I spent nearly six years homeless. I ate at soup kitchens and got food from food banks for a small portion of that time.
I grew up with a garden in the back yard. My dad hunted and some of the meat on our table was squirrel and deer he killed. My mother cooked from scratch.
I'm used to eating well for relatively little money. Most of the food at soup kitchens and food pantries fails to meet my expectations for food quality.
Food stamps (EBT) are a good program. You can use them to buy the same food from the same stores as anybody else and you get to decide what to spend it on. (Though the program could use more funding. They tend to last only 3 weeks of the month.)
Soup kitchens and food pantries tend to suck, even the better ones.
I'm not saying we shouldn't provide compassionate support to anyone. I'm just saying some programs for doing so would be acceptable to people with middle class expectations and some wouldn't be. For many reasons, including germ control, we need to be shooting for programs that fit middle class sensibilities and not act like "beggars can't be choosers."
Furthermore, if you are homeless, you are living without a fridge. Produce doesn't keep well under those conditions. When I was around a lot of other homeless people for a time, it wasn't unusual for free produce to go to waste, in part for that reason. Some idiot would give a homeless person some giant bag of apples. They could eat a few of them before they rotted, but not all of them. Maybe they managed to give the rest away. Maybe they didn't.
Last, I have serious reservations about creating systems to serve the poor instead of creating systems to help them resolve their problems. Systems designed to serve the poor tend to actively keep poverty alive, a la the Shirky Principle:
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"
> Food stamps (EBT) are a good program. You can use them to buy the same food from the same stores as anybody else and you get to decide what to spend it on.
Food stamps tend to suck for a lot of the same reasons food pantries do. You're still telling people what to buy. It's not as bad because there are more choices, but it's still the same general problem where you have a bureaucracy telling you what to buy instead of being able to buy what you need the most like anybody else.
Sometimes what you really need is food. Sometimes -- or some specific days -- you have access to food and what you really need is to save up enough for a working car or gas to put in it so you can go to job interviews. Or something else that the person in question knows they need but arbitrary politicians have no way to predict.
But if you give people food stamps, they'll buy food with it. Even if they already have suitable food, because it's free money that can only be used for one thing. Then it costs the taxpayer $1 and provides the person with $.05 worth of value, which they take because $.05 is more than $0.
Meanwhile just giving the person $1 cash would give the person $1 in value and cost the government less, because then it isn't necessary to administer a system to force people to buy the thing they needed less instead of the thing they needed more.
And eliminating that bureaucracy reduces the Shirky principle problem.
Food stamps don’t suck just because they don’t solve all your problems. Rather, they solve a baseline universal need, and they do it in an extremely attractive way which is even better than handing cash.
A lot of people don’t realize that “food stamps” are just a debit card that you use to checkout at the supermarket, yes, even Whole Foods. There are some limits to what you can buy, but generally speaking if it’s unprepared food you can pay for it with the food stamp debit card.
I was on food stamps for a short while. While the value of the balance wasn’t literally cash, it was equivalent because I was spending at least that much on groceries anyway. You can also carry a balance forward from month-to-month so there’s never a need to spend it down wastefully. It’s only about $100/person/month so it’s never too much for just food.
Food stamps have low administrative overhead and low levels of fraud. It’s a government program I have very few gripes about, which is indeed saying something.
And it’s not a small program either, around $100B per year (less in the last couple years due to very strong employment numbers).
> While the value of the balance wasn’t literally cash, it was equivalent because I was spending at least that much on groceries anyway. You can also carry a balance forward from month-to-month so there’s never a need to spend it down wastefully. It’s only about $100/person/month so it’s never too much for just food.
This is kind of the point. In all the cases where the person is spending that amount on eligible food regardless, it's already equivalent to cash so it might as well be cash without the administrative overhead. They'll spend the food stamps on food and the cash they would have spent on food on whatever they want.
The only time it matters is when the person wouldn't be spending that much, i.e. they have an alternative source of food that doesn't take food stamps. In which case it only produces inefficiency. If you're content to eat free stale bagels and ugly produce every day so you can use the money for something else, you can't without breaking the law. Nor does it help you to try to stretch the money past the limit of the benefit amount.
So people go to the grocery store and spend all the money, because a fresh bagel tastes better than a stale one if you have to spend the money on that. And if you have a consistent way to get by on $80/month in groceries, accumulating an extra $20/month in food stamp balance every month still doesn't put gas in your car.
The same dynamic plays out in all the other assistance programs. There is money for low income housing assistance, but the natural thing to do there is to get together with multiple other hard off people, pool your resources and share housing. Which is not allowed. The programs generally prohibit methods of improving efficiency or stretching money.
Even if you're dead set on not letting people spend the money on vices, why is there a whitelist instead of a blacklist? You can't spend assistance money on alcohol or cigarettes, fine. But if there is food assistance and housing assistance then why can't you spend excess food money on housing or excess housing money on food? Why is there a ban on business cards and brake pads?
That actually does sound very bad. Even US health insurance companies, rightfully derided for profit mongering, manage to come in at single-digit overheads.
The NIH estimates that the average person uses $316k ($419k in 2018 dollars) in health care spending over an 80 year life.[1][2]. That puts the value of health insurance at $5,237 per person per year.
The average health insurance deductible is $4,358 and the average premium is $321 per month.[3] That means that on average US citizens pay $321 per month for (5237-4358) / 12 = $73.25 of expected value. That's a 4X markup over the expected value of insurance.
Health insurance companies might be reporting single digit overheads but they are providing $1 of value for $4 and are inefficient.
> The average health insurance deductible is $4,358 and the average premium is $321 per month.[3] That means that on average US citizens pay $321 per month for (5237-4358) / 12 = $73.25 of expected value.
Your calculation makes no sense. Healthcare insurance pays out for catastrophic events, hence the deductible, not evenly every year. You need to know the distribution of payouts to get a meaningful result.
The NIH numbers quoted above didn't use costs over the past 80 years. They instead estimated current costs based on current demographics.
>> To estimate lifetime health care costs, we employ a method based on a current life table, also known as a period life table model.
Thus, these costs are representative of recent costs.
In the next 80 years, both the expected value of insurance and the cost of insurance will change. Health insurance premiums are expected to increase by double-digits in 2019.
You didn't at all consider the reason why food stamps might exist in the first place. I don't know anything about them, but I'd assume it has something to do with a correlation between homelessness and life problems that make financial discipline extra hard (eg addictions).
I'm not trying to imply that all homeless people are addicts (quite the contrary) but if I'm a crack addict and you give me money I'm not sure I'd be using it to save it up for buying a car one day.
> You didn't at all consider the reason why food stamps might exist in the first place. I don't know anything about them, but I'd assume it has something to do with a correlation between homelessness and life problems that make financial discipline extra hard (eg addictions).
I wouldn't assume that, since food stamps aren't particularly focussed on the homeless.
In fact, the original purpose of the food stamp program was clearing agricultural surpluses (hence why the program was created in the Department of Agriculture and not the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare where you would have expected it to be if it were a welfare program and not an ag industry support program); you originally had to purchase food stamps, and for every dollar you got $1 of unrestricted (but still only for food) stamps, and $0.50 of restrictes-to-items-deemed-to-be-in-surplus stamps.
