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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Food isn't scarce. It's just poorly distributed.
Food isn’t even poorly distributed. Almost everybody eats, and the only places people don’t eat it’s from other people with weapons actively preventing them from getting food, and actively preventing others from bringing it to them.
I’ve been homeless in America, twice. Both times I had all the food I could eat, as soon as I was willing to accept it.
The first time I relied on strangers and I ate like a king. The people of Cambridge MA just straight up gave me more food than I could eat when I asked.
The second time I stayed in a shelter in Denver. I had three square meals a day available to me, though I only ate dinner since my job didn’t permit me to attend the other meals. It was good food, donated and prepared by volunteers.
I am sick of people trying to perpetuate the myth that we have starvation in America. It’s one area we succeed in beyond the wildest dreams of anyone even 50 years ago, but haters just can’t stop hating on our society.
We feed people. We feed them extremely well.
9 million people starve to death every year
Globally, not solely in the US.
The person I replied to replied to a comment solely talking about food accessibility in the US, sharing his experiences as someone who experienced homelessness.
And the reason it doesn’t happen in the US is because nobody in the US is using guns to actively prevent people from acquiring food, or from others giving food to them.
You're replying to a comment thread about access to food in the US, I'm not sure why you're trying so hard to derail the conversation. Just make a new comment instead of arguing off topic to others.
I’m discussing food security in the US?
Yes, and only when people with guns are actively preventing them from getting food, and actively preventing others from bringing it to them.
First of all, that means food is poorly distributed. You are just disputing the cause.
And yes, conflict if a major cause of hunger. But what is a major cause of conflict? Fucking poverty. Al Qaeda doesn't recruit from fucking Beverly Hills. Another major cause: US intervention, for the sake of profit and geopolitical dominance, with the dominance ultimately also being for the sake of profit. The world economic system functions as a huge siphon that extracts wealth from the global south and funnels it to wealthy countries where the major institutions of finance are located. Western financial instruments like the IMF and World Bank, alongside direct political and economic pressure, enforce austerity in poor nations, dismantle social safety nets, depress wages, and privatize resources, and this very predictably results in underdevelopment and poverty, which fucking benefits the west because lower wages mean larger profit margins, lower prices and greater market share for the western companies that source their labor there. It's a fucking global sweatshop economy. And there are consequences to this, when everyone is fucking poor and uneducated and young men see no future for themselves except to become soldiers. It means conflict, which means starvation.
If the world economic system is as you claim, how is it that people in the southern hemisphere are getting steadily more wealthy?
The problem with people who criticize the free market is they’re so focused on distribution they don’t think about production. The answer is that as wealth is funneled north it is also generated at an even higher rate resulting in all humanity getting more wealthy as a result of the system that “concentrates” wealth.
Like if I had air in a bottle and concentrated it all to one corner, that would result in no air everywhere else.
But if I were to create an incredibly sense section of air while increasing the density of air throughout the bottle, it would be misleading to use the word “concentrate” for the action generating that air distribution.
As for big rich countries causing conflict I agree 100%. In fact as far as I know al qaida isn’t causing nearly as much hunger as the House of Saud, which is the richest organization in human history.
And I’m not talking about “there’s war and that makes the market break down” as the men with guns thing. I’m talking about “armies are actively blockading food”.
So “poorly distributed” is really better described as “actively withheld”. It’s like putting a plastic bag over a prisoner’s head then claiming their suffocation was due to “poor distribution of air”, then trying to criticize the building’s HVAC system.
There’s no HVAC system in the world that can solve the problem of a person being suffocated by a plastic bag, and there’s no economic system in the world that can solve the problem of armies actively blockading food from populations. That’s not an indication the economic system has failed; it’s an indication the political system has failed.
To my knowledge, pretty much all of the wealth gains have been in China.
It’s actually efficiently distributed, to where the profit is
Nothing efficient about throwing away food. Not even from a profit perspective.
That depends. If discarding food costs $X and distributing it to another market costs $2X guess which option is economically favourable?
The only reason that would occur would be inefficiency in distribution of product.
Wow you solved it. We just need to make distribution efficient.
That is literally the first comment in this thread, gtfo. Not going in circles with you.
Then what would you suggest? If getting rid of food costs say $5 and sending to a different area costs say $10 then between both selections which one is better for the economy?
I stated a fact, I didn't suggest anything. wtf are you still talking for?
If you're paying to get rid of something you paid for, you fucked up.
Sounds like you figured it out then. If we can just determine a way to efficiently distribute the food, then we'll be good.
Seriously, why are you still talking?
I thought we we were close to a breakthrough. Just for fun imagine a situation where eliminating a food product costs 100 pesos, but packaging and shipping that same food product to another location costs 200 pesos; which of these is more economical?
I'm going to block you because I'm not interested in speaking with you.
Probably smart. Blocking me costs you about one minute of time, whereas continually responding to me has already cost you several minutes. Way more efficient.
In many cases, it’s not that, either.
Yeah, hard to truck food when the roads are in bad shape, especially since food can go bad easily.
Logistics are harder than many people think.