I ate so well for a few months as a student until the local Waitrose started chaining their bins shut. Quite a lot of people did in fact, which is presumably why they started chaining them shut.
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.
He does sound like he’s doing a lot more than the average politician rn, but I wonder if he’s just gonna end up w a crossheir to his head for it.
He’s trying to build out a changed Democratic Party in NYC. They way, even if he goes, there are others who will implement a better government.
I just woke up. I’m not even out of bed. Why you gotta make me sad before I’ve even put socks on???
Going up against the Pedo class will always paint a target on people working to change the system. We need MORE Mamdanis in this world. Keep voting for the good guys!
Agreed. Maybe the US could revive itself if there were similars in the other 49 states.
Im in connecticut and my govenor is up for primary. He’s done okay, but you can tell he is trying to compete with the younger fella up for the D primary. I hope the younger fella wins, but in the meantime 70ish old Lemont is trying to make headlines with “proposals” (nothings passed) that are based on policies that would benefit the working class.
I love to see the fear. I should write the old man and ask him to endorse his younger canidate. Near certain these guys just dont want to give up their comfortable positions of power due to some psycological desire.
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.
I don’t think critics realize supermarkets need their millions to buy the next batches of food.
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 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.
At least one local hypermarket does sell food at discounted price before they go off. Some poorer families rely on them.
Fred Meyer (owned by Kroger) sells close dated food at half price. Produce with blemishes is set aside and sold in reduced price bundles. I am sure they still throw away plenty of food, but the reduced prices do seem to attract buyers (myself included). Some items just never make financial sense at the regular price, but half price? I’ll take it.
My tiny local market does 40% off and then FREE for products near expiration.
Yeah, there’s solutions to this problem and the idea that all of them don’t do this a failing of the store’s management.
France had to pass a law that banned food getting thrown out that could be given away.
I also noticed that Costco started offering more prepared chicken foods after it became more well known that their cheap rotisserie chickens would will dumpsters at the end of the day.
Supermarkets should be able to write off the expenses (transportation, stagging, etc) related to donating soon-to-expire foods to food banks. And not just normal income deductions, but actual direct deductions from taxes. That is, if you spend $1000 loading and shipping expired food to the food bank, you pay $1,000 less in taxes.
Truly incentivize giving food to the poor.
It sounds great on the surface, but you just know there are total assholes out there who would exploit the system with artificially inflated shipping costs to the point where they’re hardly paying tax at all. This, as is commonly said, is why we can’t have nice things.
Yes, yes and of we made everyone who makes 250k/yr pay 3865$/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.
My friend was fired from Stop & Shop for taking some food that was going to be thrown away. He would never steal, really good dude. It was cooked food from the deli, and it can ONLY go into the dumpster if not sold. Sad indeed. They don’t pay much.
the peasant class exists to generate more money for the owner class, not the other way around.
always has been
I think also rich people need to have poor people otherwise they won’t be seen to be rich. Also wealth = power
Yeah. A rich person can’t exist when no-one’s poor.
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
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?
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
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
Aren’t political positions like titles which just give privileges and very little responsibility.
/s
It seems to me that affordability starts with housing, because it is usually a household’s single largest monthly expense. And it seems to me the best way to make housing more affordable is to make it non-profit. That doesn’t necessarily mean city owned or other public housing, nor does it mean tax payer funded or subsidized housing, but having apartment buildings owned by a non-profit organization that charges tenants only enough rent to cover the organization’s expenses without any extra going to an owner as profit. And the thing, non-profit housing isn’t only theoretical. It exists right now, but it’s relatively rare. The reason is for-profit landlords don’t want it because they can’t compete.
