This produce used to be readily available to food banks but now that “ugly” and “imperfect” produce can turn a profit, they are less available to those in need.
So the argument is as follows: Farmers were donating food to the poor because they couldn't sell it. Imperfect Produce figured out how to sell that food, so now farmers are selling it instead of donating it. This is bad because now poor people get less food.
I don't get it. You could argue that the poor need food more than farmers need money. That same argument could be made to any business, though. Why are farmers more obligated to donate to the poor than anyone else?
That is even assuming Imperfect Foods is negatively affecting these food banks. The New Food Economy seems to think so, but Imperfect Foods disagrees.
I don't know who to believe, but I also don't think it matters. My takeaway is that the food bank model for donating to the poor is less viable now. We'll have to find a better model moving forward.
> I don't get it. You could argue that the poor need food more than farmers need money. That same argument could be made to any business, though. Why are farmers more obligated to donate to the poor than anyone else?
One of the arguments for subsidies to farmers is that they are the "feeders of people". Sounds to me like they want privileges, why not a few obligations for a change?
weird that you bring milk up as an example, because this is an industry where regulations tend to make sure milk prices stay high and production stays low; really there are not many examples of food subsidies/regulations that aim to reduce prices and increase supply, at least not in the developed world
Hm, I brought it up because its a staple item that everyone seems to need, but upon reflection that would make it a target for subsidy to reduce the inflation metrics.
In practice it would inform the market where to divert resources. If you want to give poor people help, then you should provide them cash. This preserves the purpose of transparent prices, which is to inform other suppliers in the market to enter to drive the price down.
However, this is not done as it's more difficult to corrupt and profit off of this since it is transparent how much help the poor are getting. It's easier to muddy the waters and steal from taxpayers by creating a byzantine system of tax breaks and subsidies.
Food has pretty much the most inelastic demand curve imaginable. There's no way that agriculture will disappear without subsidies. Prices might increase, sure. But anyone who has any money will pay whatever prices are necessary when the alternative is literally starving to death.
If you're referring to agriculture disappearing from the US, that definitely wouldn't happen either. Some of it might, but not the majority. Most countries don't heavily subsidize farming to the extent that we do, and transportation costs are non-trivial, especially for fresh produce or anything that needs freezing.
Not always true. In New Zealand we had subsidies for farmers (about 40%) and then they were taken away. The removal forced the farmers to innovate and now we have very efficient farming methods that have far less environmental impact. 2/3 of NZ's exports are agricultural.
Edit: The thing I found most interesting about this is agriculture was deregulated by the left wing government in what is a very socialist leaning country. Kiwi's are very pragmatic.
The EU has successfully tested this and removed any subsidies to the sugar agricultural sector. The sugar industry in Europe has not imploded. In fact, it’s just adjusted to the new reality of not being subsidised. Other than that, it’s pretty much business as usual.
Agriculture, at least in the US, has always been subsidized. As a country we used slave labor (free labor) to subsidize agriculture, and then over time we gave away an epic amount of land to white farmers (via the Land Act of 1820, the Homestead Act, and the Morrill Act of 1862).
One question though, are there farmers out there who are not taking the famed agricultural subsidies we give out? Because if there are, (even if there are not that many such farmers), I think those guys should be able to monetize their "ugly" produce or fruit all they want. They're not being supported by tax money at all.
But yes, if we are subsidizing a farmer, we certainly have the right to oblige him to give his scraps to us so we can feed our masses. There's nothing unreasonable about that. After all, we're only talking about the little food he's able to sell only to the guys who literally only take "scraps".
Maybe we shouldn't look at the farmer solely. In NL potato farmers get 9 ct/kilo of potatoes. This is near cost price, sometimes even below. In the supermarket the consumer pays $1.60 for that kilo. And I am talking local produce here.. the potato fields are literally right next to the supermarkets (NL is very small, no long supply lines).
With those 9 cts it is clear they need subsidies. The supermarkets set the prices, and something is wrong here.
This paper by Dr. Jayson Lusk at Purdue University outlines the valuation of farm support programs (what is being called subsidies in this thread). He also includes analysis of farm support from other countries.
If Imperfect Foods's business model works out, it sounds like farmers will see an increase in profits. I don't see why that couldn't coincide with a decrease in subsidies. In an ideal world, we could even redirect that money towards the poor - potentially making up for the impact to food banks.
> I don't see why that couldn't coincide with a decrease in subsidies. In an ideal world, we could even redirect that money towards the poor - potentially making up for the impact to food banks.
This seems true but irrelevant. The claim that things would be better for everyone, were X accompanied by policies Y and Z, is not a real defence of X unless you have good reason to believe that it really will be accompanied by Y and Z.
The subsidies aren’t going anywhere, the lobby is very strong and senators like being re-elected. “Just get rid of the subsidies” sounds great, but it won’t happen. So given that as a baseline reality, and given how much produce is grown by small farmers vs. giant conglomerates, this is really just about more money in the bank and less food in the food bank.
