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Last time, I was in the store, the last non-Chiquita bananas were two bunches with basically half-sized bananas.
And well, it did cross my mind that I’m basically paying extra for the “packaging” that way, as they have almost more peel than pulp. (The bigger the banana[1] the less surface area it has, relative to the volume.)
But on the other hand, I can portion those small bananas better, so there’s ups and downs, for sure. Which means, it’s actually quite fair that they have some smaller bananas in the store, too.
Or any other object. ↩︎
My grocery store has a “imperfect produce” section, where they have funny shaped bananas, oranges that are not round, that sort of thing. Really cheap, and just as tasty.
The grapes of wrath was written 100.years ago. The fact that capitalism is still considered the only solution (other than the state sanctioned anarchists like Chomsky) is testament to the concept that the ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class.
who has sanctioned chomsky
Epstein apparently.
Imagine if they actually sold the whole crop to stores. Bananas would be $0.10 a pound. You would never be hungry.
It wouldn’t decrease prices quite as much as you’d think, since so much of the cost of a banana is transportation, which they don’t do with the ones they throw out. They should still do it, obviously, and then transport them on trains to reduce transportation cost as well.
Good old artificial scarcity
See, you’ve found the issue they’re trying to avoid.
That and buyers preferring “pretty”/consistent produce, which means supermarkets only want to buy produce to spec because the other stuff won’t sell as well, shelf space is limited and it costs the supermarket more to waste unsold food than to just not buy food unlikely to sell. There are online markets out there that sell “ugly” produce that’s not to spec, but they aren’t broadly popular enough to make a huge dent in waste.
Bananas are already pretty cheap. I think they are the cheapest fruit in the grocery store.
id imagine there’s a demand for at minimum specialty stores that sell those 40% of bananas
Humans have produced enough food, and had the capability to feed every human in the world for over 500 years. Every famine you’ve seen in the news, all of them, has been caused by keeping food from being delivered to those that are hungry.
had the capability to feed every human in the world for over 500 years
Not 500, more like 120 or so years. First thanks to the invention of refrigerated logistics (essential for transporting foodstuffs without them spoiling during the trip) and then thanks to the Haber-Bosch process of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere, which is essential for industrial fertilizers.
Famines since ~1930 could’ve been avoided if the “waste” surplus was redirected
We’ve moved preserved food since the discovery of salt. Transport, refrigeration and fertilizer technologies just let our population explode within the last century. The population levels prior to those technologies was more than supported by the transportation and food production capabilities of the time.
That’s just historically untrue. 500 years ago we didn’t have much of the technology needed for reliable harvest. Many farms were still highly dependant on rain. No rain, no crops. A late freeze, no crops. Locusts, no crops. You starve.That simple.
This doesn’t include the absolute necessity of artificial fertizlier in maintaining the modern population.
Maybe your statement could be true if we had the ability to move crops from areas not expirencing a disaster that could have fixed it, but would have been very difficult and required a global effort. So technically humanity may have produced enough food, but there was not a real way to move it. Even ignoring profit incentives that control logistics and assuming a altruistic system of redistribution, it could take weeks for messages to arrive in areas that did have food. Then it would take weeks to move it. No refrigeration, the fastest you could move is horse.
Seems very unlikely
The fastest you’d need to move is by horse or ship. Food preservation has been a thing since the discovery of salt. And we didn’t need artificial fertilizer centuries ago, because we didn’t need to support this many people on limited land, that’s a very recent problem. Also cities grew near water for a reason, that’s how they got their food. Ships moving food supplies.
Right so how are we increasing salt production? You’ll need more workers, which leaves less people available for farming. Could salt production even be scaled to match that demand given the technology? You’ll now need an increased network capacity to move the extra salt. More horses, more pots, more baskets, more drivers.
What about places without access by water?
Artificial fertilizer does however allow for a reliable surplus. Something necessary for a redistribution network. You need some kind of fertilizer and natural sources for scalable farming are rare.