Let’s say you have two identical apartment buildings, but one is owned by a non-profit housing cooperative and the other is owned by a private landlord. The non-profit housing cooperative is going to have the same ongoing expenses (property management, maintenance, etc) as the private landlord, because the apartments are identical, but rent will be lower at the non-profit housing because they charge only enough rent to cover expenses whereas the private landlord charges rent to cover expenses plus some for his own personal profit.
yeah, in germany a few weeks ago the news made the headline that for-profit rent-out company vonovia makes 30c profit for every 1€ revenue. that’s extreme. that means they’re charging almost 50% more than they had to to operate at-cost.
also in vienna there’s a lot of city-owned apartments and rents here are really affordable. sincerely, written from my 550€/month apartment (roughly $600/month)
also a huge roadblock to lower construction costs is unnecessary complex building codes, zoning laws, and again zoning laws.
- unnecessarily complex construction regulations for example include zoning laws that prescribe that you can’t build multi-family houses on a single lot. this means two houses instead of two apartments in one house, which makes construction significantly more expensive.
- zoning laws also forbid in many places for example to operate supermarkets close to where you live. this is mostly a problem in the US, not so much in europe. it means you have to drive everywhere, which makes your cost-of-living higher.
- zoning laws, again, prescribe things such as minimum lot-size, which means you only have the option to buy 1 large lot instead of 1 small lot, even if you would be content with a smaller house on a small lot. also if not enough area is designated in a city as land for building, then that means that there’s a lack of supply, which makes the land more expensive, which makes the house more expensive.
The main problem is this :
A supermarket could donate food that will expire shortly to anyone or any charity. But if that near to expiration date food makes someone sick for whatever reason, that person could sue the supermarket. Insurance companies would charge a lot to cover that risk so stores opt to throw it out rather than do the morally correct thing and donate it because it costs them money reducing profit for no return to the stockholders.
If the US would pass a law shielding companies from lawsuits related to donated food, then this could become the norm
If the US would pass a law shielding companies from lawsuits related to donated food, then this could become the norm
Well good news then! That law is set to be passed in just thirty years ago
This idea is a myth used to excuse immoral behaviour.
yeah it’s politics’ job to feed everyone, agree. however, food waste in general is not the bad thing that you think it is.
food production naturally fluctuates. there have been over 20 volcano eruptions (example) in the last 2000 years that led to recorded famines. it’s only a matter of time till the next one happens. it’s not preventable, the only mitigation is to have enough surplus food production capability to make it through even if 30% of crops fails.
and having surplus food production capability necessarily leads to food waste.
and having surplus food production capability necessarily leads to food waste.
Nobody is complaining about that.
The complaint is that there is surplus production, and simultaneously 1. the production is actively wasted and destroyed, while 2. people are going hungry.
That’s like saying ‘your kid has a horrible disease, and in this syringe I have the cure for it, but I’m just gonna squirt it down the sink instead because why not’.
I love mamdani but “who” are these people that are scared that she’s talking about? I want names because I want some hope. Many of them openly don’t give a shit and literally say it…
You mean like the president who literally called his voters stupid and does exactly the detrimental shit to the country he ran his campaign on? Yeah, I get the skepticism, lol.
This isn’t always true. I was a volunteer at a Salvation Army food bank, and there would be crates upon crates upon crates of near expiry/day old bakery stuff/etc coming in from a local supermarket.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not nearly enough. But there are some glimmers of hope within the rubble.
I am really surprised the Salvation Army does not destroy stuff in front of people who need it.
Not sure where you’re coming from, other than I know they had some kind of negative reputation in the past, I think for anti-LGBTQ stuff?
Either way, once I was in there seeing what they were doing, I’m not going to throw any shade their way. Never once did I see religion being pushed on a single person, nor anyone turned away for any reason. Granted that is one particular food bank, I can’t claim it represents the entire organization.
Here is a good list.
My dad grew up in the Army, my grandmother was part of it until her death in mid 00s. I saw how they treated the people they were helping, if you looked too nice for help you got none (I fit here when I was on the verge of homelessness in the late 90s, despite volunteering with my grandmother in years previous), if you looked too bad you got no help.
Their soup kitchen gave small portions and always had leftovers. This was thrown away, not even given to the volunteers.