Hey, next time you comment please take a look over HN's comment guidelines[0]. The parent comment brings up a good point about subsidies, however it would be great to also learn if there is a flaw in their reasoning (as you so strongly believe). Comment's like yours just discourage conversation.
Yikes, posting like this will get you banned on HN. Please don't do that again.
If you know more than someone else, the best thing to do is to post correct information, hopefully with a good amount of detail. Then the rest of us can learn something too. Alternatively, you can just not post anything. But no personal attacks, please.
I think the argument most commonly put forth is not "feeders of the people" but "national security." Proponents of the subsidies say that the ability of a nation to feed itself is a matter of national security. Although in the era of factory farms and big agra it seems like the "national security" is maybe less of a concern that during say the Eisenhower era.
US farmers do receive non crop based subsidies for growing vegetables. The absolute subsidy is far smaller, but far less land is used for vegetables 2.5 million acres vs 81.8 million acres of corn for grain, 47.8 million acres of wheat, and 89.6 million acres of soybeans.
> Between 1995 and 2009, USDA distributed more than $246 billion ($246,000,000,000) in subsidies. The subsidy system, updated approximately every five years, provides financial support primarily to producers of “commodity crops,” which include more than a dozen nonperishable crops. However, five commodity crops—corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, and rice—receive the vast majority of subsidies.
>"Sounds to me like they want privileges, why not a few obligations for a change?"
Exactly, recipients of those subsidies should be obligated to contribute to food banks for the poor. I don't believe any such strings are attached today. Source: I have a American friend who has farm land as part of a second home but has never grown a single crop, he receives an annual subsidy check and has now for many years.
Then you get to enjoy one bad harvest caused by drought, hail, etc send a large chunk of your farms into bankruptcy and then enjoy food shortages until it becomes profitable to farm again. The subsidies are there to make farming less boom or bust, worst case scenario your citizens get really cheap food.
I think op's point is that ugly food business is based on peoples charitable instincts, while those same customers are not aware the food would not in fact be wasted. so the consumers are buying it for wrong reasons
I think its just an observation of the outcome of a real world change. People put effort into reducing food waste and the outcome is reduced food for the poor. I think the question is, was it worth it?
Imperfect produce has managed to create a market for food that was previously not able to be sold. Good for them.
Does this mean that we may have to restructure social programs as that food becomes sold rather than donated? Sure might. That's ok though.
I'd also like to clearly point out that the author misquotes their source for the amount of food donated. The California Association of Food Banks states that they have donated 164 million pounds of fruits and vegetables. That's not 164 million PER YEAR. That's 164 million since they were founded in 1995 - or 7.1 million a year. Additionally, the Imperfect produce comment saying 150,000 lbs specifically calls out "From California farmers". While the food banks numbers are simply totals (they likely purchase and redistribute, as well as take donations from out of state sources). There's probably fudging on both sides, but I find this article fairly disingenuous.
I see nothing wrong with: selling something if a paying market is found for that, instead of giving it away for free.
I do see something wrong with: creating that paying market by lying.
I suspect most of those conscientious people who think they are helping farmers and reducing food waste would not be paying for this produce if they knew that it was being taken away from poor people.
That's roughly in line with my experience using one of these services.
It really wasn't much of a money saver for us, especially after factoring the delivery fee into account. Worse, it was a terribly inconvenient service. We'd need to place our order the better part of a week before our delivery date, which really threw a monkey wrench into our weekly meal planning. And, for anything that was sold by unit rather than by weight, we had no way of knowing how much food we were actually buying - sometimes you'd get a 2lb head of cabbage, sometimes you'd get a 1/2lb head of cabbage. Again, really threw a monkey wrench into our meal planning. The box wouldn't necessarily contain everything we ordered, either. Which really. . . you get the picture.
I wouldn't have considered it a service that was even the slightest bit compelling, if not for the whole pitch about saving food from the landfill. If that turns out to be inaccurate or exaggerated, that really does kill the whole value proposition as far as I'm concerned.
Anything manufactured, non-perishable that is donated will just be flipped online for a profit. If it still doesn't sell when being flipped, then that confirms that it absolutely is junk that nobody wanted.
I'm just opposed to the lying; don't tell me that unsold goods are going to the landfill if they are really being donated. I will still buy it; I'm not going to join some hand-out lineup to try to get it for free, which won't even happen if the stock moves.
The overriding problem with the analogy is that we can't compare manufactured goods for which there is a demand to stigmatized produce that is viewed as inferior and met with low demand.
In the majority of cases, retailers trash their products (sometimes after physically destroying them) that go unsold. Even for used items, most people are too lazy to donate even things in perfect condition
Yup. Canadian Tire does this. They have a fence around their returned product smashing area. Any product returned that's not resellable is smashed and thrown away. And their criteria for what's resellable is fairly strict. Most returns just end up smashed. Employees aren't allowed to take or even purchase at a discounted rate or anything. It's just obliterated and trashed. I know someone who used to work there. Employees had ways of taking things(however you feel about it...i understand it's to stop scamming and such but I still feel like it's better than just trashing perfectly good things.). But they still destroyed hundreds of perfectly good stuff while they worked there.