You’ve created a fictional understanding of logistics that sums up to “just move the stuff” without considering the consequences.
You’re misunderstanding my statement, there is no need for increased production, because it already existed. There is no need for an expanded distribution system, it already existed. There is no need for more of anything, because it was already sitting there, just going to somewhere else. The only changes needed were which wagon, or which ship, the only consequences were who made how much profit, and who got credit for it.
Oh no I understand your statements, it’s just they are inherently wrong.
Honestly if you said in the last 200 years (maybe even 300) we wouldn’t be arguing. I think you’re severally over-estimating the surplus created by pre-industrial farmers and the amount of the economy engaged in luxury or profiteering. Most people then produced what they needed and little more. Yes there were portions of the economy tooled to serve the needs of the elite, but I’m not convinced that is enough labor to completely eliminate hunger even if redistributed to production and logistical networks.
We’re not even getting into how common slavery was for agricultural production. If we are creating a new system to ensure everyone is fed how do we deal with that?
I’ve made a simple historically verifiable statement, if you had any case what so ever, you’d be able to point to a counter example.
I’ve made a simple historically verifiable statement
You did the opposite. You insisted that your version was true and that re-tooling an entire supply chain is easy.
Your entire arguement is hypotheticals with no source.
I’d assume that intercontinental food shipping would have been rather difficult in the 1500s.
Swallows could grip it by the husk?
It’s not a question of where they grip it, it’s a simple matter of weight ratios!
Wouldn’t have been needed, production was distributed enough with populations. And crop collapses were contained to regional problems.
It’s really crazy how cheap bananas are. They’re flown in from tropical countries and are at least half the cost of local in season produce. And they’re throwing away so many at every stage of production.
Bananas come by slow boat.
Yes, slow Banana boat.
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all,” Steinbeck wrote. “Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground…a million people hungry, needing the fruit — and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.”
Finally read this book last week. Needs to be a required read for every human. Basically every sentence had me nodding furiously in agreement . really shows how fucking evil rich people are even back then when they had WAYYYYYYYYYYY less than they do now.
But if you read Steinbeck you might have a spark of empathy or introspection and we can’t have that. Or even have thoughts about socialism, gasp! God forbid.
Ha exactly. I told my friend who is a big Rand fan they need to read it.
I actually like Rands books myself. But the ideology falls apart with a modicum of introspection.
I’d recommend east of Eden and winter of our discontent as well. Especially the latter if you’re in the US.
Gonna get those for sure
What book is this? Sounds like something Steinbeck would write.
Grapes of Wrath. Good catch, as he wrote that book!
40% thrown away does not necessarily imply all others are better.
Normally imperfect produce goes to processing plants (juice, cans, pies etc.) but I’m not sure if there’s any significant market for banana chunks/puree.
They figured out ways to cram all the subsidized surplus soy and almonds nobody wants into every conceivable product, they could certainly manage to do so with ugly bananas.
Banana juice is a thing, and banana chips and such. Probably too small of a market to repurpose all the uncool bananas :/
There are some frozen fruit mixes that use banana chunks. Also some that use frozen puree in pre-measured shapes.
Animal feed as well.
Here lidl has boxes of random fruit and vegetables that don’t meet the pretty standard for like 25czk now probably more. But now I see them rarely. They were great when I wanted to make soup or something.
Same here in the UK, it’s like £2 for a crate of fruit, most of the time there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, just looks like fruit to me
This is bananas!
Them apples really get me sometimes frfr
Capitalism (free markets really) optimize for low cost and price. Waste is not something it optimizes for.
Capitalism being efficient is doubtful, but it certainly is effective at producing a lot of bananas, so you can buy cheap bananas around the globe all year long.
Capitalism optimizes for low cost and high prices. Waste helps maintain high prices, so capitalism absolutely encourages waste.
Is capitalism really the problem here?
