The title reads that changing the date labels is a way to fix the problem, yet the third paragraph outlines that "we estimate that 20% of household food waste is due to confusion over date labels". Cutting down on that 20% would of course be beneficial, but it's a long way away from fixing the problem as a whole.
Saying "this fixes a substantial part of the problem but not everything" is a surefire way to get nothing done.
Same in healthcare. Somebody makes a proposal and immediately people come out of the weeds claiming "But look at this thing! this is much worse" and in the end nothing ever changes.
Right, if there isn't a simple solution that can be explained in a headline a large number of people jump to "there is nothing (useful) that can be done".
They also seem to be ignoring the possibility that the current date indicators take the form they take because the firm that packaged that food has decided they make the most money that with this form of date indicator. Sure, there could be regulations governing this, but like all regulations they'll be written by the firms they regulate.
Date labels on food let you plan ahead. For half of the stuff in my kitchen, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head whether it'll go bad in a month or in a year. Sure, once it goes bad, I might be able to spot it - but labels let me look at an unopened bag of $foodstuffs and decide whether I have to build a dinner around it this week, or whether it can wait another month.
That's a neat trick. However, I've never seen anyone doing it around me. I wonder how one would make it work with fridge and storage space regularly filled to capacity?
My wife and I do something else instead. We know we can eat all foodstuffs before their printed expiry date, but we got tripped regularly by products with have short expiry time after being opened - in particular, through not remembering how long such a product has been sitting in the fridge. I eventually glued some magnets to a permanent marker and put it on the fridge, and now we write current date whenever opening a fridge-stored product. This made it much easier to avoid accidental food waste due to uncertainty around spoilage.
I guess. I think it depends a lot on what you buy.
I pretty much have fresh stuff that would go stale within weeks, and stable stuff that has effectively infinite lifespan. I don't find it hard to track the fresh stuff.
It's quite possible that my shelf stable items build up forever and so will eventually get wasted in 10 years or something though :P
In addition, 37% reported that they always or usually discard food when it is near the date stamped on the package, and 84% said they do so at least occasionally.
As someone who grew up in a not so wealthy family (but not "poor" by any standard), this behaviour is... perplexing. Are people regularly buying far more than they can consume? If that's the case, I don't think changing the date labels will do much. We almost never discarded food because of, and used the dates more as an indicator of when to consume it.
Part of it is even the small portions of ingredients are still too much if you're only cooking the required meal occasionally as a single. It would be great if grocery stores had the ability to only buy "2 cups of milk" or a "single egg" in a way that isn't a packaging waste nightmare.
Regardless of the date on the package, eggs at least last a really long time. Go ahead and buy a dozen. If you eat those dozen this month, you'll probably be fine.
The float test is helpful here, if the egg floats then it's not a witch but you should dispose of it (or better yet, check it but be ready for the smell if it's off).
I have seen eggs be fine after 3 months in the fridge. I have seen foreign eggs last 6 weeks without refrigeration, the latter part of it in the tropics. (Don't try that with US eggs--we clean them more, weakening their defenses.)
I just opened a jar of curry sauce with an expiry date of 2018. I get it, the manufacturer doesn't want to deal with any potential liability, but otherwise this sauce is perfectly fine even when expired for over a year. Throwing food away just because the date says so, has always seemed crazy to me.
I tasted some famous-brand Greek yogurt that was about 1 or 2 weeks past the best-by date recently. The taste was flawless, but there was something very weird about the texture, like it was subtly sandy or something. I ended up throwing several cups away.
I only recently replaced my half empty "Best-by Nov 2016" Costco Saigon Cinnamon with a brand new bottle of the same. The new bottle tastes a little stronger but I sort of regret throwing the old bottle away since I don't think it will actually matter.
Some of it is that people want fresh fruits and vegetables to be available. They buy these things fully intending to cook with them, or have their kids eat them, in the next few days/week, but then life happens, other things come up, and they sit out of sight in the fridge until they go bad.
In particular, time and mental energy are more valuable than money for many people. It's more optimal for them to let some things go bad than to spend the time and energy to monitor tightly enough that nothing ever spoils before it's used.
So this happens to me. I think I’ll be cooking s bunch of things, but then I’m in a crunch and don’t have as much time as I thought so I whip up quicker options. That means that okra, eggplant or whatever it was I though I was going to make doesn’t and I’m making something else. When I look after the middle of the week I might have a couple of these items piled up, in addition to the things I already had planned to cook, so I’m left with more things than I can cook and by the time I might get to them, they’re past their useful date.
