walkitout | Reasonable! (Reply)

From:

For more or less all of human experience on this planet, running out has been the problem. Running out is bad. We fixed Running Out. We fixed it really hard. In fact, we fixed it so hard, that we’re sitting around watching the people we subsidized throw stuff away. As you note, one of your husband’s tasks _at a food bank_ is to throw out bread, so clearly, doing more to connect groceries to food banks is no way to solve the excess bread problem.

This is one of the reasons I find the author’s focus on What the End Consumer Can Do unspeakably maddening. The problem does not lie with the end consumer. The problem either lies in straight up overproduction across the board OR it lies in inappropriate matching of peak production with consumption. Let me explain a bit about those two possibilities, and which it is matters a lot in terms of what intervention we engage in — and the end consumer can do very little about this at all.

If the problem lies in universal overproduction, specifically, producers making too much and more of everything because the _price_ of what they are making is very low, then the solution lies in some kind of quota system (a la OPEC, or what we did for a while post New Deal). Basically, STOP the overproduction, because commodity producers who make very little on things because of overproduction generally speaking (as in ALWAYS sadly) will make even more to increase their total take. (I know, crazy!) Further reducing demand (by reducing waste) will not fix this problem, and might actually make it worse.

If the problem lies in a demand / supply mismatch, then the solution is considerably more complex and historically impossible, but potentially solvable now with smartphones / shopping list generators / recipes supplied with a season focus / meal kits / etc. Basically, there are a very few weeks a year when, say, there is asparagus, and during those weeks there is a lot. So you can fix the pricing / waste issue by making sure that absolutely everyone who can stand asparagus remembers to eat it a few times during that week. And then does not waste their precious time shopping for it when it is not available. Ditto for a lot of things. Basically, unwind our imposition of No Season for Anything, which was the old skool solution to dealing with the cognitive load of keeping track of what was currently in season when the fields were literally never visible to you (thousands of miles away type of thing).

Anyway. You are reasonable. He is definitely coming across like an ass. I suspect — altho I don’t know — that the grocer and bakery he described didn’t really keep everything fully stocked right up until close when they tossed it. They were, after all, taking notes about how much of what they threw away, which hopefully went into some calculation of how many to stock on future days.

ETA: Whoops! Meant to say, to the extent that JIT approaches have not been fully deployed in groceries, they should be. Plenty of restaurants are baking bread for customers as they sit down at the table; stores ought to be able to do something similar, especially as we move more and more towards shop online / pick up at store (or have delivered). That’s a _huge_ window into what people will be wanting later, and we should use that information.

ETAYA: the book came out before smartphones, so I don’t blame him for that. [ETA Still More: seriously? You want to complain about my smartphone dates? Sure. Go ahead. Just make sure you calculate in the 2-3 years where the text is complete before it is actually published. Still want to complain? OK. Fine. Complain. But it isn’t like smartphones had the kind of penetration and apps connected to delivery services when he was writing this that exist now when I’m writing my complaints).

Also, my sister has been exploring the space of imperfect / n day old food space, and has received bread partway through its shelf life that was fine. This is, again, stuff that is treated as worth nothing by the store getting rid of it, but some other company is salvaging that value and delivering it to customers for the delivery value. Things to think about.