The exact restrictions and mechanisms changed over time in subsequent iterations of the program (and it's hard to find a clear purpose for many changes because lots were compromises between competing visions with fundamentally opposed goals.)
You can't sell food stamps so easily anymore. They used to be paper currency, but they are in the form of a debit card now, still possible to sell, just requires some planning
Exactly this. More food for less money is a good deal if you are just-over-the-line for getting food stamps or the ones you have don't go far enough to really feed your family.
I agree. Folks will find a way to get their needs met.
You don’t solve trauma with cash, but you also don’t make it worse and the benefits to others seem to be greater.
A regulated nervous system is a need, and if someone never developed that capability and doesn’t have awareness or resources to develop it as an adult, it’s actually a pretty logical move to use drugs.
> * the original purpose of the food stamp program was clearing agricultural surpluses (hence why the program was created in the Department of Agriculture...*
This!! I am always a little disappointed to see so many people on HN talking about gov't programs as though they are some form of altruism. They (usually) are not.
SNAP/WIC/EBT (what people are referring to as food stamps, which I don't think exist anymore; the 'benefits' are managed and distributed via a card provided by JPMorgan last I read) is a corporate welfare program.
Every time there's political talk about cutting the 'food stamp' program, the lobbyists come out. Whose lobbyists? Kraft, Walmart, JPMorgan, et al. If you use your 'Googles' you should be able to find a few articles about what % of revenue the program(s) account for some of these programs. One year Kraft said it was something like 14% (I have this on paper somewhere in my archive, but the info's available on the interwebs). Because of this, these programs aren't going anywhere.
This is also why, when you look at the food stuffs provided to students via school breakfast and lunch programs, they're often crap. Food nutrition is not the goal, getting Vitamin $ to companies (and maybe a few small farmers) is.
Meats and grains are heavily subsidized by the USG, produce not so much. IIRC this goes back to the doing of Nixon's guy, Earl Butz.
Wow! I didnt know any of that. These clearly-presented, insightful posts are why I love reading your comments. Esp on business or law. Learned a ton from them. :)
Good point and it's an active concern in development economics. Most often giving people cash will lead them to either use it for not-food (incl. things that are outright detrimental to their wellbeing), or to get low-nutrition (and high-energy) food such as snacks or soda. Not quite desirable either way.
> I'm not trying to imply that all homeless people are addicts (quite the contrary) but if I'm a crack addict and you give me money I'm not sure I'd be using it to save it up for buying a car one day.
Drug addicts make up a negligible percentage of people getting a helping hand. The statistics show this and it has been born out by the states that introduced drug testing for assistance recipients: they cost more to administer than the money saved by kicking people out of the assistance programs because the numbers are so tiny. Even in SF where it seems like all the crazy homeless people are strung out or tweaked, well, that's a sample problem: indeed many of the crazy ones are, but they are a minuscule, though highly visible, percentage of the people in need.
If you're struggling to make ends meet you don't have time to take drugs.
Whereas if you start out OK, become drug addled and fall out of the system, you probably by that time are too out of it to ask for help.
But if I give you food stamps, you could just sell them and buy crack. Is there any reason to believe food stamps help solve the problem you're describing?
I think the problem is more complex than you're bothering to give it credit.
For example, food stamps may go to a family, where they are dealt with responsibly, in a way that money, which is very easy to grab and walk out to buy cigarettes with when things go badly, is not.
Obviously, it's not a full solution, and a cynical recipient could sell them, true... but we're not talking about individuals acting in isolation for purely selfish reasons; that's a contrived subset of the problem.
What's the alternative you're proposing?
Just hand out cash?
The research shows that people suffer severe difficulty in managing fiscal matters when under financial stress. It's the old 'why do people who are poor buy so many lottery tickets?'?
Money isn't the correct solution; and maybe food stamps aren't either... but they're a better solution, and don't think that's even in doubt.
...but if you have a different one, I'm happy to hear it.
"why do people who are poor buy so many lottery tickets?"
Answer, all people buy lottery tickets at the same rate for tickets which might materially change their life. If you are rich, spending 20 bucks for a 1 in a million chance to win 10k is not going seem worthwhile.
The problem food stamps are solving is to keep a lid on the brow beating from taxpayers toward the poor. It is a mild form of punishment masquerading as help. It would be cheaper, easier, and more effective to just give cash (and because it would be cheaper, you could give more).
The main issue poor people have in managing money, is simply that they do not have enough.
And that they'll do things like spend their last penny to get the latest iPhone, or on buy $400 sneakers.
Or if they inherit 50k, immediately go to Vegas and lose it all.
These are all real examples I've known personally.
The people you're describing exist but it's hard to imagine someone who is great with money staying poor for years and years, considering almost everyone in America moves between income quintiles during their life and most spend time at the top.
If free food is punishment please sign me up to be punished.
Also, I'm interested in the source for your lottery ticket info. It sounds fairly absurd in a world where many jackpots are over 5 million, which is enough to change almost anyone's life. I've never even heard of a lottery for 10k.
I think maybe you missed my point. Everyone is bad with money (mostly), it is just rich people have more. And perhaps they have had more time to form good habits with ever increasing amounts to ride over the rough patches. I have known way more rich people bad with money than poor, it just didn't have the same effect.
That is because you don't buy them I guess. Scratch tickets, poker machines, plus lots of small state lotteries that start at 5-10k and top out at maybe half a mill.
Yeah, just hand out cash, and make it very easy for people with medical problems like addiction to get help without getting arrested or going bankrupt.
I don't know very much about this topic and I'd love to see the research you're talking about. Are poor people worse at managing finances? Intuitively that sounds wrong to me, but intuition is usually useless in economics. Do food stamps result in better health outcomes than cash?
I was a military wife for a lot of years. Trying to talk about the differences in compensation and lifestyle between the American military and American civilian jobs is quite challenging. If you want to talk about what works in Europe, you need to talk about all the factors that make it work.
People in this discussion are saying "If you give cash to an addict, they will spend it on drugs." Well, most poor Americans have serious health issues. It is one of the things that makes them poor.
If you need medical care and you have to pay for it and it's very expensive, giving such a person money won't go to food. It will go to medical bills.
If you want to give Americans cash instead if food stamps, first you need to give them free medical care. We really need universal basic health care in the US.
If you need medicine more than you need food, why is it bad that the money is going to medicine? How is it better to give someone medicine + [cost of food] than to give them [cost of medicine + code of food] and then let them buy medicine and food as needed? It's the same number of tax dollars in benefits and fewer in overhead. And more value to the recipient because they get to decide if it's worth $5000 to have a marginally effective surgery or use the money for something else, instead of having a bureaucracy decide they can't have it when they want it or they can have it but not the cash equivalent if they need something else more.
I guess I can see that if say, you have a person with an addiction, if they don't have access to free healthcare to treat that addiction, giving them straight-up cash might be a poor idea.
Of course that's just another reason to implement universal healthcare, not to shame poor people with food stamps.
The whole “food stamp recipients = crack addicts” is a lie created by tax cutting politicians. 44 MILLION people receive food stamps. There are not 44 million crack addicts in America. There aren’t even 4 million.
You’re not looking at this from the money supply side in a democratically chosen policy environment. I am a high taxpayer and I’d happily vote for increased EBT distributions at the expense of my own tax rate. I would not do the same for unrestricted money. I’d vote for even more if luxury foods were eliminated from EBT. There are many like me. I don’t want anyone to go hungry but I am also not volunteering my wallet at their discretion.