I feel like car culture and suburbs create some of this.
When I used to spend time in the suburbs I witnessed people filling large cars with groceries to last for weeks. It is hard to estimate in advance what you will actually use working that way.
I prefer to live walking distance from grocers and go every day to buy a small amount of ingredients. I often still end up with leftovers, but I am pretty conscientious about using them before they go bad and before buying more.
I grew up in the suburbs, with a large car (and I still have one), so I doubt that's the only big factor; it's probably more related to people with a "this is cheap/sale, so I'll buy tons of it" attitude without thinking about the rate at which they'll use it, what they already have, and how long they can store it for.
You're probably spending much more money and time doing it this way. There's a middle ground between just-in-time purchasing and stocking up for a zombie apocalypse. It's not that hard to estimate how much you use in a week, and buy a week's worth of groceries at a time. Saves time, saves money, and the amount of food isn't so large you can't keep track of it anymore.
I'm shut out of savings-heavy options like Costco by buying this way, but I don't know about the rest of your assertion. Especially when you consider, eg., that I use my various walks to the grocer in place of where somebody else might use a gym membership. Things like this keep me physically active.
I've never had a gym membership so I can't tell you what results I would have with that. However, I did once achieve 100 lbs of weight loss over 18 months where my primary exercise was walking.
Reduction in portion sizes, but no major change in items consumed. Biggest staple of my diet is pasta. High carb, high fat, lots of walking keeps me at normal BMI.
I live alone I can rarely can get perishable items in small enough quantities that I can use them before they spoil. After throwing such items a few times I have almost stopped trying to cook anything as it is cheaper to buy ready made meals plus I don't have to do the dishes after.
You just have to find a set of recipes that contains a lot of common ingredients. E.g. if you have 2 bell peppers, one day you can stir fry stipes of it with some meat, the next day you can fill the other with rice and bake it, the day after you make a rice omelette using the leftover rice that didn't fit in the bell pepper...
> Are people regularly buying far more than they can consume?
I think often, the answer is a resounding "yes". In the UK there was a major push a few years ago to get rid of BOGOF deals on food as it often just led to more food waste.
I've not really seen much tangible change from that, but supermarkets are competing so much on "deals" that it's often better value to buy more than you need than trying to buy "enough".
> Are people regularly buying far more than they can consume?
Yes, and it's not limited to food. It's the same phenomenon as someone buying too many games on Steam or buying more books than they can read.
You are right in that labelling won't solve the fundamental issue, even if it could solve some of it: for instance making it more clear at purchase time how fast a product will degenerate could help lower impulse purchase. But then it will lower sales as well, we'd need regulation otherwise the key players won't buy in.
At some point I wonder if a model close to subscription to food services would work, in the same way Netflix doesn't make you buy thousands of movies you won't watch. If fixing our culture doesn't work.
In the old days, long before I was born, about 50% of the population was conscripted as "free" labor; staying home, cooking, cleaning, etc. That didn't take up all of the time, but that allocation of resources did leave a lot of time for doing things within a household.
Since that time nearly everyone works, and we have a literal war for attention (ads). At least in the school district where I had my education we also lacked any class about how to cook properly.
If as a society we want to make that choice I believe the logical conclusion is to have more community kitchens where workers (and automation where possible) make healthy, and also tasty (maybe not healthy) options for people to eat. We've outsourced that to fast food, generally, since that's also cheep "food". However the healthy, diversity, and quality are often lacking.
I live in the suburbs and I have to really, really, think. If I want something that isn't deep fried, isn't a burger, or a salad with 'BS' leafs (but is actually a salad with strong content and non-filler material): I struggle to think of even one place, let alone a selection that I could drive to within the local zone. Let alone anything I could hope to walk to in a reasonable duration of time.
Maybe if the automation revolution allows the average worker to have a 2-4 hour a day job (mostly supervising the automation and the paperwork) we can have an alternate future with time for rotating dinner parties and actual uses of the food.
The problem is density. The hawker stalls in Singapore are exactly this (pojangmachas and cafeteria dealios in Seoul, hawkers in Hong Kong), but they get to have it and your suburb doesn't because they have enough soulless 50 story apartments. Ask for a 50 story soulless concrete apartment in your neighborhood today!
There’s nothing soulless about high density, it’s efficient, environmentally friendly and to your point allows and supports diversity in recreation and dining. It’s the inescapable future of human civilization, in a good way. Would you describe living in New York as soulless? It’s time to get over the dog/white picket fence/2.5 kids delusion.
