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Comment by John23832 | Hacker News Reader

I think you would still have an issue because people still have to afford to eat. That implies some sort of barrier to entry to eating.

Half of all food in the US is thrown away. We don't have a food production problem, we have a resource allocation problem. Humans are notoriously bad at resource allocation.

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Well, most of that food waste is at the consumer/household level. The distribution chain up to that point wastes very little (indeed, when it comes to things like meat scraps and produce trimmings, it's almost too thrifty.) A big part of this consumer waste is because food is cheap enough to not eat all of. So, do we make it more expensive to encourage less waste? It's an inherently hard problem.

I agree, a lot of waste is on households. However, I used to work at the nations largest grocery chain (surprise, not Walmart) and food waste was rampant... particularly in the bakery and produce department. Food that was a little off date was thrown away rather than given to local shelters due to the liability. This happened every day.

Right, but that's not due to what the chain wanted to do, but due to liability. Allow people to waive liability claims for past-due food, and this problem mostly goes away.

I remember working in a produce warehouse, and due to some clever particularities of our non-profit status, we were allowed to give away surplus produce to employees with no liability. I don't think we ever threw out anything except old bananas; it all got taken home.

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