If someone who's dependent on EBT money is spending it on caviar and filet mignon, they're going to go hungry for most of the month. Restrictions just add administrative overhead without benefit. (They also make the program more paternalistic and potentially stigmatizing, but that's a different argument.)
I’ve seen a person buying organic ribeye steaks with EBT. I assume they were not going hungry because they were morbidly obese. And paternalistic is fine with me, that means like a father which is what buying someone’s food is, really.
I lost several dress sizes by eating things like organic beef. I have a medical condition that causes malabsorption. It is routinely treated with expensive prescription digestive enzymes, plus large amounts of prescription drugs.
I'm a former military wife. Technically, I should be able to get the $100k/year or more worth of medical treatment I am supposed to need for free, at taxpayer expense.
Eating right is vastly cheaper, saves all kinds of tax dollars and also gives me a hugely higher quality of life. Win/win/win.
Does anybody thank me for doing the right thing here? No. Instead, I am frequently attacked for any number of reasons, some of which seem to be rooted in this idea that poor people aren't entitled to eat well, and their health be damned.
You have no idea what that person's needs are. Being able to see that they weigh a lot and what they purchased on a particular day doesn't really give you enough information to know if they were spending wastefully on frivolous purchases or not on that day.
If organic ribeyes is saving this person’s life maybe they need to be in a hospital. How about if you need an organic ribeye you can get your doctor to prescribe you one and then your EBT card works for it. I sure as hell don’t think that people who earn their wages and can’t afford organic ribeyes should be buying them for people who can’t afford them.
Is that really feasible, though? Fungibility of money and all that, how can restricting EBT actually restrict what people use the money to buy? Unless EBT is literally the only money they have.
There are two basic ways to provide funding, either you force people to ask for it and deal with a long approval process, or you trust them with it in the beginning and subject them to an audit process. Approval processes suck because they take too long and the bureaucracy stunts your ability to react to changing conditions, which is why most private sector companies use audit processes internally.
And even though the public sector incurs real costs due to an approval process (you're not just paying the salaries of the overview bureaucrats, but also the salaries of the project workers who need to sit around and wait for funding to come in), it persists because it is viewed as more legitimate and more protective of legitimacy.
If you ask the public whether they would prefer for a public program to cost $100 million, including $20 million which ended up being embezzled into private pockets, or $150 million spent entirely legitimately, most members of the public would rather spend the $150 million for a legitimate program, even if you could show them how the additional taxes needed directly affected their personal bottom lines.
The reason why we don't give poor people cash directly is simple: even if 99%+ of beneficiaries will use the money responsibly, a tiny minority will not. That tiny minority will get written up in the press, and the perceived unfairness will politically doom the program. How public money is spent is, unfortunately, important.
Money is fungible, not spending money on food means you might be able to spend some on gas. The advantage of food stamps over cash is that it helps overcome middle class voter's judgmental attitude towards the poor.
> But if you give people food stamps, they'll buy food with it. Even if they already have suitable food, because it's free money that can only be used for one thing.
Well, no. A lot of them will sell the food stamps at a discount to people who do want food, but would like to pay a little less for it. The poor person gets money and so does the grocery shopper.
A lot of commenters are focused on the reselling of food stamps...
They're not physical stamps anymore and haven't been for at least a decade. It's a debit card that gets money deposited monthly. You can't sell the money without selling the card and your future access to the money going to the card.
In other words, the fraud you're all worried about has already been addressed.
It was an actual incident that I witnessed. Perhaps it stuck with me precisely because apples keep relatively well. But there they were, going bad.
If you aren't homeless, no one expects you to sit and eat a giant bag of apples all by yourself within one to three days. People in housing who are gifted a large amount of produce or whose gardens overflow will post questions to forums concerning creative uses. They will can, pickle, etc the excess -- the amount they can't reasonably eat fresh. People expect you to eat an apple or two in a day, not twenty or thirty of them. Unless you are homeless, I guess. Then suddenly you should be grateful for 30 apples instead of revolted at the idea of trying to finish them by yourself before they rot in the heat.
Canning, pickling etc is beyond the means of a homeless person. So I have no idea why any middle class person would think giving a huge bag of a single type of fruit to a homeless individual in hot weather would make any sense whatsoever. I cannot fathom it.
If you give a big enough bag of even a hardy fruit to someone with no means to preserve it, it will rot. Even apples.
As a rubber tramp, I have EBT/SNAP (for the next 2-3 months until the Republicans take it away), 2 propane burners and Costco but no fridge (it needs servicing). It’s often buy fresh as-needed, which is expensive, or buy things that keep like protein bars and bag of rice/lentil/quinoa. Giving homeless people canned goods is a waste because they usually require can openers or are too heavy for the amount of food contained.
Grocery Outlet and WinCo often have hydroponic LiveLettuce for cheap that keeps for a long time. Apples and some citrus last. I wish I had fresh tomatoes, they’re so good. Fresh tomato, basil, onion and garlic salad is to die for: see FrenchGuyCooking on IG. If I had a solar-powered hydroponic greenhouse trailer, I’d grow all of my own vegetables. One modern adaptation is some farmer’s markets take EBT and offer extra incentives... which all well-and-good if you have refrigeration.
The bigger problem in the produce industry is the parallels with swipe dating apps: optimizing for looks, but not taste or nutrition... hence why store-bought vegetables taste like cardboard. As an example, a former coworker had a job at one of those fruit stands. Blemished fruits and vegetables were fine to eat but wouldn’t sell, so they went into pies and soups. It seems to me shrewd farmers and shoppers would find a way to rate/compete produce, shorten the supply chain and deliver naturally-ripened food.
Finally, a Russian hustler friend of mine fregans all sorts of stuff: steaks, salads, takeaway meals, whatever. I should do that more TBH because expiration dates are very conservative.
I’d say 95% or more are still stamped ends, requiring a can opener. (Though a field can opener [P-38/P-51 type] is light and cheap, so shouldn’t be viewed as an impenetrable barrier, IMO.)
Thank you very much for mentioning and linking to the Shirky Principle. I've been thinking about the idea for a while but didn't know that it has a succinct name.
>Our BeetBox CSA supports small farmers of color mostly farming under 50 acres, [...]
...
>Imperfect Produce is only able to make a profit by working with the larger global agribusinesses, not the picturesque small and mid-sized farms they project in their marketing campaign.
Can someone explain what I'm missing? They get their produce from small farmers, Imperfect Produce gets their produce from large farmers, where is the overlap?
>it certainly doesn’t help small, local farmers or address the source of waste: overproduction by industrial farms as they produce the perfect produce sold in supermarkets.
So in this context, the over production is being considered "waste" but once Imperfect Produce uses it, it's perfectly good food that food banks and soup kitchens no longer have access to.
Also, there is a lot of implication that all of the food waste going to support communities is being utilized effectively. But certainly they, too, discard some portion of food, not to mention issues with quality or sanitation.
Clearly I'm missing something. That, or they really called it on the "sour grapes" thing.
They (Phat Beets) are operating under the common misunderstanding that small farms are always 'better' than larger ones, and that 'local' produce is, ipso facto, more sustainable than produce grown elsewhere and transported efficiently in bulk.