I gotta admit the grocery store I worked at back in the day was pretty good. They left their old produce for people with animals to take. Employees could take expired stuff that was still good but going to be thrown because it was past the date.
I dunno I don't like wasting things that are good. There's always a better solution than just throwing things away and destroying them.
Problem with unsold stuff is that people don't want it at any price. Even poor people. Before stuff is unsold, it goes on sale for 50% off, or maybe 75% or more. Poorer people can afford it at those lower price points.
More like: if unsold X is given away to people who need it, don't buy X with the goal of reducing waste. And if your other possible motivation is to help the producers of X, bear in mind that there is another group with conflicting interests.
(But it doesn't sound silly if you summarise it accurately, does it?)
> conscientious people who think they are helping farmers
But they are helping farmers, they are giving them money they otherwise would not have gotten. Why should the burden of providing food for the needy solely come out of farmers' incomes?
That one seems arguable to me. They are probably getting their food either from larger farmers, or from wholesalers.
The rate at which most people consume food is relatively constant, and it's a fair bet that people in these services' target market are more likely than most to get a lot of produce from smaller farmers at farmer's markets.
Meaning that it kind of depends on what you mean by "helping farmers". If you narrowly mean increasing the income of some set of farmers, yeah, sure. If you implicitly mean the small family farms many of us like to romantically think of when we use phrases like "helping farmers", nah, it's probably diverting money away from family farmers and toward bigger players in the industry. If you mean diverting more money toward farmers in general, that also seems doubtful - most people have a relatively fixed grocery budget, and these services are probably just shuffling around who gets a cut of it, and naturally keeping some of it for themselves. That suggests a good chance of a net decrease in the amount of money going to farmers of any size.
There's also an angle that's not-so-tacitly baked into the sales pitch: Less food wasted translates pretty directly into less economic demand for food to be grown.
Also, 'throwing out' or turning under viable produce is a good way to replenish soil nutrients. Imperfect produce is also further incentivizing the destruction of American soil quality.
Most marketing is borderline deceptive. I'd venture a guess that most of IP customers are eduacted enough to know that, and are buying the service based on its more tangible benefits (ie. not to save the world)
This happened previously with "chocolate" diamonds. Those undesirable diamonds were often used in industrial applications. When jewelry stores started promoting them, the cost of "ugly" diamonds went up, making some other applications more expensive.
Also, I do a fair amount of work with a local neighborhood center that has as a part of their mission meeting the basic needs of local residents. I haven't been there during fresh produce bank they run, but I've seen pictures and been told by the management that they get some very high quality produce. Apparently the local markets aren't that great at predicting the desire for a product, so they get some pretty high quality produce from every chain in the city.
Yeah, this whole piece is from someone with an axe to grind. I get it, Beet Box was more community focused and basically a non-profit masquerading as a startup. It's natural they'd get stomped by a real startup, but in this case, the competition is literally taking trash and making people eat it. It's great! What could be wrong with that? We waste like 40% of all food made in this country.
But it's not trash. It's food that was being used. I don't think most of Imperfect Produce's customers would subscribe if they knew this food was previously being eaten by people in need. Their entire marketing and product concept is based on a lie.
Imperfect Produce's customers are more than welcome to donate their cost savings or other food to people in need if they are dissatisfied with how much someone else is donating.
To be very clear, we do not sell food that would've otherwise gone to folks in need. We source from the 20 billion pounds of produce that goes to waste on farms–that's after food banks take what they can. As a country, we've barely scratched the surface of this huge problem of food waste. This Feeding American report is a great resource: bit.ly/2wobdjK
Personal swipes are not allowed here, and we ban accounts that do that repeatedly (and we've had to ask you not to do it before), so in the future would you please edit them out? Your comment would be fine without the nasty bits.
The author's best arguments aren't articulated well. I will try and paraphrase.
Essentially, Imperfect Produce is buying scraps from medium to larger farms and marketing it to people that would normally buy produce from small farmers. They sell you on the concept of buying vegetables and helping the environment and farmers at the same time. They do this by claiming that the food would go to waste if you didn't buy it and they also imply through marketing materials that the food comes from quaint little ma and pa farms.
The thrust of the argument is not "boo, capitalism!", it's that it is deceptive marketing and it's hurting small farmers. Because 1) the food would not go to waste if it wasn't purchased and 2) the food they are selling does not come from small farmers but it's marketed like it does and it's marketed to the same people that would normally buy from small farmers
I think I understood the author fairly well, I just find fault in his argument.
He hasn't proved "1) the food would not go to waste if it wasn't purchased" AT ALL. He's merely implied it through incorrect facts about donations to food banks.
number 2 is likely true, but that actually make it MORE likely that the food would have gone to waste. I've worked with donation programs in my local state that harvest crops left in the field. Large farms will leave crops unharvested if the price drops below a certain point (either because of market changes or because the produce grade would be lower). They do this because it costs more to hire the labor to harvest it than the crop will bring in.
Small farms are much less likely to do this.
