Barring mental illness or lack of movement etc? Even barring government assistance and charity and theft.
The amount of discarded food I see is shocking, I pass by one street with a produce market at night and often help myself to any good looking discards, boxes and boxes of produce someone just didn’t want to bother hauling thrown on a heap for the garbage truck.
Now sure that does you no good if you don’t have a place to cook it, and there is a whole community in the USA and other countries called freegans etc.
It is just shocking to realize so much edible food is cast off that basically people can live on it.
Supermarkets and restaurants toss a disgraceful amount of good edible food that could be used to feed the poor and homeless. A great many of them keep their dumpsters padlocked to keep the scavengers out.
True story I witnessed once: Went last-minute shopping the night before Thanksgiving, several years ago. All the markets have hot baked chickens. They were about to close for the night, and there were about a dozen chickens left over. A clerk was taking off the hot-table, putting them into a shopping cart. She carefully removed each plastic container from the cardboard hand-carrier, and folded up those carriers and put them in a separate stack.
I asked her what she was doing. She told me that they save those cardboard hand-carriers to use them again, but the chickens get dumped. She told me they can’t refrigerate them overnight and sell them cold the next day. They used to donate them to a local homeless shelter. But someone somewhere got salmonella or something and sued somebody, and now no supermarkets will donate those hot chickens any more.
To use them, either the store or the shelter or someone would have to provide a refrigerated truck to transport them, and nobody is going to do that.
I told the same story there too at Post #7 (read that and the next several posts too), along with other disucssion of dealing with left-over food that might be given to homeless people.
It’s pretty hard to starve to death in the first world. Even in poor countries, while malnutrition is common, it’s unusual for people to actually die of starvation. The most common cause of famine is natural disaster and war, and wars are a lot less common these days. And disaster relief is getting better.
The most common cause of famine is war and/or corrupt governments. We have enough food to easily feed the population of earth, and if large numbers of people are starving to death, it’s because some agency is preventing food aid from getting to people who need it.
One of which agencies can be the Free Market. From 17th - 18th century France or Italy to present-day places like Haiti it is no use having a cornucopia of plenty in the shops if one hasn’t the price demanded; or even, as is their right, the owners don’t want to sell — sometimes because they are hoarding for increased prices later.
Yes, I see that where I work. However, there are health laws involved in that and as much as we hate seeing food go to waste we do try to obey the laws and health regulations.
What pisses me off the most are people who changed their minds about that 3 pounds of ground beef or something and just leave in some random place, like behind the cosmetics or in among the diapers or something. Please, PLEASE just give it to an employee or tell the cashier you changed your mind. It cuts down on messes, odd smells (hide that hamburger real well we might not find it for a few days, it’s happened), and sometimes we can return the item to the shelf for someone else. But if you leave it somewhere to fester we can’t.
Actually… the Food Depository of Chicago DOES have refrigerated trucks, allowing some of that food to be captured and distributed to soup kitchens and shelters. So someone actually did do that. Generally, though, you’ll only see it in a major urban area or region.
I can imagine a person starving to death if they’re lost in the wilds of Montana. Probably not what the OP had in mind, but it does emphasize that “the amount of discarded food you see” is going to vary depending on where in the industrialized country you are.
My wife works at a grade school, it is in a very middle class neighborhood. She is amazed at the number of kids at the school that state the free lunch they get at school is often the only meal they will have that day.
Just two quick comments on that.
Yes, many restaurants do lock their dumpsters to keep people out, but it’s not because they’re worried about people taking free food out of the dumpster. It looks terrible when customers see people rummaging through your dumpster and if one of those people hurts themselves in the process the business’ insurance will end up covering the medical bills. I’ve often wondered what would happen if someone would get food poisoning from something that they took from our dumpster.
Secondly, it’s also to keep people from putting things into the dumpster. We get our dumpster emptied once a week for about $200 a month. But if I get to work and find that someone filled it with a couch and dining room set, it costs me about $100 to get Waste Management to do an emergency/same day pick up. What’s worse is when I find that someone stuffed it totally full of branches or grass clippings (or tires or an oil drum or TVs, I’ve had all of that happen) and I have to hope that the driver that comes to pick it up doesn’t notice that and refuse since they’re not supposed to pick up those things up. Then I have to find a way to deal with that.
We don’t lock our dumpsters because we’re worried about some homeless guy that just wants to eat around that bad spot on a peach and we just feel like being jerks, we lock them because it can cost us a lot of money to leave them unlocked. Money that has to be passed on to the customers in the form of higher prices.
I’ve read of school boards in various American districts trying to avoid weather-based closings unless absolutely necessary, specifically because they know that any school closing means some kids will go hungry that day.
Montana is one of the last places I would imagine a person to starve to death.
Some of the best hunting and fishing the country. Many edible plants everywhere.
I am willing to take a wager that if we imported a bunch of ethiopians into Montana within a year or 2 they would double their body weight, as well as their numbers.
I have an aunt who works in some of the poorer regions of Appalachia and I’ve worked inner city in some pretty poor areas. To death? I’m betting damn few but I wouldn’t be surprised. To a much shorter and more painful existence? Tons of those every day.
Yes, because people largely dependent on herding, hunting and gathering the wild plants of Africa will automatically recognize the edible plants of Montana despite never having seen them before, have the skills to hunt the particular wildlife there, and be ready to deal with sub-freezing weather for half the year.
I worked in a small grocery where the boss insisted we stamped on everything when itwent out of date to bust the seal and crush it before throwing it out, just to make sure no-one could eat it. He was an utter dick, though.
We also had to pour literally gallons of milk down the drain- we weren’t even allowed to keep some in the staff fridge until the end of the day it was dated until- when he left at 6, it all had to be gone, and the late shift had to buy their own for tea.
But yrah, I know enough places in my city I could get free food or food for pennies that I could eat for the cost of change picked up from the floor, if I had to.