In my experience all big cities i've been through are soulless, and so are the humans living there. When i say soulless, i mean people living there have: no sense of purpose, no community, no solidarity. Everyone has sold their soul to capitalist oppression and is just silently suffering their way to success or suicide.
Big cities require incredible quantities of concrete, and can't feed themselves. They are therefore NOT environmentally friendly at all (it's hard to think of something less eco-friendly). They appear to be on some stats because all the other ways of life (and local production everywhere) have been systematically attacked and almost destroyed by the "green revolution" and neoliberal policies.
If you want a city that's ecofriendly, it needs to produce most of its food locally (like Cuba) and use local materials for construction (clay-based earth is really good). That, and it should designed for pedestrians/bikes not cars. That's an eco-friendly city, but it wouldn't be high-density.
Although, i agree with you the suburban/countryside family delusion is no dream of mine ;)
Soulless 50 story apartments are better than soulless cookie cutter detached homes, because at least with the former it‘s easier to escape total isolation. And of course it is better for the environment.
Neither option is humane. In both cases, the capitalist illness has destroyed any sense of community.
Nobody in big cities knows their neighbors. And very few people organize against poverty, against their bosses, landlords, and police abuse. They could have a good life if they did, but don't underestimate the capacity of an oppressive system to isolate people (because it's the only way it can survive).
I mean, the former Warsaw Pact states are also full of lots of "soulless" dense housing, just Communist-flavored.
You can have lots of housing, cheap housing, and quality housing, but never really all three. Vienna, which a lot of people like bringing up as an example of a friendly masss housing program, recorded flat or declining population every decade until 2000, and has still not recovered from its pre-WWI peak, which wasn't even very big at 2M people.
It does work in the West you just need to enforce the rules. There are Western countries that do this well and there are ones that fail at enforcing these rules.
> too many self-absorbed people thinking they're more important than their community.
If people in Singapore are more community minded, then why the need for the harsh enforcement? (You know, public whippings for putting your shoes on the wrong feet or whatever...)
> I live in the suburbs and I have to really, really, think. If I want something that isn't deep fried, isn't a burger, or a salad with 'BS' leafs (but is actually a salad with strong content and non-filler material): I struggle to think of even one place, let alone a selection that I could drive to within the local zone. Let alone anything I could hope to walk to in a reasonable duration of time.
Start checking out your local grocery stores. In addition to selling, well, groceries, most of them will have a deli section and a salad bar. Salad bars in grocery stores typically get charged by the pound, so you can pick and choose exactly what you're getting. Most grocery stores in the US will also have already-cooked rotisserie chickens, sides available by weight, and other precooked options. Most large grocery stores in the US basically have a fully stocked cafeteria in them.
It is a big supermarket thing moreso than a city thing. It’s a big part of the Whole Foods strategy, and an increasing part of Safeway/Ralph’s/etc. They have an increasing amount of hot food that you can take away. Walmart in the “country” didn’t, I don’t know if that’s a Walmart thing or a country thing (they did have a subway in-store).
Yeah, large supermarkets tend to have salad bars, suburban or urban. Wal-Mart has grocery items, but you're not going to find a salad bar at one. Same goes for Target. You're also not going to find a salad bar at a Trader Joe's or an Aldi's.
But your typical large-format grocery store will have one. It's hard to talk chains and be comprehensive because American supermarket chains are not national. But whatever your market's equivalent of Wegmans/Publix/Kroger/HEB/Meijer/Albertsons/Hy-Vee should have one.
There are, it should be noted, places in the US where there are not readily-available supermarkets. But those tend to be urban and rural, not suburban:
Buy a bottle of olive oil and a bottle of vinegar (a fancy vinegar if you want, apple cider or balsamic, but not malt) then buy a packet of Italian spices (typically a blend of oregano, thyme, etc...)
Buy some salad greens, either a head of lettuce, or a box of spring mix or similar blend of greens.
To make salad dressing mix two parts oil to one part vinegar, put in a pinch of Italian spices, a pinch of salt, whisk.
Then pour over your greens, add some feta cheese olives and baby tomatoes, capers if you want.
When I'm in the mood for a good self built salad I go to the hospital cafeteria near me. They charge by weight and have a large selection. I find most hospitals are the same. Maybe you should check out that option.
That's why there were the airquotes. Not-paid, and not priced in to the actual compensation of others directly. It was simply assumed that this was the way things were. (IIRC the legal terms also made the union a single person in a lot of respects.)