Finally: The author of this piece is basically just a competitor in the SAME market. Literally. You can sign up for 16 weeks of BeetBox deliveries for a mere 530 bucks (I'm being facetious if it's not entirely obvious... they're asking 35 dollars a box for self pickup - they're selling expensive freaking veggies.)
So I fail to find the argument that this is hurting donations compelling (or even factual) and I don't believe the author's motives are any more pure.
Basically - this is a hit piece against a competitor in the same market, and it should be read as such.
We have never claimed to source from small farms. We source from medium and large scale farms, where most of the 20 billion lbs of food waste happens. Rather than targeting CSA shoppers or farmers market patrons, we target shoppers who are going to supermarkets and buying “perfect” produce at a premium. We are encouraging them to think more about where they get their fruits and vegetables by offering another option so they can save money and reduce waste. We think CSAs are a great option for those that want locally-sourced produce that’s grown at a small-scale and we entirely support that choice if the option is financially available to you.
The author of this piece is basically just a competitor in the SAME market. Literally. You can sign up for 16 weeks of BeetBox for a mere 530 bucks (I'm being facetious if it's not entirely obvious... they're asking 35 dollars a box for self pickup - they're selling expensive freaking veggies.)
So I fail to find the argument that this is hurting donations compelling (or even factual) and I don't believe the author's motives are any more pure.
Basically - this is a hit piece against a competitor in the same market, and it should be read as such.
You are making my point for me. I'm talking about people who rely on donated food to survive and you are talking about prices, markets and competition.
>Imperfect produce has managed to create a market for food that was previously not able to be sold. Good for them.
Like when Robin Hood was introduced to capitalism and started “robbing the hood.” Nothing like taking food from the poor and selling it to the rich, just need that good market...I know tell them they are saving the world by buying this food and otherwise it would be waste.
Think of all these “untapped” markets startups can disrupt like soup kitchens and food stamps. These morons out here giving food away when they are just one round of VC money away from creating new markets.
That’s probably because you are not an Oakland hipster who attended a liberal college }:)
Jokes aside, the article does read like a buzzword soup, and looks like a low blow from someone who is getting outcompited fair and square.
I would also like to see an analysis of the impact in consumer prices, since imperfect food is making a net loss for producers into a net gain.
If these producers are competing this should lower the prices, what could potentially reduce the need for donated food altogether (I know it’s very optimistic, but hey, a man can dream)
"Our venture, and ventures like ours, which rely on redistributing food waste, cannot succeed if people waste less food. So please waste more food."
Talk about putting the cart before the horse. I have no problem with saying, "that food isn't really waste, let's redistribute it if it's going unused." But someone's got their head turned right around if they think that a logical corollary is, "and that food should never be used, because we're redistributing it."
I think there's a way to think about this that does actually make sense...
"As long as people are only willing to buy pretty produce, then because actual produce inherently contains only a certain fraction of pretty produce, a demand for pretty produce inherently creates a surplus of ugly produce which can then be redistributed. In effect, every purchase of pretty produce hides an invisible tax which goes to buying ugly produce for the homeless. If paying customers no longer demand pretty produce, then stores will be able to only order as much produce as they need for paying customers, and the ugly-food surplus - that virtual tax on produce customers - will disappear. So, in effect, the ugly produce movement is the equivalent of advocating for a repeal of a tax on produce purchases which is used to buy produce for the poor."
And phrased that way - "do you support or wish to abolish the produce tax and the social program based on it" - it becomes a political issue which one can reasonably have opinions supporting the tax on the basis that it helps the poor. Especially as this tax and feed-the-poor social program has been created without government intervention or regulation - they're an emergent product of unforced consumer preferences, and there's no administrative overhead involved in keeping track of the taxes and organizing food purchases because it's just an automatic consequence of spending money to buy produce.
This is an interesting way to frame the issue! However, your point about there being no overhead to organize food purchases seems dubious to me. Charities have overhead costs, too. And even if a food bank were run entirely by volunteers at no monetary cost to the public, there is a social cost in terms of the time the volunteers are donating.
Furthermore, I suspect that the improper valuation of “ugly” produce leads to other sources of waste. Sure - some percentage of it makes its way to food banks. But how much of it is left to spoil or used to feed livestock?
>that food isn't really waste, let's redistribute it if it's going unused.
But this is exactly what I got from the article, that the supposed wasted food isn't being wasted. And so the consumer activism behind the appeal of these products is misplaced.
“Food waste” means, specifically, food that went unsold because a market couldn’t be found for it. Donating something rather than throwing it out is how these venture began.
> It's waste for the producer. If you stop giving a reason for producers to produce goods, the goods stop being made.
Not in this case: we're talking about growers not manufacturers. A farmer can't tell his beet not to grow in unaesthetic shapes at scale. If he wants to produce X tons of produce, Y% will be edible but "ugly," and there's not a lot he can do about it (absent an uneconomic increase in costs or some fantasy bit of genetic engineering).
