"Wasting" food

>"Wasting" food

Can someone explain how the most biodegradable substance on earth can be "wasted" by going in a landfill?

To answer your question OP:
Nope.

No

"No" what?

>manpower during picking/seperation
>transport
>storage
>into the dump in goes

it's almost like we're so disconnected from the agricultural lifestyle

>Manpower
>Not farms and corporate factory farming

man power is interchangeable with "robotics" power.

don't nit pick to create sidetracking arguments

No one farms on landfill

What even is your argument?

It's almost like bacteria travels or something.

Huh?

Imagine you spend several hours of time and 20-30 dollars creating a large meal, enough to feed several people. Then you throw it all in the organic waste recycling bin for no particular reason.

Wouldn't you call that wasteful?

nah cos the bacterias get a yummy meal

Because theyre are millions on the planet starving that would kill for that food, i'd say that classifies throwing away perfectly good food as wasteful.

Energy input into the production can not be recouped fully.

Try not to buy too much. It is that simple.

(Mind those pieces too that do not get bought, because people think there is something wrong with the last salad in a box OR that never even gets to the store / factory.)

Soil and groundwater tables get depleted too.

Probably more of a /pol/ type discussion, fairly obvious we can end world hunger on a whim, but humankind just doesn't really give a shit about establishing a minimum quality of life that would be easily achieved. I suspect the concept of 'money' and such is mostly to blame but perhaps there's more to it.
Think I read somewhere that it takes less than 1% of the population to farm the produce needed for everyone. Though perhaps they don't factor in the people needed to make industrial tools and such, still probably a small percentage even then I'm guessing.

Think of food as clean waste. - left to rot in aerobic conditions it will break down into substances that would do nothing but enrich the earth. If you had nothing but clean waste you could, after a relatively short time turn your former garbage dump into a farm, because the soil would end up totally enriched by it.

But that's not how a landfill works. First off it ends up being an anaerobic situation for the most part, so even the clean stuff breaks down into powerful (and explosive) greenhouse gasses like methane as it decomposes. But it also mixes with toxic substances in the landfill from the "unclean" waste there - shit like electronics, construction materials, household solvents and lubricants, plastics and whatever other non-food garbage ends up there. Once this happens the clean waste is now toxic - you've taken something that would safely decompose pretty quickly on its own and turned it into toxic waste.

And that's just the endgame. It doesn't take into account the resources it took to get the food to you in the first place. The price you paid for the food you waste may have just been a couple bucks. But the cost of getting that food to you was much more. Not just in obvious shit like agricultural subsidies, but less obvious things as well. Every time we turn a blind eye to the massive pollution caused by agricultural runoff that's subsidy. The subsidies for the massive petrochemical inputs used to grow it is another less obvious one.

So in reality wasting what seems like just a couple dollars' worth of food is wasting a lot more than that in terms of the real cost of producing it and getting it to you.

Ah, the "kids in africa could have eaten that" bullshit? It's mostly a holdover from baby boomer culture, our parents were trained by their own parents and by actual military rationing to just eat whatever the hell is put in front of them. All of it, without fail, regardless of how bad it is or you're being "insulting", "clean your plate" they'd say. It's just resource trauma and the situation is reversed now - cheap food is plentiful and nutritionally is total shit, meanwhile overeating is the direct cause of multiple public health crises. Now the most expensive food is organic health shit grown in real dirt and using things like real sugar - and the least expensive is total garbage like HFCS and palm oil.

If someone says you're wasting food just ignore them, WW2 ended long ago and you can buy as many cans of pork and beans and spam as you can carry.

You are right that the "clean your plate" bullshit is nonsense caused by WWII food trauma. But that doesn't invalidate the fact that food cost is far more than food price, so wasting food is wasting more in the way of resources than it seems, and it going to a landfill is turning relatively clean waste into far more toxic waste.

By cleaning your plate you're not doing anything to help or hurt the starving kids in Africa. But callously wasting resources, especially when it comes to food where it isn't exactly obvious what the real cost is, that shit is totally immoral.

wouldn't be too bad if it was food was composted and put into the garden.

but it gets mixed with toxic shit in the landfill.