And if I say men died for their families in war or in the struggle to make a living and did it for "free", that also would be a vast oversimplification and a distortion of the situation.
Yeah, I think if you are forced to do something and not paid a mutually agreed upon wage, and then you die, you are not getting monetary compensation for that sacrifice.
But you may gladly go along with all of it, even the risk of death, because of what you care about. Your family, your town, your country.
Which is why claiming the work of either men or women is done for free is silly. There are so many other values in life.
I prefer to look at it like this: in the West, we used to have an effective cradle-to-grave UBI for females. In fact, caring for women and children in our culture was so important that we dedicated an adult male to basically every woman in the country, and her offspring. Super important. All of society was organized around this, and it's one of the greatest achievements of modern civilization.
Now we make women work for money, but the total amount paid across all workers is roughly the same. (Wages have been flat for 40 years, mostly because we have twice the "paid" workers—men AND women—but consumption is basically flat.)
It's regressive. Women have ALWAYS "worked" [0], but prior to the financialization of Western culture, that "work" was—as you pointed out—on activities that we can't put a price on, things like:
* building happy homes and families
* proper nutrition, which is extremely time consuming even today
* birthing and raising children (women had universal "time off" to have kids until we put those same women to work making widgets)
* helping out other families in the local community
* building and maintaining community institutions, schools, churches, etc.
* helping others in humane, non-financial ways where there isn't any money to be made
We've given up a lot of these things just to keep wages down for the Capitalists. At least the rising inequality over the last 40 years shows someone benefited. Just not us, or our children, or our communities.
Decline is a choice.
[0] I hate that our culture only values things that can be expressed in terms of money. Calling what women do "work" (or as the OP calls it, uncompensated "labor") is demeaning to women. What women do day-to-day is vastly more important than whatever bullshit men have to (gladly) do to build and maintain civilization for their families.
Can't say I agree completely, actually I'm pretty insulted. People pursue careers for reasons other than pure greed. My sister is a doctor and a professor and has contributed far more to society than I have as man or a father.
I do agree that we don't need two people per household doing bullshit jobs like selling advertising.
But civilization is perfectly capable of decline and disaster even if we were still organized around single income households. So what if out our children have good nutrition, if we are faced with total environmental collapse or nuclear war?
It's disingenuous to call domestic servitude "caring for" or "UBI", by the same metric prison is UBI for prisoners.
If you want cooking, cleaning, and childcare so badly, why don't you volunteer to do it instead of telling women it's our place. I think I'll take my job over being a man's property.
I personally would love to be the property of most of the women I've dated in my life.
I help watch my nieces and nephews when needed already anyway, I'm very stubborn about keeping my living space organized and sanitized(in fact i cleaned my grandparent's entire house of mold(they are hoarders too so it involved tons of lifting/reoganizing)), and I've been into fitness/athletics my whole life, which entails learning to cook healthy meals.
If a women were to ask me to come do any of those things for her I would head right over enthusiastically and I don't expect anything in return either as long as she kept me company. This applies regardless of whether I'm romantically interested in her.
The problem here is that your job is then defined at your birth based on the genitalia with which you're born. That's more or less arbitrary. What if a female is better able to contribute to society as, say, a doctor? What if a male wants to stay home and run a family?
People should have the freedom to choose how they live their lives; they should be able to contribute to society in any way they please.
Suggesting that assigning jobs at birth is superior to our current system is rather silly. Yes, we have new problems to solve by ceasing that behavior, but regressing isn't the solution.
> In fact, caring for women and children in our culture was so important that we dedicated an adult male to basically every woman in the country, and her offspring.
That is, at least to me, a very interesting way to describe a patriarchy that was backed only by bible interpretations for centuries.
EDIT: "interesting" should be pronounced with a strong, British accent.
I'm guessing your parents are still saving money overall, even accounting for the stuff thrown away.
Having transitioned from the "buy supper and breakfast on my way home" to "week's worth of food in the fridge" myself, I see two components to this. One, buying just-in-time is easier when you're single, gets more complicated when you have a partner, and much more so when you have kids. Two, the "keeping fridge stocked" model affords going to a cheaper store less frequently, and buy in bulk, saving considerable amount of money on a monthly basis.
> I'm guessing your parents are still saving money overall, even accounting for the stuff thrown away.
I'm the same as OP, for the most part my parents would be buying the same stuff at the same store. They'll also be buying at the price on their weekly shopping day and if that's on a weekend when a lot of people shop then stores aren't discounting, whereas I can take advantage of daily specials or late night discounts.
