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 $5 for a 20lb bag.
It takes time and money to do this, and it gets done anyway because the will is there.
Me when there are Costcoposters
TBH though I love Costco. They actually pay their employees well, value their customers, and do things correctly. It’s living proof that things could be different it’s just a group of around 300 people set the incentive structures and propaganda used to program everyone and everything…
Well, before Costco I worked at Walmart. You can imagine the difference in environment
Yeah that would be like going from working in the 19th century to working at Costco
Yes, yes and of we made everyone who makes 250k/yr pay 3865$/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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think critics realize supermarkets need their millions to buy the next batches of food.
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.
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.
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
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
the peasant class exists to generate more money for the owner class, not the other way around.
always has been
edit:
I think also rich people need to have poor people otherwise they won’t be seen to be rich. Also wealth = power
you make a good point, but i think of “rich people” as the families who have been unimaginably wealthy for hundreds of years. not musk, not bezos, bill gates, etc. the “old money” doesn’t care if you know they’re rich–in fact they would prefer you didn’t. they just want to control the trajectory of your life in order to keep you in your place, and prevent you from encroaching on their position of power.
think warburgs and rothschilds, not the idiotic rich people flaunting their wealth on twitter
Porque no los dos?
i mean, fuck musk and bezos and all the rest too. call me a conspiracy theorist, but i’m skeptical of the notion that these people are actually the “richest” of all rich people
While raising their children, Bill Sr. and Mary instilled in them a strong work ethic, the importance of community and the significance of helping others.
https://people.com/all-about-bill-gates-parents-8624696that could all be a lie of course, who knows…
yes, bill gates’s parents were loaded. i’m talking about families that have been too wealthy to measure for many many generations, since banking was invented
Are you saying tech oligarchs don’t have as much desire or ability to control people’s lives and prevent threats to their power?
desire or ability to control people’s lives
no. the desire is there. and in some cases the ability too.
but they are still muppets, controlled by people more powerful than they are. the fact that elon musk, the “richest man in the world” doesn’t get everything he wants should tell you something.
you need to change your mindset away from thinking people like elon musk are the top of the food chain. he’s fucking not.
I hear what you’re saying, that at a certain level of wealth the power hierarchy becomes about seniority, and I don’t know that it’s wrong, but I’m not sure what reason there is to believe it either. Certainly people like elon musk are not all powerful, but what does that really say about the state of things when it would be hard to point to anyone who gets everything they want on a level beyond that?
There’s more to wealth than pure money. Musk has the money. What he doesn’t have is the generations of wealth, that came before. Some of that can’t be bought.
i don’t get what your argument is. that we don’t objectively know who the people above elon musk are, so therefore they must not exist?
what DOES that say about the state of things? you tell me
Not a lot, as far as I can tell? I’m more expressing doubt than making an argument. You are claiming you know they do exist and what defines them, but I don’t see reasons to be confident about that.
Yeah but that’s the power part though
money and power are intimately connected, but they are not the same thing
Yeah. A rich person can’t exist when no-one’s poor.
is there a low volume (byte wise) guillotine available?
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I do a lot of big events at big convention hotels, and you would be shocked at how much amazing food they throw out. I know you think you know, but trust me you have no idea.
Big events are irregular things with hot, fresh food, so it doesn’t surprise me. It would be nice if the food could go to a food bank, but that one would be a logistical nightmare compared sending a regular, but small amount of baked goods from a local grocery store to a local food bank.
Hey, give me some numbers please.
I fear I might be overestimating it and getting angrier by the minute.
I once saw a hotel throw out at least a dozen delicious pork roasts (I grabbed a couple before), 2 entire queens of key lime pies, and too much of everything else to quantify. It was a massive banquet for 2000+, and they made lots more food than they needed.
These events are not “irregular things,” as one poster put it. That was only one banquet, on one night, in one hotel. I am in one of the major convention cities, and banquets like that go on EVERY night, in multiple hotels. Some hotels are hosting multiple conventions at a time, AND multiple large companies attending those conventions, as well as their Local Social events like Weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. The food waste is mind-boggling.
One of the favorite things I watch for is cheese. As we’re leaving, I always take a stroll past the dishwashing room, where there are always queens (rolling racks) lined up full of dirty dishes. I guarantee that on one of those queens is the cheese tray that was on the buffet, and it will contain four or five multi-POUND blocks of barely touched, expensive cheese that is going to go straight into the trash. I can usually grab a block of cheddar, blue cheese, Swiss, maybe a couple more. I probably take home $1000 in free cheese every year.
I understand that they have to carefully monitor the food safety protocols, but I don’t know why vans from food banks can’t be waiting at the hotels at 9 pm at night, to collect any leftover food, and rush it back to refrigeration, to be reheated and served the next day.
Or even that night. I’m sure hungry homeless people wouldn’t mind waiting until 10 pm to eat, if it meant a feast like pork roast mashed potatoes, and key lime pie.
Impossible. There’s no way you could possibly imagine it.
You couldn’t imagine how upset I am hearing about wasted food at hotel conventions.
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The fact that at this time in history we have the world’s first trillionaire and we padlock the dumpsters we throw food away into is a disgrace. The future will not look kindly on us that we let this stand
We live in an absolutely disgusting world.
The world is full of the most beauty, I watched a heron fish in a pond earlier, the air and shade were perfect, it was majestic. It’s just the handful of absolute assholes making it all suck so much.
Even the Harkonnen let the poor of Arrakeen eat the leftovers from their table.
i heard local vendors would give their unsellable foods (discolored etc) to churches to hand out. dont know how much but its a tough issue.
Then there is the whole safety issue. Food poisoning is no joke.
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.
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.
They need the poors to fight their wars and work on their factory floors.
And to focus on perceived races, while keeping women and queers in their places.
(I’m working on the last line, too long)