There are valid arguments to be made against high-input agriculture. None of them are discussed in this blog post, which seems to be not so much a case of sour grapes as one of rigid ideology.
As an aside, a valuable lesson here about what matters to consumers: people buy things to address their own needs. The business that makes it easier for consumers to feel good about themselves wins. 'I eat ugly vegetables' is an easier, even more fun consumer story than 'I help fight entrenched societal ills by buying vegetables from bad neihborhoods.' All else being equaly, IP would still dominate here based on resonating with more consumers.
The only reasonable interpretation I could come up with was based on this quote: Small, local and urban farmers are losing their CSAs–their lifeline to economic viability.
The argument would be: IP took a large chunk of customers away from these farms, which also supplied PB.
Not that I buy it necessarily, but it is in keeping with the common theme of manipulating conscious but ignorant consumers. (E.g., how some companies might say "Our crazy amounts of single use packaging are totally recyclable")
My girl signed us up for the ugly fruit box, and I’ve done a couple shifts doing processing (sorting) at two food banks. Maybe this is different elsewhere but the two streams of food had very little in common.
What has shocked me is that I expected ugly food to get turned into processed food. You know, lopsided potatoes made into soup or Pringles. Weird looking apples into fruit juice.
What I get instead is oranges the size of grapefruit, grapefruit the size of oranges, and a reality check. The food I’m picturing is made on machines. Machines like to work with uniform inputs and usually can’t cut out bad bits. So maybe they’re turning all the apples that are between three and four standard deviations below normal size into applesauce, but they probably aren’t turning giant or scabby grapefruit into my breakfast beverage.
It does kind of make me wonder if there’s a market for making machines that can do that though. We have to be close to building that sort of tech at a competitive price.
4 standard deviations excludes 63 in a million. Why would a designer of food prep automation design around that? Why would a market for such outliers form? At some point, it’s cheaper and more efficient to compost 0.006% of food than to design ultra-flexible processing equipment.
What’s surprising to me is that the alternate market for such outlier food evolved. It would seem cheaper to just compost it. I actually wonder how much of the market is genuine economically driven vs “feel good”/signaling.
OK nerd. When was the last time you saw the word “maybe” in sentences that are intended to be scientifically accurate? But I’ll bite.
Do we know for certain that fruit sizes are a normal distribution? If not then you can’t estimate sigma the way you did. Most of our tree fruit comes from genetic clones, with a different root graft tuned to soil type. So size is going to come down to weather, health and inputs (water nutrients and sun), but not really to genetics.
Compost should be the third or forth option for this process. The one cull we did, all of the rotting fruit went to compost, and the too far gone or gouged fruit went to a farmer for his cows. Pigs should work just as well (better, really, since pork is much more efficient than cow, caloricly speaking).
Maybe free range chickens too. My friend who is somewhere between overachieving gardener and homesteader gives her spent cider apples to her chickens. And I know of small scale chicken farmers who collect restaurant waste and let their chickens forage on the piles. But at industrial scale it probably goes to compost.
But even compost and manure can still have a life if the right people are involved. We should be doing more of that.
New Belgian Brewery (a B Corp), last I heard, double composts their spent grains. First anaerobically to get methane to fire the boilers, and a second aerobic composting which gets spread on the property.
And one voice in the permaculture community, Mark Shepard, rotates his cows and chickens so the fly spawn on the cow patties are in the larval stage when the chickens arrive. Good protein and the manure is dispersed “for free”.
My guess would be that the selection of processed foods happens at a different level. Ugly produce is sorted out of batches that go to places sorting produce for retail. Whole other batches go into processed food. They are probably different varieties, harvested at different levels of ripeness.
Like no one would can any tomatoes that were harvested for retail, because those canned tomatoes would suck.
I had the exact same thought as well 'nobody cares what the jam, canned, or juiced fruit looks like'. I guess it might depend largely on the exact mechanics used for what is feasible for what application and how much they need to care about the end product. Like say if one attempted a juice or alcohol precursor pulp production by just pulping or pressing everything, leaves and all and then filtering out unacceptably sized bits.
There are some fruit juice places that do use everything. Growing up we toured a couple local farms that would outright use all oranges no matter what. It was kinda gross to watch but I guess that’s part of learning where food comes from.
It’s probably more of a cost thing for the large companies. Just cheaper to only use a certain grade to entire their product is consistent.
>Imperfect Produce claims they’re 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.
I've been chewing on this for a while. Who's in charge of setting up a social safety net? Whose responsibility is it to make sure people don't starve in the streets?
I thought I paid taxes to my government to socialize the issue across my representative district, but my government (in the USA) has disagreed with me - that money is to be spent on fighter jets (to quote the executive branch), while the churches are responsible for taking care of the homeless. And by the way, the homeless are responsible for policing themselves (to quote my mayor).
A couple weeks ago Domino's Pizza filled a bunch of potholes and stamped their logo on the asphalt after. I thought that would cause a national discussion. I thought at the very least, the city that it happened in would be humiliated enough to make the foolish mistake of maybe trying to slap back at Domino's for putting their logo all over the street. Nope, business as usual.
In other words, why suddenly are people starving again because imperfect produce found a capitalist way to reduce waste?
The article's term "gentrification" has a more specific focus than overall social welfare, and I think it's spot-on. Entrepreneurs notice an "underutilized" resource (housing / food waste) and create a new distribution network, disrupting the old one. This is good ol' competition (which I am a fan of), but it's important to acknowledge that it impacts people who aren't "competing", like food bank visitors. Even if the new network captures more value than the old one, it may also redistribute that value -- as the article contends, from food banks that would get more donations to "conscious consumers" who prefer this to traditional groceries, and of course to Imperfect Produce via profits.
Regardless of how you feel about the ethics of the above, it's at least part of Imperfect Produce's identity. If they are marketing to conscious consumers, this article helps those consumers consider more broadly their social impact.
For my own value judgement, I feel like I'm missing some important data:
- If IP is taking waste produce from larger farms, are they actually competing with BeetBox for the supply of produce?
- Downstream of above, has IP's activity actually reduced the amount of food donations being made available to food banks?
If IP is mainly competing with BeetBox for the "conscious consumers" that subsidize their charitable work, maybe BB can focus efforts to marketing their distinction from IP. Maybe this article is the first step.
Alternatively, if the BB folks are prioritizing social impact, have they tried to convince/train IP to work with the same social gaps they fill? If IP is more efficient in extracting conscious-consumer dollars, they have more surplus that could be poured back into the community.
I don't know anything about either of these groups, but the article says that this is simply the marketing of Imperfect Produce that doesn't bear out in reality. Do you have information contradicting their points that you decided not to share?
IP assert: "This food was going to be thrown out & going to waste. We are using it for something!"
Article asserts: "That food wasn't being thrown out it was going to food banks and homeless shelters."
So while IP is almost certainly helping the farmers by paying them for produce they can't normally sell they certainly aren't reclaiming mountains of food otherwise destined for rot.
> why suddenly are people starving again because imperfect produce found a capitalist way to reduce waste?
They don't. They wont. The article is nonsensical and ignores basic economics. Suffers from "we know better" attitude.
Small farmers are struggling. If the ugly produce helps them become little more profitable it is both good for them and also good for the food security of the nation. More available food would mean food will be cheaper for everyone. Will the world be better place if small farmers are out of business and a large businesses like Amazon takes up farming ?