> Two, the "keeping fridge stocked" model affords going to a cheaper store less frequently, and buy in bulk, saving considerable amount of money on a monthly basis.
You can do both, most thrown away food is of the more perishable varieties, so you can buy that on an as needed basis and buy stuff like tinned food in bulk.
Even the perishables can be bought somewhat in bulk. My wife ends up chucking an appreciable amount of perishables so I have thought about the economics--and her approach is generally the right one. Much of what gets chucked came from a store with good produce sales on Wednesday only. If she ends up chucking 20% of it but paid only 30% of what it would be at the store closer to home she's still way ahead.
>I'm guessing your parents are still saving money overall, even accounting for the stuff thrown away.
Probably. They make use of a farmers market heavily too & are probably more eco friendly on amount of packaging. So not really criticizing just find it crazy opening the fridge when I visit (once a year :( ) and am just stunned by how much food they keep for 2 people. At one point they had 2 full sized fridges.
If you're buying a prepackaged meal on the way home then you're likely spending one of order of magnitude more than your parents. They could literally be using half their fridge food for target practice and still be spending less than you.
I now fall back on HN's common knowledge about Electron to declare that you are being bad and should immediately seek to maximize the use of the shared storage areas in your refrigerator.
I do actual cooking too, but the turn around between buying ingredients and eating them is like 3 hours. Where my parents do weekly shopping. So tons of 2 week old stuff lurking behind other stuff etc.
>you are being bad
Def am on packaging. Quite difficult to buy stuff in bachelor compatible portions without it being a environmental shitshow.
Manufacturers don't want to put "safe until" on anything because there are a lot of things that can go wrong with an agricultural product and you don't want to provide a firm safety guarantee.
The thing is, most labels that I see have _sell by_ dates. They're intended for grocery stores, not consumers. But people treat them as _use by_ dates. Which is just awful.
There are (in Sweden at least, I suppose everywhere else too) two types of dates: "best before" and "last day of use".
The "best before" kind of date is the most common one by far, and it's used on things that will be obviously bad to eat before they start becoming really bad for your health. Milk, for example, will smell and taste bad before it's really unhealthy. If it seems ok to eat, it probably is - regardless of the date printed on the box.
The other kind, "last day of use", is put on things that can become unhealthy without you noticing - most common use in Sweden is minced meat and raw chicken. This is the type of date you should actually follow without thinking too much about it.
A lot of people don't know there are two types of dates, and treat all dates like the second type.
I have pretty good insurance by most standards, but a trip to the ER or emergency room for a serious case of food poisoning would be pretty hard to handle. Couple that with often having some important event coming up (project deadline, travel, social event, etc). So to that end, I throw out when in doubt. Yes, I feel particularly bad wasting food, but there are significant financial and social costs I have to pay for getting it wrong. And honestly knowing that I'm risking those things actually makes eating the food less enjoyable.
It's important to keep in mind that people are making similar rational decisions when deciding to sniff or toss.
Let's keep the wages stagnant for 40 years, and come up with new ways for the average American to do more things because they're so naughty, 40% of food goes to waste you naughty American.
What else should Americans do, use less water when showering, to fix 'water waste'?
Maybe the problem lies elsewhere...
To take it apart a little more - why is 40% of the food being thrown out a problem? What do we gain by cutting that down to 20%? Do we have a food shortage? Agriculture is 0.9% of America's GDP and less than 0.7% of the population is involved in farming and fishing combined. [0]
It's not at all clear there is any food 'waste' occurring and even if there is, it's not at all unclear where it sits on the list of priorities. I'd say somewhere near the bottom.
Wages have been stagnating for 40 years because more and more women have been entering the workforce for 40 years.
Supply of workers has increased massively, while demand for the things being produced has obviously not increased in the same manner (because the women now in the workforce were already consumers).
It would be cool if any food about to expire could be given away by your refrigerator. Maybe robots will one day handle that. Maybe even sniff the food to make sure it's still good.
Of course, when robots start cooking and restaurant quality meals on demand for the cost of the fresh ingredients, the need to store food will drop like a rock and this problem goes away.
I'm not sure what threat model this supposed "Easy Fix" is intended to address. Struggling families already keep food past supposed expiration date. If manufacturers want people to throw away food, changing the way the label is worded won't fix that. And most people are discarding food because they don't plan and/or buy too many.
"Best by" labels have no inherent accuracy. However, you know fairly certainly that for two instances X, Y of exactly the same product, if bestby(X) > bestby(Y), then X is the fresher one.