You can tell your vegetables and fruit not to grow into unaesthetic shapes or colors at the very least. That's why commercial tomatoes and apples don't have as much flavor as heirloom varieties. They spend a lot of money on such things as travel durability, skin toughness, size, and color at the expense of taste.
If you make it so that farmers can actually sell blemished food, that will increase the profits of farmers, making it a more attractive to be a farmer. Otherwise they'll get another job.
Yes, but in our imaginary world of perfect capitalism, the inherent market flaw is that farmers should simply stop growing ugly vegetables, and only grow beautiful ones. Problem solved!
There are already good markets for a lot of ugly produce. They wind up in a lot of prepared foods. Good example - baby carrots. They're not "baby carrots", they're lathed-down cores of regular carrots that had the misfortune of being ugly - crooked, lumpy, or broken. And the stuff that gets shaved off in the lathe? It winds up carrot juice, or stock, or animal feed, or any number of other things.
Another example of reducing waste, though not ugly... one of our local co-ops recently started selling "pulled chicken" fresh in plastic containers, great for making dinner. Where does it come from? Their rotisserie chickens that don't sell by the end of the day. They reduce waste and get a valuable new product. (My daughter was raving about it while cooking dinner the other day - stripping chicken carcasses is one of her least-favorite bits of kitchen labor, and she's happy to be able to buy what someone else did for her already.)
> Talk about putting the cart before the horse. I have no problem with saying, "that food isn't really waste, let's redistribute it if it's going unused." But someone's got their head turned right around if they think that a logical corollary is, "and that food should never be used, because we're redistributing it."
No, I think you're the one who has it wrong. Previously, the "ugly produce" wasn't food waste because it was distributed to the needy through food banks and other social uses.
The problem is that the "imperfect produce" startup used a glitzy marketing campaign to turn that produce into a marketable commodity, redirecting it from social uses to profit-making uses, making the poor worse off to benefit some VCs and midsize-to-large agribusiness companies. To add insult to injury, the marketing tries to pass off the profit-making use as a social one.
Here's a thought experiment for you: suppose that farming technology had developed which allows every fruit and vegetable grown to be "pretty" and saleable. Would it be immoral for farmers to stop producing "ugly" produce in that world?
If so, I think your argument is with capitalism, and not any one actor.
Beyond the first paragraph which just states that their food would otherwise end up as trash, they don't actually reply to any of the claims in the parent article.
The evidence they provide is broad macro-level statistics about how much food is wasted, but not about where the food they're selling comes from.
The parent article claims specifically that they are getting their food from sources that would otherwise be going to food banks.
The fact that this "reply" repeats talking points with country-level statistics instead of directly addressing the question leaves me feeling suspicious of Imperfect Produce.
We source from medium and large scale farms where most of the 20 billion lbs of food waste happens. These farmers either let their ugly produce rot in the field, or sell it for pennies to animal feed. Happy to clear up any other misinformation that this article presents.
I wonder if this has to do with location as well. This reply cites a food pantry in Chicago, an area of the country that doesn't produce much produce. The farms in Illinois mostly grow corn and soybeans that feed cows. The article is in California, which is where a much more substantial portion of produce is grown.
There is some very disingenous sounding hand-waving going on in this article - and it appears to have been successful! Most of the commenters here seem to have come away with the idea that the problem is that Imperfect Produce is taking food that would have otherwise gone to food banks. While the article never claims thus, I think the misunderstanding is intentional on the part of the author. The key point to me is this:
> Three years later and with a 30-percent drop in customers
and
> We lost customers, a lot of customers.
With a more careful reading, one can see that the "loss" to food banks is because BeetBox is not making as much money now that they have competition with better marketing. In fact the article even says as much:
> subscriptions have fallen so much we’ve had to cut back on many of the food justice programs that our CSA proceeds had previously supported.
Sounds a lot less like Imperfect Produce is an evil monster here, and a lot more like they're just a more succesful competitor.
I used Imperfect Produce for several months and I wonder how much of it was actually 'imperfect.' Most of it was labeled 'surplus,' as the imperfection, and came in looking identical to the grocery store.
I ended up cancelling my subscription after I did the math and it was slightly more expensive than going to the grocery store, and their selection was narrow and seemed to rotate between the same items. Also almost none of it was local to my region--just like a normal grocery store supply chain.
"Imperfect Produce claims it’s saving the world by reducing food waste—and helping farmers by buying surplus 'ugly' produce that would have been thrown out. Sounds great. The reality is that this produce would have otherwise gone to food banks, to be redistributed for free."
People are complaining because a hidden subsidy (from government and other food buyers to the food banks) has been removed.
I don't like seeing groups shoehorn welfare into other areas. If you've got an income (or cash welfare) problem, fix that.
> I don't like seeing groups shoehorn welfare into other areas. If you've got an income (or cash welfare) problem, fix that.
I'd prefer a better solution, but when one isn't available (and likely not forthcoming), needs of real people outweigh my economic principles: These people need food.
It's the same in engineering: As much as we would wish otherwise, sometimes the 'right' solution isn't available and we need to deliver, so we provide an imperfect solution that works.