Personally do not think there is anything ugly about ugly produce.
Note: I am not a rich techie. I earn less than $10K a year.
It's not small farmers that this is helping though. The article quotes Imperfect Produce as saying they need to be able to take at least a truckload of produce off a farm each week for it to be economical, so they don't deal with small farms. This is helping the large agribusinesses, not the mom and pop farms.
In all seriousness, banning plastic straws is a much lower hanging fruit than solving the homeless situation. The money to build and maintain affordable housing has to come from somewhere, probably by raising taxes. Would the SF residents, lots of whom are high income earners and who ironically are the ones feeding the crazy housing and rent prices, be willing to chip in to solve the problem or just sit on the sidelines and complain about the homeless?
They do mainly because of the promises of a high-paying job in the tech industry, not because a politician focuses his policies on plastic straws instead of taking care of people in need.
SF spends over $300M a year on homeless and we still have homeless people defecating openly on Market Street during the day. They don’t even collect metrics to figure out if the money is working (which it’s not) or have any accountability.
Surprisingly (to me) it seems this is approximately true [1]:
> San Francisco reportedly is set to spend nearly $280 million in its next budget fighting homelessness – an average of $37,300 for each of the city’s estimated 7,499 homeless residents
I live in a place where I don't see homeless people even on a monthly basis. Maybe a fuew time's per year when I've ventured an hour or more from home. So I'm sure there is a lot of nuance to the problem of homelessness that I don't understand. Still, considering these facts naively, I fail to see how such a large amount of spending can fail to address the issue:
1. $30k per year is more than enough to enable a person to be not-homeless. Rent them an apartment, buy them groceries and medical care, etc.
2. If they refuse to live in that apartment because they have itchy feet, schizophrenia, or just don't like the wallpaper, then perhaps we should suppose that they don't consider their homelessness to be much of a problem.
3. If any of those folks who don't take the city up on the free apartment do something illegal, like defecating in public, they can probably be incarcerated or institutionalized for $30k per year.
4. Some of the people from #2 might not be eliminated in step #3, because they don't break any laws. Being that that's the case, even if we consider them to be a nuisance, shouldn't we just get over it and ignore them?
Hi - small note from someone who has worked extensively with homeless.
While each bullet point you make has a superficial logic, they are (unfortunately !) Incorrect due to erroneous assumptions.
If the "problem" was as simple as you assume, the solution pointed out would have already worked.
It's a complex problem, which requires complex solutions.
In my experience, the major element is mental health. Many people are on the streets due to mental health issues, or develop mental health issues when on the street.
One take away note: most people are only two simultaneous life disasters away from being on the streets. One disaster (health / family / relationship / job) can typically be weathered, but two or more at once is typically catastrophic. There's many a PhD / CEO / father of four on the street.
This is a fallacy - for all we know, SF might be spending that money to help 20,000 people to find homes, and 7,500 homeless people are still left or newly homeless.
> If any of those folks who don't take the city up on the free apartment do something illegal, like defecating in public, they can probably be incarcerated or institutionalized for $30k per year.
Should a non-homeless person be institutionalized or incarcerated for defecating in public?
Really there is a small but seriously problematic population of people in need of a high level of mental health care who I would guess are the primary perpetrators of public defecation + urination (schizophrenia, addiction/intoxication, etc.). The 1,320 homeless people needing the most aid required $106 million in emergency medical and mental health services in 2015. Putting this money to work institutionalizing these chronic cases seems like a sensible and responsible thing to do – and it isn't hard to pick these individuals out. Staff at the General know all the regulars.
I mean, I feel you, but having witnessed first hand the hell of an incorrect psychological diagnosis followed by state ordered psych ward imprisonment, things can get ugly fast.
We'd need a very very good mechanism for deciding who gets institutionalized if we're going to start suspending legal rights. Far better than we have now. A Galaxy better than "staff at general recognizing" someone.
There’s a common refrain that “SF doesn’t spend enough money on the homeless, because they are rich and greedy etc etc. if only there was some compassion!!!!” In fact SF spends as much money on the homeless as they spend on the streets and parks. This shows that throwing money at the problem hasn’t helped.
how about measuring the effectiveness of the programs using that money, and improving them at least even if you want to keep at the same budget? why is bad acceptable when you spend 300M a year?
If they are, then it looks like they are pretty bad at what they are doing. And since its a public program all measurements should be public as well, by definition.
This pointless flamewar began by breaking this site guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." There are plenty of other plausible interpretations you could have reacted to, especially since the comment used the phrase "homeless people" a couple of words later in the same sentence.
Because it's more informative. "a person" doesn't tell anything descriptive at all; "friendly" or "a good father" would be relevant if we were talking about their personalities, but if we're talking about their economic needs, then "homeless" is the single property that's most relevant to the discussion.
With your examples about mental handicap, the same principle applies - it matters what's the topic of the discussion, what's the next sentence, and thus where the emphasis should be. If the fact that that person is mentally handicapped is irrelevant to the rest of the story, then "person" is the part that should be emphasised; but if the mental handicap is the key factor for what happens next, then that is the most salient information of the sentence and it should be emphasised.
I know they are people. Why do you think otherwise? Don't you think about people when you read "homeless"? Makes me wonder, since you so strongly react to it.
Since we're firing off arbitrary primary characteristics, let's just choose "male" for me. Could be that I'm homeless. Could be I'm a billionaire. I could be a Nazi with heads in my freezer.
Dimunitive language dehumanizes. Why the effort to classify with a single word?
Two, if you really want to reduce redundancy just use "person/people." Everyone knows if you say "homeless person", that that person is, in fact, a person. Seems like an extra word there.
If you want to be precise and point out someone is homeless, use "person, who is homeless." If two words and a comma is too redundant for you, see my first point.
I'm all for humanization, and some people can really be cruel. But I also think it is important to point out that 55% of the homeless population in SF has been homeless for a decade or more, and are not just "people who are currently homeless."
And at some point we have to accept imprecise language in service of useful abstraction (which is all language is).
Sure they could. Just pay for housing for all homeless SF residents. The only reason it doesn't happen is because people with money and power don't care enough to make the material sacrifices required to solve the problem.
Homelessness is rooted in two things: very serious personal problems that have no easy answer combined with a dire shortage of genuinely affordable housing in the US.*
We need to dramatically improve availability of affordable housing. That would get a lot of retirees and the like off the street.
But the ones who would, say, burn the house down while you weren't looking need a lot more than a free place to live.
If you care deeply about this issue, work on affordable housing. But please stop acting like homeless people are all puppies that need to be adopted by some well-meaning stranger. It's incredibly dehumanizing and tends to compound the problem.
I've been reading you on here for a while and I respect your experience and deep thoughtfulness on these issues so I'm really interested in your opinion on this: what about the other half of the problem? How can we navigate the balance of providing mental health services vs. forced incarceration? I want this to be government funded, but our government has a track record on mental health that literally includes long periods in which "put them on an island" was the official policy for "treating" wide varieties of mentally ill people. What things could we do that would actually make a difference here? Is there any meaningful way to make progress without reducing the freedom of the mentally ill?
Better nutrition would help a whole lot. It is more effective and more humane than the drugs we prefer. If psychoactive drugs help a mental health issue, you can assume it has medical roots for at least a portion of the problem. Treating the medical roots, which can include various infections, is a good path forward.