Furthermore, you know that the less fresh one is at least |bestby(X) - bestby(Y)| days old.
If the difference in "best by" between two instances is three months, one of them is at least three months old already: it's three months plus the age of the newer one.
That's really the only accurate use of these labels: to leave the old stock on the shelf for someone who doesn't care. Once you bring it home they have little value.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadIf I "cut" someone's pay, they get a "pay cut" or, in other words, their pay goes down. They don't lose their entire wage.
Same in healthcare. Somebody makes a proposal and immediately people come out of the weeds claiming "But look at this thing! this is much worse" and in the end nothing ever changes.
Different countries just like, don't have them. Particularly on stuff like fruit and vegetables.
I pretty much just eat things if they seem edible. If a piece of fruit is mouldy, I'll chop off the mould and eat the rest.
Maybe that's why I'm so bonkers. :P
My wife and I do something else instead. We know we can eat all foodstuffs before their printed expiry date, but we got tripped regularly by products with have short expiry time after being opened - in particular, through not remembering how long such a product has been sitting in the fridge. I eventually glued some magnets to a permanent marker and put it on the fridge, and now we write current date whenever opening a fridge-stored product. This made it much easier to avoid accidental food waste due to uncertainty around spoilage.
I pretty much have fresh stuff that would go stale within weeks, and stable stuff that has effectively infinite lifespan. I don't find it hard to track the fresh stuff.
It's quite possible that my shelf stable items build up forever and so will eventually get wasted in 10 years or something though :P
As someone who grew up in a not so wealthy family (but not "poor" by any standard), this behaviour is... perplexing. Are people regularly buying far more than they can consume? If that's the case, I don't think changing the date labels will do much. We almost never discarded food because of, and used the dates more as an indicator of when to consume it.
Regardless of the date on the package, eggs at least last a really long time. Go ahead and buy a dozen. If you eat those dozen this month, you'll probably be fine.
Delia Smith on how to tell a good egg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2OWXN80NZQ
Edit: Ironically (or sadly), I was a bit too quick to call for disposal of old eggs.
I have seen eggs be fine after 3 months in the fridge. I have seen foreign eggs last 6 weeks without refrigeration, the latter part of it in the tropics. (Don't try that with US eggs--we clean them more, weakening their defenses.)
Lots of bulk liquids too, but I haven't seen milk.
I only recently replaced my half empty "Best-by Nov 2016" Costco Saigon Cinnamon with a brand new bottle of the same. The new bottle tastes a little stronger but I sort of regret throwing the old bottle away since I don't think it will actually matter.
When I used to spend time in the suburbs I witnessed people filling large cars with groceries to last for weeks. It is hard to estimate in advance what you will actually use working that way.
I prefer to live walking distance from grocers and go every day to buy a small amount of ingredients. I often still end up with leftovers, but I am pretty conscientious about using them before they go bad and before buying more.
You also save the money on gas/less wear on the car/gym membership.
I think often, the answer is a resounding "yes". In the UK there was a major push a few years ago to get rid of BOGOF deals on food as it often just led to more food waste.
I've not really seen much tangible change from that, but supermarkets are competing so much on "deals" that it's often better value to buy more than you need than trying to buy "enough".
Yes, and it's not limited to food. It's the same phenomenon as someone buying too many games on Steam or buying more books than they can read.
You are right in that labelling won't solve the fundamental issue, even if it could solve some of it: for instance making it more clear at purchase time how fast a product will degenerate could help lower impulse purchase. But then it will lower sales as well, we'd need regulation otherwise the key players won't buy in.
At some point I wonder if a model close to subscription to food services would work, in the same way Netflix doesn't make you buy thousands of movies you won't watch. If fixing our culture doesn't work.
Since that time nearly everyone works, and we have a literal war for attention (ads). At least in the school district where I had my education we also lacked any class about how to cook properly.
If as a society we want to make that choice I believe the logical conclusion is to have more community kitchens where workers (and automation where possible) make healthy, and also tasty (maybe not healthy) options for people to eat. We've outsourced that to fast food, generally, since that's also cheep "food". However the healthy, diversity, and quality are often lacking.
I live in the suburbs and I have to really, really, think. If I want something that isn't deep fried, isn't a burger, or a salad with 'BS' leafs (but is actually a salad with strong content and non-filler material): I struggle to think of even one place, let alone a selection that I could drive to within the local zone. Let alone anything I could hope to walk to in a reasonable duration of time.
