above that at the moment and unemployment is low.
Farm labor (in the USA) has much lower minimum wage and safety protections compared to most other work, enforced by federal law, though I don't know how consequential the farm cost part of the equation is by the time the food gets to the restaurant or dinner table.
Farm labor in the US is largely divorced from the minimum wage because it largely uses undocumented and illegal immigrants, with threat of deportation for any back chat. This was true even in Northern Maine, 2000 miles from the border. These people do NOT make $15 an hour. I don't think they even make $7.25 an hour.
It's a climate and biodiversity concern: overproduction wastes farmland that could be, or used to be, wild. The energy put into food transport and storage was used for nothing. Wasted produce rots, giving off methane, and wasted meat or dairy represents double waste, as the animals were raised on crops.
Land would not be wild if it wasn't producing crop X. That land is put into productive use because it has been bought and sold to be put into productive use. If its not a field of cattle its a field of soy. If its not a field of soy its a junk yard. If its not a junk yard the owners are desperately trying to get a housing development or an amazon warehouse built, etc. No land owner in this country buys land content to let it sit wild generating no money and incurring costs, unless they are rich as hell and don't want neighbors nearby. If you want more land set aside to be wild, it comes from establishing preserves, not changing how one particular land using industry works. That's just cutting off one snake off the head of medusa, there are dozens left you haven't cut, and rest assured two more will take its place.
The “acting responsibly” part costs money in labor, if you apply it to the parts of the supply chain that really matter. This is just another way of arriving at “raise food prices”.
It has to have some cost or we’d already do it. Right?
Recovering waste in production and transportation is labor costs. If it were cost-effective, they’d already do it. Recovering waste at the grocery stores costs labor and/or loss of sales in excess of the cost of the risk of waste. Same at restaurants. Again, if it wouldn’t cost them more to avoid that waste, they already would.
Admittedly, at home, it’s mostly a time cost, but good luck convincing people to spend even a couple more hours a week in the kitchen and meal planning and pantry organizing to save small amounts of money (and really cutting home food waste takes a lot more than a couple hours a week)
If food is inexpensive compared to labor and, therefore subject to be wasted, that seems like a good thing overall (at least as compared to the alternatives) rather than a thing that "must be fixed".
Right—it’s not gonna happen, so food waste isn’t gonna get meaningfully better, which makes the constant worrying about it kinda a silly distraction. Unless we do want to talk about increasing the price of food.
You fix it by making food expensive. I doubt anyone’s too keen to do that.