There used to be an article online called "Diseases of the mind." One thing it talked about: When antibiotics were invented, thousands of people in asylums were successfully treated for syphilis and then set free. Another point it made: Mental illness tends to occur in demographic clusters exactly like infectious disease, which implies it might actually be due to infectious disease.
It's aimed at the issue if isolation in the elderly. Homeless people also suffer from social isolation.
It's late. I'm tired. I will add that not all personal problems are about being crazy. Some people have learning disabilities or other barriers to regular employment.
I feel like this answer really sucks because of the framing of the problem in this subthread. I have tried to answer your actual question, which is a legitimate question, but I think the problem is more complicated than that.
It seems that affordable housing as such isn't a problem in USA, the problem is with affordable housing in certain areas where the jobs are. Housing a jobless, homeless person can be very affordable, there is a lot of empty, cheap housing available in areas where population has decreased due to lack of jobs. If we accept that we're going to subsidize these people anyway, then the lack of jobs at those locations isn't an issue.
This seems like an enormously cynical way to argue to me. Yes, I'm sure there is still a lot of affordable living space available in the desert.
It's not just about availability of work, it's also about the availability of infrastructure, opportunities to make connections, in short, ensuring a decent quality if life.
If the current trend continues, this will probably push larger parts of the population to increasingly low-quality living spaces. This isn't even a problem restricted to homelessness.
But that's kind of the point - no matter what "should" be, it's an unavoidable fact that desirable real estate / desirable location of living is an inherently scarce, limited, exclusive resource; whatever you do, not everyone can have it. Living in the best locations is a luxury - the average person can't live in Hollywood Hills or NY SoHo, and yes, they have to to live in a lower quality living space that they can afford.
A homeless person wanting to live only in SF is just like a starving person wanting only caviar; it's a luxury good that they're not going to realistically get because so many others want it as well.
If you want better availability of infrastructure, better opportunities to make connections, and a better quality of life, then the question is how to improve the quality of life at locations which currently have low cost real estate - and decoupling income from jobs is one way that can happen; for many of these places the living environment actually is quite good (mainly because you can afford much more space), but the main (only?) problem is the lack of local jobs; if the local people wouldn't be forced to move to where the jobs are, there's nothing wrong with the infrastructure.
A homeless person wanting to live only in SF is just like a starving person wanting only caviar
Homeless people gravitate towards big cities because that's where the concentration of services tend to be. It is why I went to San Diego: there are enough soup kitchens there to eat every day, even if you have no money or benefits at all. I left San Diego after I got food stamps and had dealt with a few things where I felt I could cope without daily access to homeless services.
It's inhumane to suggest shipping people elsewhere and actively evicting them from a particular city because they are poor. This is a mentality similar to the one that was behind removing Native kids from their families, sending them to boarding schools, forbidding them from speaking their own language, etc.
I have a collection of websites I run. I actively encourage people to do things like develop portable income and move someplace cheaper. That is exactly how I got back into housing.
But one woman I spoke with couldn't move because she was currently a college student. She had huge student loans that would immediately come due if she dropped out of her program. She needed to complete her degree in order to have any hope of making her life work.
Other people have children and shared custody with the other parent, or they can't leave because they are on parole and are required to remain in the area or any number of other reasons.
Homeless people are still people. They still have many things going on in their lives that can give them ties to a particular place.
Homelessness arises out of complex, multifaceted problems. One-size-fits-all solutions do not work and tend to make things worse, not better.
> But that's kind of the point - no matter what "should" be, it's an unavoidable fact that desirable real estate / desirable location of living is an inherently scarce, limited, exclusive resource;
Yes, but the scarcity of real estate hasn't changed - there haven't been any holes suddenly opening up in the ground and decreasing the amount if available space. Nevertheless, housing prices have skyrocketed (and so have the number of homeless from what I've read).
So to stay in your frame of discussion, it seems the definition of what is "non-luxury" living space has shifted considerably.
You aren't the first person to say something like this to me.
I am willing to actively encourage poor people to develop portable income and move someplace cheaper.
I am not willing to agree that we should ship people with boatloads of problems to the middle of fuck nowhere with no services, no shopping etc because burned out hell holes have nominally cheap housing.
That's potentially an even emptier life than they currently have.
Do you earnestly think that setting up a fine for places that continue to use plastic straws is not considerably more trivial than creating a program to pay for housing for all the homeless in SF?
Well, consider that SF has a diverse population, with several different factions who disagree dramatically about homelessness, help for drug addicts, housing policy, etc., and many other topics of “concern”.
It sounds like you personally are not at all involved politically, other than maybe occasionally voting and chatting on this forum where none of the stakeholders or policymakers involved are likely to see it.
The way the American system of government works (and to some extent any system of government), problems get addressed when someone cares enough about them to spend their time and attention working on them, organizing, looking for compromises with other stakeholders, etc.
There are folks out there working on increasing Bay Area’s housing supply, helping the homeless get the help they need, building public bathrooms, drug rehabilitation, lobbying the city to change police priorities, and so on. You can look them up and lend some of your time / money to projects you think are important.
City government is done by you/us, the residents of the city. It’s not some abstract force beyond human comprehension, but people just like you who are willing to put in the effort to make things work.
Though, fair warning, it seems like you are more concerned with judging/condemning the less fortunate and maybe chasing them out of your town than really fixing any of the root problems. If you go into working on government/policy problems with that attitude, be prepared for a lot of frustration. Actually, be prepared for frustration regardless; democratic government is inherently frustrating.
> Well, consider that SF has a diverse population, with several different factions who disagree dramatically about homelessness, help for drug addicts, housing policy, etc., and many other topics of “concern”.
Yes. Like home owners and people looking for a place to live.
That's not a fair characterization. I would argue that dealing with the homeless population is significantly more complex of an issue than dealing with plastic straws.
The author seems to be saying “don’t sell imperfect produce to people... only sell them perfect produce so that you have to waste huge amounts of resources in overproduction so that the leftovers can be donated to the poor.”
No. Feeding the poor is important but there must be a better way than that.
It's not the strongest supporting argument, but I think you can make the case that Imperfect Produce also do a good job of destigmatizing eating and using ugly produce.
If you look at the formation of a lot of Western welfare systems, most had a focus on dignity. It's no fun to be the one kid with the ugly produce, or explicitly going to something that's for the poor kids. We see it a lot with adults as well - how many people don't take advantage of benefits they deserve, because they don't want to be people that have to take these benefits. If we can support a culture that says produce doesn't have to be perfect to be socially acceptable, then I think everyone benefits.
While I'm sure Phat Beets do good stuff, I'm not sure if their constant refrain on helping the poor and marginalised is helpful in the long run. In my view, a good local grocery store that sells fresh produce at an affordable price is going to be a massive help, and I think both they and Imperfect Produce do the same thing.
Finally Phat Beets only deliver in the East Bay. Imperfect Produce also come to San Francisco.
Food banks are charity which should be tackled by the welfare state. Food banks do good work. They do amazing work. But it's work which shouldn't have to be done, and it's an indicator oF economic failure.
Commoditising ugly fruit and veg is good. We should stop treating perfectly good food as reject and we should stop assuming the best use of ugly food is donation to the poor.
Poor people need jobs and state intervention not food banks
They need other welfare services: food stamps, long-term unemployment benefits, medicaid, vocational training, minimum income guarantees, free daycare for children, etc.