Maybe if the automation revolution allows the average worker to have a 2-4 hour a day job (mostly supervising the automation and the paperwork) we can have an alternate future with time for rotating dinner parties and actual uses of the food.
That could be anywhere up until 2019 or later.
Big cities require incredible quantities of concrete, and can't feed themselves. They are therefore NOT environmentally friendly at all (it's hard to think of something less eco-friendly). They appear to be on some stats because all the other ways of life (and local production everywhere) have been systematically attacked and almost destroyed by the "green revolution" and neoliberal policies.
If you want a city that's ecofriendly, it needs to produce most of its food locally (like Cuba) and use local materials for construction (clay-based earth is really good). That, and it should designed for pedestrians/bikes not cars. That's an eco-friendly city, but it wouldn't be high-density.
Although, i agree with you the suburban/countryside family delusion is no dream of mine ;)
Nobody in big cities knows their neighbors. And very few people organize against poverty, against their bosses, landlords, and police abuse. They could have a good life if they did, but don't underestimate the capacity of an oppressive system to isolate people (because it's the only way it can survive).
You can have lots of housing, cheap housing, and quality housing, but never really all three. Vienna, which a lot of people like bringing up as an example of a friendly masss housing program, recorded flat or declining population every decade until 2000, and has still not recovered from its pre-WWI peak, which wasn't even very big at 2M people.
People respect the rules (otherwise they face consequences for asocial behaviour) and this makes the city function like a well oiled machine.
The same scheme wouldn't work in many Western cities, too many self-absorbed people thinking they're more important than their community.
If people in Singapore are more community minded, then why the need for the harsh enforcement? (You know, public whippings for putting your shoes on the wrong feet or whatever...)
Start checking out your local grocery stores. In addition to selling, well, groceries, most of them will have a deli section and a salad bar. Salad bars in grocery stores typically get charged by the pound, so you can pick and choose exactly what you're getting. Most grocery stores in the US will also have already-cooked rotisserie chickens, sides available by weight, and other precooked options. Most large grocery stores in the US basically have a fully stocked cafeteria in them.
But your typical large-format grocery store will have one. It's hard to talk chains and be comprehensive because American supermarket chains are not national. But whatever your market's equivalent of Wegmans/Publix/Kroger/HEB/Meijer/Albertsons/Hy-Vee should have one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
Buy a bottle of olive oil and a bottle of vinegar (a fancy vinegar if you want, apple cider or balsamic, but not malt) then buy a packet of Italian spices (typically a blend of oregano, thyme, etc...)
Buy some salad greens, either a head of lettuce, or a box of spring mix or similar blend of greens.
To make salad dressing mix two parts oil to one part vinegar, put in a pinch of Italian spices, a pinch of salt, whisk.
Then pour over your greens, add some feta cheese olives and baby tomatoes, capers if you want.
But free definitely implies they did in exchange for nothing, which is false.
But you may gladly go along with all of it, even the risk of death, because of what you care about. Your family, your town, your country.
Which is why claiming the work of either men or women is done for free is silly. There are so many other values in life.
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Now we make women work for money, but the total amount paid across all workers is roughly the same. (Wages have been flat for 40 years, mostly because we have twice the "paid" workers—men AND women—but consumption is basically flat.)
It's regressive. Women have ALWAYS "worked" [0], but prior to the financialization of Western culture, that "work" was—as you pointed out—on activities that we can't put a price on, things like:
* building happy homes and families
* proper nutrition, which is extremely time consuming even today
* birthing and raising children (women had universal "time off" to have kids until we put those same women to work making widgets)
* helping out other families in the local community
* building and maintaining community institutions, schools, churches, etc.
* helping others in humane, non-financial ways where there isn't any money to be made
We've given up a lot of these things just to keep wages down for the Capitalists. At least the rising inequality over the last 40 years shows someone benefited. Just not us, or our children, or our communities.
Decline is a choice.
[0] I hate that our culture only values things that can be expressed in terms of money. Calling what women do "work" (or as the OP calls it, uncompensated "labor") is demeaning to women. What women do day-to-day is vastly more important than whatever bullshit men have to (gladly) do to build and maintain civilization for their families.
I do agree that we don't need two people per household doing bullshit jobs like selling advertising.
But civilization is perfectly capable of decline and disaster even if we were still organized around single income households. So what if out our children have good nutrition, if we are faced with total environmental collapse or nuclear war?
If you want cooking, cleaning, and childcare so badly, why don't you volunteer to do it instead of telling women it's our place. I think I'll take my job over being a man's property.