You aren't disagreeing. People need food, so fund a food bank. Don't create absurdly contorted markets to preserve unnecessary waste streams to be reprurposed for food banks.
In the same line and as an anecdotal aside, here in Bavaria we are soon going to have state-wide elections (i.e. for Bavaria). One party that is known to be a kind of comedic joke party but nevertheless actually managed to get someone elected for EU parliament put up posters all over town that are not all that funny down deep: For background, here in Germany quite a few retirees walk around town and collect deposit bottles out of trash bins, to make a little bit of money on top of their meager pensions. The poster ad suggests as election slogan of "Die Partei" ("The Party") to increase the per-bottle deposit in order to decrease poverty, so that retirees get more money from rummaging in trash bins.
I think that's a similar variant of the twisted logic that you call out, but while it probably isn't intentional in the example discussed here (looks more like an emergent property nobody planned for) they use it deliberately to make a point, to make people think.
Yes. But in reality, removing the 'contortions' does not imply increasing direct funding for food banks.
It's misleading to defend a change on the basis that it would lead to a pareto improvement if accompanied by another change, when in reality the two can vary independently and there's no good reason to assume they won't.
It’s crazy the contortions americans go through to avoid having welfare while still trying to have welfare. But god forbid we just have actual welfare.
Been living here 4 years, still don’t get it. Prob never will.
I’m supposed to only buy expensive produce so the cheap stuff can be left for those less fortunate? Why don’t you just use some of the exorbitant taxes I pay to help the less fortunate directly? Smh
I get the sentiment but...we do have welfare programs. If a food source once available is becoming scarce, then obviously they will need to be revamped where appropriate.
No. I happen to agree that the best thing would be for the market to purchase these items and for food subsidies to adjust. But you say
> they [welfare programs] will need to be revamped where appropriate.
as if this will certainly happen and that it will happen quickly. But that is certainly not the case. And what do people do in the meantime? It doesn't seem tough when you've got $1,000, $500 even $100 in the bank. But losing a small benefit for even a couple years can be brutal if you're in poverty. The gears of the market are a powerful tool for making our society wealthier but they'll grind you up just the same if you're living on the margin as they begin to turn. Ask anyone who has been a resident of a Midwestern town for the past 50 years.
I grew up in the Midwest. I think you’re mistaking my tone. I’m not saying we shouldn’t care, I’m reminding the original parent that we do have welfare programs and they will adjust. It’s equally absurd to suggest impoverished people shouldn’t have access to the same food others do and be resigned to ugly food because no one else buys it...
Fine maybe they’re not exorbitant comparatively but paying 30 to 50% of my income to taxes and seemingly not getting much if anything in return feels wrong. I’m okay paying taxes, I’d just like them to be used better (meaning for things I can see/experience)
Wow - security, both from war and crime, a legal system, safety in everything from water to food to airplanes, almost the entire transportation infrastructure, most of the education everyone receives including college and post-grad, research in everything from history to cancer to basic physics to fracking to computer science and integrated circuits (let's recall that the industry that probably employs you was founded on government research), a stable business environment both domestically and internationally, healthcare, democracy, freedom ... I kinda feel like I underpay.
> I don't like seeing groups shoehorn welfare into other areas. If you've got an income (or cash welfare) problem, fix that.
And then the problem never gets fixed. You argue against this practice with the reasoning that the "income problem" should be solved directly. Simultaneously, others argue (loudly) against solving the "income problem" directly with the reasoning that practices like this are the answer. At every point, there's an alternative that can be used as an excuse to totally avoid solving or ameliorating the problem.
Right, I felt like I was going crazy, because I was sure I had read this line before:
>Soon, Imperfect’s single-use cardboard boxes began lining the streets on recycling and garbage days in the East Bay.
but I couldn't find the linked URL elsewhere on HN! It's almost a verbatim quote from the original article:
>Soon, their single use cardboard boxes began lining the streets on recycling and garbage days in the East Bay.
The whole paragraphs are nearly identical:
>Within months of its arrival in the Bay Area, Imperfect Produce fliers were showing up on our car windows, their outreach coordinators were pitching at community meetings, their Facebook advertisements popped up daily in our feeds, and they were edging into community centers we had operated at for years. Their marketing blitz paid off. Soon, their single use cardboard boxes began lining the streets on recycling and garbage days in the East Bay. We lost customers, a lot of customers.
>Within months of its arrival in the Bay Area, Imperfect Produce fliers were showing up on our car windows, its outreach coordinators were pitching at community meetings, its Facebook advertisements popped up daily in our feeds, and it was edging into community centers we had operated at for years. The marketing blitz paid off. Soon, Imperfect’s single-use cardboard boxes began lining the streets on recycling and garbage days in the East Bay. We lost customers, a lot of customers.
If I'm throwing something in the trash because it is no use to me, it might be a windfall for you if you can snag it and make use of it. But that's what it is, it's a windfall; you shouldn't get dependent on picking my trash and get irate if I stop tossing out the bits you liked to pick.