These services should be provided by the local government rather than charities.
> It’s a clever money making scheme, but it certainly doesn’t help small, local farmers or address the source of waste: overproduction by industrial farms as they produce the perfect produce sold in supermarkets.
No...that's literally exactly what they are addressing. They are creating demand for the imperfect produce. That was the problem in the first place, lack of demand for imperfect produce and the inseparability of imperfect produce production from perfect produce production.
Does the food industry have a moral obligation to produce waste for the poor? It seems they discovered a market segment that had been previously overlooked.
Being transparent about where the food would have gone might make people think twice before lowering their quality standards, but in aggregate, I think the technology to route second-rate food to bargain hunters is a genie that won't be easily rebottled.
We are all, at the close of everything, equally human, and I would argue that there is not a human alive who has who does not bear some measure of responsibility for those who have not. Even a small measure at the very least, and getting shady at the expense of nonprofits and foodbanks is probably enough for, y'know...most Americans with the luxury--and it is a luxury, an extreme one--to found a venture-backed startup to surpass theirs.
> Does the food industry have a moral obligation to produce waste for the poor?
So, if private enterprises have no responsibility (because of free enterprise), the state has no responsibility (because of small government) and charities are strictly voluntary yet still compete against enterprises, then who actually does have responsibility?
I signed up for Imperfect Produce about 6 months ago. I'm relatively happy with the service. Despite calling the produce "imperfect" often the freshness and taste is better than what I find at the store. Caveat, I have not liked the quality of the fruit so I stick to their vegetable offerings. The main driver for me sticking with the service so long is that a) we do not have to make grocery trips as frequently, b) my diet has improved. I feel a pressure to eat the veg we have on hand before the next delivery, which means eating veg for breakfast many days. And lunch. And twice for dinner.
I also don't own a car, and having services like this helps me continue the car-free lifestyle.
I am sympathetic to phatbeets' criticism. Despite leaning towards not changing my consumer habits, I will have to mull over their points and evaluate my priorities.
At some point though, I need to eat and if the service fits within my overall lifestyle but I care about community hunger, maybe I can donate a box of produce to a food shelter through IP?
I’m beginning to think VC is the most important driving force of rising inequality. It replaces natural flourishing of community connected entrepreneurship with a winner take all market. It crushes the less connected and resourced with tactics that would be called dumping in other markets.
I strongly disagree. In my opinion, the relationship between VC and rising inequality is indirect at most. The primary factors which contribute to inequality in a given country are related to the number of available jobs, the distribution of wages among various subsets of the working population, the robustness of social safety net programs, and the underlying distribution of political and economic power.
Our startup movement, more so than any other segment of the global economy, embodies the idea of the "American Dream" that if you work hard you can be successful and move up the social ladder. It's not perfect, and clearly it's not a pure meritocracy, but to claim that the VC world is "the most important driving force of rising inequality" is very inaccurate in my judgement.
It is true that silicon valley style tech companies are more and more becoming an important part of the economy, but the types of startups which are part of the tech startup eco system are creating jobs and are disrupting existing industries as part of a healthy capitalist process.
Here are two factors which I consider to have a much more significant influence than VC's on the global trend of rising inequality:
1) It is well understood that middle class families keep on average the majority of their wealth in the form of a house which they own. The housing crisis, which was fueled by wall street excess, wiped out an incredible amount of wealth from poor and middle class families and the bailout and shorting transferred this wealth to the top 0.1%
2) Approximately 3 trillion is collected by the US government every year in taxes, and approximately 1.5 trillion is borrowed by the government, for a total budget of approximately 4.5 trillion. This money is handed out by congress members to powerful banks and corporations from their state as a form of quid pro quo for campaign donations. The budget deficit is then used to justify a never ending cycle of cuts to social safety net programs.
I thought there was going to be something interesting but no, that's only a header no content afterwards to answer that rhetorical question.
Also I am kinda bothered by the repetitive use of small farmers of color. This also surprisingly seems to be mentioned nowhere else on their pages. Why not just Precarious ? local? Engaged for affordable quality or whatever? Is really color the most accurate and essential way to describe the farmers in this project?
I already have no sympathy for this organization after reading what should be an unfair case that could help to bring traction about them.
Social programs should really plan for these types of disruptors more often. We've had Asda (Walmart to you US folk) trying to do the same by adding boxes of below commercial grade into supermarkets couple years ago. It really pressured our local small suppliers by people seeing the cost of two trips higher than the difference in prices. I don't think the author should feel more cornered though - imperfect food still makes perfect meals at a higher margin - perhaps they should use this encouraging response from their community to take their stock, teach to cook healthy and retain profitablity to support their existing programs? They would even be able to maintain a reliable % for food banks and reducing waste by converting excess into food for a later time.
Does anyone have a better source than this article on what's really going on in the industry?
I don't know anything about it, but I'm skeptical. I would have thought that an ugly carrot would end up as carrot juice or sliced up into bits and put into soup.
Many here are not getting the point of this article. Imperfect produce claim that most of the ugly produce used to get wasted , which is not true. Imperfect produce is also killing small non profits like Beetbox by taking away their customers.
Also, what happens when Imperfect produce gets big enough that there isn't enough ugly produce to source. This is a problem with investor driven, profit hungry companies. Other example is SeatToTable which claimed to deliver fish from local fishermen to your doorstep was actually sourcing from other parts of world.
It seems that industries have become negative-sum games.
In the software development industry, there is a similar problem; SaaS services have been replacing free open source solutions even though they are expensive and they take away flexibility from those who use them.
Advertising has become too powerful - It allows for-profit companies to use big VC funding to fund campaigns to trick people into making bad decisions. They end up paying more for the same thing.
In effect, they're changing the world for the worse but they're packaging it nicely.
With SaaS and as a business owner and operator, I see the value in a specialised company offering hosted X and charging for it. My general purpose sysadmin employee will never be as good at looking after whatever niche tool than the SaaS company offering it and charging me $500/mo or whatever.
Even at several thousand/month (approaching thr salary of a sysadmin), the economics can work out fine as you're being more productive and the sysadmin can be working on the really custom things that are core to your business like specific CI pipelines or monitoring and optimising our own software. It's the same argument as AWS. EC2 is really expensive, but it's still usually cheaper than actually running your own hardware at the same service level as AWS can provide.
Scale of operation changes things, but the vast majority of companies are small enough that spending money on SaaS and IaaS is usually better than building a local team of commodity staff doing nothing unique for the business.
The idea that it's difficult to self-host these open source solutions is often part of the marketing but it often isn't true. Many times, I've seen companies host their own HTTP servers but outsource their WebSocket servers even though they don't require much additional DevOps skills if they used the right open source tools.
Often, those companies would actually have benefited from being able to integrate their backend systems more closely.
Regarding back end services; I've used various Amazon AWS services at different companies and, every time, it made development and deployment way more complicated - For example, one corporation I worked at, there was only 1 person in the whole company who had the full knowledge to work with our Lambda setup; this person worked very slowly (probably not their fault) so they were blocking all other teams in the company. It would have been much faster if the company operated the server themselves.
Big for-profit companies have always been marketing against open source software; before, they would say that because it's free; it means that it's insecure and low quality.
