The lie of expired food and the disastrous truth of Americas food waste problem

This feels like a problem that doesn’t need to be solved. Solving it might even be worse than not solving it. Do we really want our food production system to become “just in time”? Delivering exactly how much we need exactly when we need it. Overproduction feels like a safety net for when things go wrong. We really don’t want a food shortage the same way we had toilet paper shortages or gas shortages. Food shortages topple governments and empires the way other shortages don’t.

The obvious solution is to keep production at say 150% of demand but if we are going to do that then we are going to be ‘wasting food’ just like you waste time with all those database backups you never needed. The only difference is we went though all this hoop jumping to make the end user not waste so much food just to push the waste back down the line to the producers (which as the article points out are already throwing away a bunch of food themselves under the current system.)

All in, I would say this issue is close neighbors to the US switching to the metric system completely. Just not worth all the fuss and cost of doing it even though it has some feel good reasons for why getting to the other side of that big initiative would be worthwhile.

I wish there were good resources on identifying if products are still safe to eat. Not just guidelines on how long they are likely to last, but also what indicators to look for to know that you should definitely throw the food away. And also things that are known to happen to the appearance of food over time that doesn't actually affect its safety.

Food waste is not an issue. The whole point of an industrialized food system is that we all can eat. Being able to throw food away should be considered a good thing compared to the rest of history before the 1940s. People back then often ate what they could get and were skinny cause they couldn't eat. Obviously in a perfect world we'd consume things to the max percentage possible, but it's not a perfect world. This article comes from a pretentious first world view that forgets most of the world starved in a pre industrial era for most of their lives. Having people become obese is very weirdly a good problem to have since it's a lot easier to resolve than having to figure out how to equitably get enough food for your people to be satiated.

Long but very interesting. I have read multiple articles about the problem, and this is probably the best one.