I was an imperfect customer, frankly it figuratively stunk. I was charged $14-$18 per week for around a pound of produce. It was mostly just overstock. Honestly, weird shaped produce was part of the fun for me. It was always on the brink of going very bad, so ironically even though it was just a pound I often threw some away.
After a few weeks I realized that I could get the same value by simply buying some older produce at my grocery store for much cheaper. I can get a pound from any store here in the Chicago area for around $5 - $6.
Also the "carbon savings" their website gave to me seemed pretty suspect. It seemed they were just spitting an average at me and not doing any hard calculations. It's curious that getting a pound of food each week delivered on a truck could actually be a net positive for the environment. I'm sure they can justify it but the premise itself seems kind of absurd.
I was suckered in by the allure this article talks about. No more fancy food startups for me, let me just focus on using all of what I get from a conventional grocery store.
> Imperfect Produce claims it’s saving the world by reducing food waste—and helping farmers by buying surplus “ugly” produce that would have been thrown out. Sounds great. The reality is that this produce would have otherwise gone to food banks, to be redistributed for free.
So I feel for the social cause, and I think the business ventures should be much more up-front about what they are and not masquerade as something else, but let's be clear that buy buying this less than perfect produce, they are helping growers, including small growers, by allowing them to capitalize on more of their crop.
Ultimately, if you want your social cause to not be a victim of market forces, you either need to work yourself into the market correctly, divorce yourself form it, or find a segregating line that works.
If they were taking monetary donations, or allowing write-offs of the produce at full price (something that conceivably could be supported through targeted legislation), then they might be more competitive here. But since they relied on drowers giving them produce that had little or not value, which now does have some value, they'll see the market respond like anyone else.
Again, this doesn't excuse businesses masquerading as social causes (which is nothing new, even if it is loathsome in the worse cases), but this article isn't exactly presenting the case in a balanced light either.
Later on it says that it specifically helps only midsize- and larger growers, because small growers don't produce large enough quantities for it to be profitable to purchase from them:
"'We want to be able to source at least a truckload from these growers each week, so they have to be at least midsize in most cases.' Imperfect Produce is only able to make a profit by working with the larger global agribusinesses, not the picturesque small and mid-sized farms it projects in its marketing campaign."
I have yet to see any food industry marketing anywhere that doesn't create a rosy picture of family farming in its marketing, rather than the factory farms and giant agribusiness that actually supply the vast majority of our food.
I suspect we'll see co-ops of smaller growers to gather this food from members for the purpose of selling in bulk then. If there's a market, and it's worth enough, that's what I would expect to happen, just like it does for other market situations with small growers (e.g. farmers markets).
Markets tend to work around inefficiencies like that, just as they worked around the inefficiency of product waste in general here. It's generally best to work with and nudge the market through incentives than to expect it to not behave like expected.
> if you want your social cause to not be a victim of market forces, you either need to work yourself into the market correctly...
Social enterprises aren’t responding to a market opportunity in the same way a for profit business is. They are filling a gap that the for-profit market has created or left unfilled and are often doing so by using fragile mechanisms that can easily be destabilised. They don’t really have many options to adapt and they can’t ‘pivot’ to a new customer base to adapt as that would be leaving the original problem unsolved.
In short, I don’t think you can fairly use free market thinking for social enterprises.
"The company does this by commodifying food that would go to the poor for free"
The article provides 0 evidence towards this case. I'm all for listening to this argument, as it is a good one, but are there any facts to support this other than their shrinking user base?
> Within months of its arrival in the Bay Area, Imperfect Produce fliers were showing up on our car windows, its outreach coordinators were pitching at community meetings, its Facebook advertisements popped up daily in our feeds, and it was edging into community centers we had operated at for years. The marketing blitz paid off. Soon, Imperfect’s single-use cardboard boxes began lining the streets on recycling and garbage days in the East Bay. We lost customers, a lot of customers.
So how were the customers or farmers hurt here? It sounds like they chose to switch services, and the only loser is the author of this post. It’s not clear to me how losing customers = food banks suffering.
But the total beet supply remains unchanged? Affluent customers are now buying the ugly beets, does that mean more pretty beets go unsold? Can they be donated?
> But the total beet supply remains unchanged? Affluent customers are now buying the ugly beets, does that mean more pretty beets go unsold? Can they be donated?
I doubt it. This is fresh produce we're talking about, the unsold "pretty beets" will be offered for sale on grocer shelves until they're close to spoiling and them get trashed as food waste.
One of the probable advantages of the "ugly beets," from the food bank perspective, is that they could affordably get access to them earlier in the supply chain while they were still fresh.
>Affluent customers are now buying the ugly beets, does that mean more pretty beets go unsold? Can they be donated?
Realistically they probably end up on grocer shelves, which are themselves a horrific contributor to food waste. Some small portion of those that will otherwise end up in a dumpster will be redirected to other ends (e.g. 'made fresh' foods offered by various grocers) or donated.
We waste food because we can. If industrial agriculture and distribution were less effective, there probably would be less food waste. And there would probably be lots more hungry people.