Is there another system that would bend straight bananas?
Or do we just force people to eat approved food. That sounds a bit shit if im honest.
Or do we just force people to eat approved food. That sounds a bit shit if im honest.
Kind of like some sort of Food and Drug Administration?
And let’s be perfectly clear what you mean by “approved food” here. We’re talking about bananas that weren’t “bent enough”.
The straightness of the bananas aren’t the issue, it’s the waste created by throwing out perfectly good bananas for not being purportedly aesthetically pleasing enough.
Nobody is forcing you to buy a straight banana, but you are being forced to have your only banana option be curved.
You seem to have missed my point.
Any solution requires all bananas to be consumed, including the less desirable ones.
You could produce less, but all produced nanas desirable or not need to be consumed lest they be wasted.
Honestly, it doesn’t need to be every banana, I imagine some are irredeemably damaged at some point during production or are so outside of banana norms that they look as though they may be spoiled.
Allowing a higher percentage of abnormal bananas to go to market would give people the option to buy them, but it wouldn’t remove their ability to buy normal bananas.
Allowing a higher percentage of abnormal bananas to go to market would give people the option to buy them, but it wouldn’t remove their ability to buy normal bananas.
The core of it is this:
You have a crop. The “pretty” ones get sold to supermarkets at the highest price (who in turn only want to buy the “pretty” ones because they sell best). The less pretty ones get sold to manufactured food companies, where the processing hides that they weren’t “pretty” - diced veggies for canned vegetable soup, fruit purees, that kind of thing. There’s not enough demand here to sell all the “ugly” ones. There’s also online markets that sell “ugly” produce, like Misfits Market - they buy it cheaper than supermarkets and can resell cheaper than supermarkets as a result. Depending on the crop, some lower quality ones might get sold as animal feed. The rest is running out of people who want to buy it.
There’s not enough demand here to sell all the “ugly” ones.
I’m not sure that you (and the banana merchants) are correct about this assumption. In this thread, there are many people who want to buy ugly produce, and not all want it at a reduced price.
If there were, the markets that specialize in “ugly” produce would do much, much better, have higher demand and buy up more of the produce to fill it.
That 40% is what’s left after supermarkets buy all the “pretty” bananas they think they can sell, manufactured food companies buy up what they can use for stuff like purees, sliced banana going into various products, that sort of thing and “ugly” produce sellers (places like Misfits Market) buying up what they think they can sell. I don’t think bananas are used in animal feed but for crops where that’s a common use some of it gets sold for that. Broadly, each of these involves the farmer making less money per unit weight than the previous and selling less desirable product to each.
I watched the documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy last night. Wow, there’s so much more waste than that in our systems.
oh banana, how i suffer with thee
I wonder if i can buy cheaper fruit by asking them if i can buy the things that super markets don’t want;
I should try a day
That was the original gimmick behind the subscription service “imperfect produce”. I gave it a try for a while (back before they pivoted to being a normal grocery subscription) and found out that a lot of this “perfectly good” produce is also completely devoid of flavor. Another problem is that “minor cosmetic defects” often means the skin of fruits is splitting so they mold within 48 hours of arriving.
Devoid of flavor is just a huge problem with our modern farming practices.
But agreed that instead of getting perfectly good produce that looks funny it felt like I was getting stuff that had been crushed under the pallets and or had mold or splitting issues.
We just don’t have an actual infrastructure for getting actual bulk waste produce to people who could use it. We really need food halls.
There are shops that sell this stuff.
Green grocers et cetera are usually focused more on local produce than conforming produce.
Woolies doesn’t have a secret stash of straight bananas you can buy for cheap.
I never seen a shop like that tbh, i don’t think they even exist here.
Woolies doesn’t have a secret stash of straight bananas you can buy for cheap
Well, not if you don’t ask them to keep some, just ask them or if you know a farmer/a friend of yours know one it’s even better then
These bananas aren’t discarded from your local woolies.