I help watch my nieces and nephews when needed already anyway, I'm very stubborn about keeping my living space organized and sanitized(in fact i cleaned my grandparent's entire house of mold(they are hoarders too so it involved tons of lifting/reoganizing)), and I've been into fitness/athletics my whole life, which entails learning to cook healthy meals.
If a women were to ask me to come do any of those things for her I would head right over enthusiastically and I don't expect anything in return either as long as she kept me company. This applies regardless of whether I'm romantically interested in her.
People should have the freedom to choose how they live their lives; they should be able to contribute to society in any way they please.
Suggesting that assigning jobs at birth is superior to our current system is rather silly. Yes, we have new problems to solve by ceasing that behavior, but regressing isn't the solution.
That is, at least to me, a very interesting way to describe a patriarchy that was backed only by bible interpretations for centuries.
EDIT: "interesting" should be pronounced with a strong, British accent.
Meanwhile my parents have a fridge full of food and are constantly throwing stuff out
Having transitioned from the "buy supper and breakfast on my way home" to "week's worth of food in the fridge" myself, I see two components to this. One, buying just-in-time is easier when you're single, gets more complicated when you have a partner, and much more so when you have kids. Two, the "keeping fridge stocked" model affords going to a cheaper store less frequently, and buy in bulk, saving considerable amount of money on a monthly basis.
I'm the same as OP, for the most part my parents would be buying the same stuff at the same store. They'll also be buying at the price on their weekly shopping day and if that's on a weekend when a lot of people shop then stores aren't discounting, whereas I can take advantage of daily specials or late night discounts.
> Two, the "keeping fridge stocked" model affords going to a cheaper store less frequently, and buy in bulk, saving considerable amount of money on a monthly basis.
You can do both, most thrown away food is of the more perishable varieties, so you can buy that on an as needed basis and buy stuff like tinned food in bulk.
Probably. They make use of a farmers market heavily too & are probably more eco friendly on amount of packaging. So not really criticizing just find it crazy opening the fridge when I visit (once a year :( ) and am just stunned by how much food they keep for 2 people. At one point they had 2 full sized fridges.
I now fall back on HN's common knowledge about Electron to declare that you are being bad and should immediately seek to maximize the use of the shared storage areas in your refrigerator.
I do actual cooking too, but the turn around between buying ingredients and eating them is like 3 hours. Where my parents do weekly shopping. So tons of 2 week old stuff lurking behind other stuff etc.
>you are being bad
Def am on packaging. Quite difficult to buy stuff in bachelor compatible portions without it being a environmental shitshow.
The thing is, most labels that I see have _sell by_ dates. They're intended for grocery stores, not consumers. But people treat them as _use by_ dates. Which is just awful.
The "best before" kind of date is the most common one by far, and it's used on things that will be obviously bad to eat before they start becoming really bad for your health. Milk, for example, will smell and taste bad before it's really unhealthy. If it seems ok to eat, it probably is - regardless of the date printed on the box.
The other kind, "last day of use", is put on things that can become unhealthy without you noticing - most common use in Sweden is minced meat and raw chicken. This is the type of date you should actually follow without thinking too much about it.
A lot of people don't know there are two types of dates, and treat all dates like the second type.
It's important to keep in mind that people are making similar rational decisions when deciding to sniff or toss.
What else should Americans do, use less water when showering, to fix 'water waste'?
Maybe the problem lies elsewhere...
To take it apart a little more - why is 40% of the food being thrown out a problem? What do we gain by cutting that down to 20%? Do we have a food shortage? Agriculture is 0.9% of America's GDP and less than 0.7% of the population is involved in farming and fishing combined. [0]
It's not at all clear there is any food 'waste' occurring and even if there is, it's not at all unclear where it sits on the list of priorities. I'd say somewhere near the bottom.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
Supply of workers has increased massively, while demand for the things being produced has obviously not increased in the same manner (because the women now in the workforce were already consumers).
Of course, when robots start cooking and restaurant quality meals on demand for the cost of the fresh ingredients, the need to store food will drop like a rock and this problem goes away.
Furthermore, you know that the less fresh one is at least |bestby(X) - bestby(Y)| days old.
If the difference in "best by" between two instances is three months, one of them is at least three months old already: it's three months plus the age of the newer one.
That's really the only accurate use of these labels: to leave the old stock on the shelf for someone who doesn't care. Once you bring it home they have little value.
I NEVER buy strawberries because they are ALWAYS moldy straight from the store.
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