Daily reminder that food waste is necessary to make sure there will be enough when there is a bad harvest. Like when climate change massively reduces crop yields, or a forest fire burns down your food forest.

To some extent this can be mitigated with preserves, but preserves don't last forever and also cost labor and resources to prepare and recycle. Sometimes harvests are better than expected 10 years in a row. Sometimes they're catastrophically worse 10 years in a row. Sometimes you suddenly need to feed more people, sometimes you suddenly have better things to do than prevent food waste. You fundamentally can't prevent waste without risking shortage.

Capitalism is bad, especially when its mask slips and profit opportunities are wasted to hurt people to enforce the hierarchy that capitalism actually cares about. But please make sure you have plenty of food to waste whenever you try to set something up on your own.

[–] SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 days ago

Food sovereignty and food security are much more detailed and nuanced than this, but yeah this illusion of shameless abundance has been the operating principle for many decades, justified by industrial production methods at grand scale.

We now know, or rather have remembered, that diversity in production is the secret. The andean civilizations cultivated thousands of varieties of potato before colonization, so that microclimates and disease resistance and ripening and a variance of growing conditions could be addressed, for ensuring a ready supply across all possible disasters. Much of that legacy has been lost.

Industrial production squashes this kind of resilience in favour of ‘illusions of shameless abundance’, tied to scaled up methods. For instance, the Cariboo potato is a yummy garden variety but proscribed by AgCan because it messes up tractor attachments.

[–] liuther9 1 points 2 days ago

That is such a weak hypothesis, backed by what?