You're not wrong, but just because we possess technical capabilities to produce a surplus of goods such that the economy can tolerate high levels of waste doesn't mean that we should. This is an area where we should be making incremental improvements, not only to increase the efficiency of how and where we distribute goods, but in the interest of things like public health.
Food is wasted because it’s the most efficient method of meeting demand. Don’t forget that solving the wastage issue may increase the overall resources needed.
In other words, the extra effort to prevent food waste might cost more than the food waste itself.
It doesn’t make much sense to spend $1 to prevent the waste of a $0.50 potato.
Paying farmers for food that they previously had to give away looks an awful lot like an incremental improvement (payment for more of their crop can be expected to increase their ability to plan).
If it cost X resources to create Y food yesterday,
and thanks to modern technology it costs X resources to create Y+W food today, and W of that food is trashed, why does that W waste matter at all?
So when I was a kid my family made use of food banks. Now that I'm doing better in life I give a cut of each paycheck to my local food bank (The Alameda County Food Bank). I don't feel too bad about ordering from Imperfect Produce, it's convenient way to get produce delivered to your door, and I still wind up buying some things from the farmers market and co-op. On that note, it is good to know what consequences new business models have on the surrounding community.
> I don't feel too bad about ordering from Imperfect Produce, it's convenient way to get produce delivered to your door
Honest question: are there similarly convent ways to get produce delivered to your door that don't undermine the food banks' fresh food supply? If you can afford to pay for produce, why not pay for the produce that's traditionally been on the market?
I think this is a very narrow perspective. The situation around access to food has changed radically over the past 50 years or so, in the US and globally. Over that period, the human population has doubled, while the cost of food has actually dropped significantly. Although access to food in the US is sometimes still a problem, it is nowhere near the problem it was for our grandparents' generation.
Did you actually read the article linked? Imperfect Produce and similar operations divert food that otherwise would be bound for food banks and other sources of food assistance programs towards more affluent segments of the consumer market.
My parents spent a lifetime barely making ends meet as organic vegetable farmers, and will be living the rest of their retirement in what amounts to basic poverty.
Anything that increased their revenue on their hard work is a good thing. Asking them to give away otherwise sellable produce is simply asking for someone else to perform charity on your behalf. And if you work in tech you would be a (relatively) rich person asking some of the poorest to do so - which I find both immoral and despicable - since this attitude is so prevalent in these circles.
The moral thing to do if you care, is donate to the food bank or otherwise directly support charity - not asking someone else to do it on your behalf.
Yes, they found a way to give profit to farmers while still operating as a for-profit.
By reducing stuff that is not valuable to the farmer at all they are evil?
Food assistance programs take food that is otherwise unsaleable. Making more stuff saleable is how technology works. Considering we have a bustling market in recyclables, is that bad?
The marginal effect of 1 person buying ugly produce is that that set of produce does not get donated. In other words, a marginal decrease in inkind donations to foodbanks. This can be directly offset by a monetary donation.
I wonder what's better in the long term for the farmers.
Making sure people have food to eat is something society in the US can easily do, I really wonder if the heroic volunteerism surrounding food banks is a good way to do it.
They're not reducing waste: before Imperfect Produce, this food went to food banks. It's just that now someone has found a way to make money off of it.
> This corporate-supported agriculture was avidly commodifying agribusiness’ food “waste” and had little to do with supporting the community.
I'm not familiar with the publication's audience, but is emphasizing the word "corporate" supposed to prove a point? Is it taken as given that corporations are evil, and therefore Imperfect Foods is evil?
If those laws need an update, it doesn't seem like a huge deal. There's a lot of support for food assistance programs. I don't see any reason to villainize people trying to reduce food waste.
Is Community Service Agriculture a new social justice version of that, or was there a typo in the article?
CSAs are a great idea for supporting small farms, but adding a social justice mission to an already challenging undertaking seems like biting off too much at one time.
Maybe supermarkets will begin selling ugly produce now, too, since Imperfect Produce is raising awareness. If they had aisles of ugly produce at discount prices, would it really undercut their sales of pretty produce? Maybe they should run experiments, to see if they can make higher profit margins on ugly veggies, even sold at discount prices, since they have bargaining power over what they pay the producers.
It seems quite unlikely that this random startup is actually the source of a 30% drop in business at BeetBox. Both of these companies account for a tiny percent of the produce market. BeetBox would be better off working on making their product better, rather than writing articles criticizing a startup doing something similar.
So the argument is as follows: Farmers were donating food to the poor because they couldn't sell it. Imperfect Produce figured out how to sell that food, so now farmers are selling it instead of donating it. This is bad because now poor people get less food.
I don't get it. You could argue that the poor need food more than farmers need money. That same argument could be made to any business, though. Why are farmers more obligated to donate to the poor than anyone else?
That is even assuming Imperfect Foods is negatively affecting these food banks. The New Food Economy seems to think so, but Imperfect Foods disagrees.
https://help.imperfectproduce.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500456...
I don't know who to believe, but I also don't think it matters. My takeaway is that the food bank model for donating to the poor is less viable now. We'll have to find a better model moving forward.