Because it's now obvious that this is not true, for-profit companies have resorted to focusing their marketing on the idea that it's "too much effort to manage and scale" open source software.
What comments diss phatbeets produce? I just read literally every one and I haven't seen anyone complain about the product.
Look: I live in Canada. I've never heard of phatbeats OR Ugly Produce, so it's fair to say that I don't have much of a horse in the race. However, it seems like your ultimate conclusion (UP is a shitty startup and they should DIAF) is based on logic that isn't nearly as "obvious" as you've decided that it is.
Please, feel free to add more information. I find this topic genuinely interesting.
I debated whether to say anything or not because this seems zero-sum and the potential for downside is huge. Yet, here I am at 4:30am, in Canada, being opinionated about a problem that I am far-removed from.
20 years ago, I was a 20y/o radical activist. I spent a significant amount of my time, energy and money participating in street-level activist organizing - all while holding down a job as a software developer by day.
I have protested the KKK (the Ohio police put us in a big cage while robed Klansmen hung out with a PA on the courthouse steps). I have personally been involved with shutting down white power skinhead concerts, which often involved physical confrontation. I wasn't "in Seattle" but I was "in Washington", for those of you old enough or inclined to catch the reference. I've held placards at Free Mumia rallies. I almost got arrested for jabbing Fred Phelps (the God Hates Fags asshole) with an umbrella.
I offer this - if you're willing to trust me - not to brag or signal virtue, but to offer some context when I say that holy fuck the language that they use in their call-to-arms manifesto is irritating to me.
Maybe it's true, what they say about getting old making you conservative. Maybe this post is giving me an existential crisis. And yet, I don't think so. What I actually think is that perhaps East Bay food activists are just guileless in their messaging and are completely tone-deaf to how incredibly elitist that this kind of intentionally polarizing propaganda actually sounds to anyone who might not shake their fist at the concept of capitalism still existing in the bathroom mirror every morning.
Ranting about how a startup is stealing your thunder / community groups because they are gasp effective is the literal definition of sour grapes. It has nothing to do with capitalism, which is true regardless of how many comments you delete.
Seriously, phatbeats: when did you get so scared to innovate? You don't have to do it in a capitalist framework, but you have to get creative and try new things or you won't have a legitimate argument to make to 99.9% of the population. Even Canadians who are moved to tears by Bernie Sanders find your tone to be grating.
I want so badly to support people who spend their energy making the world better for people. Maybe these Imperfect Produce folks really do have blood boys and drink the tears of orphans. But my knee-jerk reaction to your post, as life-long self-identified progressive, is to cheer for them. That should not be what's happening, and it's not just because I got old and sold out.
Meta: I am genuinely impressed at how civil this discussion is. We HN commenters often get a bad rap. We often++ deserve it, but today, we can have nice things.
I was kind of thinking the same thing. Calling themselves “PhatBeets” though a clever play on words, does little to describe their mission and implant a memory in viewers. They now have to compete with a startup, they need to be kick ass marketers themselves. Why just surrender the food supply that Imperfect is acquiring? Get out there and get some of that for the PB programs. Corporations have philanthropy programs, you just need to talk to different parts of the company. Expanding beyond taking supply from farms owned by people of color seems like a logical step to increase the supply in their system. Learn all that stuff and then do some training among other programs that are suffering.
Maybe all of my ideas suck and would fail. My point is I didn’t hear one word about what they’re going to do about the situation they find themselves in. They’re just whining that their business model has been disrupted.
And the key thing about their messaging. They’re not building themselves up, they’re tearing someone else’s thing down. That’s never a successful strategy. Though I am thankful for the reveal about Imperfect (who are greedy assholes)...I think hey would have done a lot better shopping this story to SF Gate or SacBee. And then using those stories as a touchstone for their new launch of how they’re going to overcome this issue.
Exactly this: it reminds me of how the ACLU joined YC to learn to think and act more like a startup.
The ugly truth is that perhaps the most real problem these folks have is the need to decide whether they are prioritizing fighting capitalism or feeding poor people.
It's quite likely that they cannot effectively do both at the same time, but would benefit from focused priorities.
Well said. I think the major problem here is not that PhatBeets is being out-competed by a more well funded company. The problem is that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone in the world and more, but because of economic inequality there are many people who cannot afford to put enough food on the table for them or their kids. It's not Imperfect Produce's fault that the world is so fucked up, and I love the mission of PhatBeet's. My take away is that if I was in PhatBeet's shoes I would be incredibly frustrated and would feel very powerless and might make a blog post with similar hyperbolic language lashing out at the easiest target I could find in a desperate effort to save everything I had been working so hard on for so long by any means necessary. If I were in Imperfect Produce's shoes I would feel like this ire has been misdirected at me when the real problem lies with extremely complex and difficult problems which exist in general in our society.
Is anyone else extremely frustrated with Phat Beets about this article? Or are we all too busy burning down a conveniently placed straw man? Phat beets haven’t produced any stats or facts of their own here. They just keep tearing down the ones that Imperfect is providing. Nitpicking statistics and shaming a company for trying to feed more people with less waste is just as bad as whatever greenwashing they claim to despise so much. It’s pretty undeniable that Imperfect is making an impact on food waste and until they or any other company are using all of the billions of pounds of food that aren’t getting eaten every year, it’s utterly counterproductive to try to tear them apart for trying to help this food find a home on someone's table. Why are they so obsessed with fact-less mudslinging? Why is Imperfect the chosen target and not a real villain of the food industry like Bayer/Monsanto, Walmart, or McDonalds?
Here are some facts for you: In 2017, Feeding America reported that they received over 1.47 billion pounds of produce. As a reference, Imperfect claims to have recovered 30 million pounds of produce to date. Feeding America and the NRDC also reported that over 6 billion pounds of crops go unharvested or unsold ever year. This study was based on 7 key crops so the total is likely much higher, but let’s assume its 6 billion to be conservative. This means that even if Imperfect went through 100 times the amount of ugly produce every year that they’ve recovered to date, they would still be using less than half of the available supply. Phat Beets, your math doesn’t add up! Provide meaningful statistics and facts to back up your argument or everyone will see through your emphatic nourishment of the outrage machine of social media for the reactionary
Zooming out, there’s also a huge aspect of this that’s a messed up apples to oranges comparison. Imperfect is a business with a social mission related to food waste, not a nonprofit solely focused on ending hunger. It’s great that they are making a difference while also making money but it’s not fair to ask a company to overthrow capitalism. Do you expect Lyft to overthrow the freeway system, or ask the computer that you wrote these words on to end exploitative mining practices that provided the copper for the circuitry? It seems like you’re making the good the enemy of the perfect and in so doing ignoring the reality of the situation which is much more nuanced than you portray it. Isn’t there a way for community CSAs to work alongside companies like Imperfect? It seems to me that these two groups are working towards admirable, but very different goals at different scales and this is actually a good thing. There is plenty of work left to be done and there is clearly more than enough food for both of you to achieve your goals and then some. Save the abstract critique of capitalism for philosophy class, the rest of us live in the real world where we have to make compromises and embrace the grey areas.
TL;DR: my research suggests that different groups work with significantly different definitions of "racism", which I feel injures all conversations that build on fundamental assumptions - to society's detriment.
Recently, I did some research on the subject of white privilege, and I came to some troubling (or at least, intellectually interesting) conclusions that I wish people would talk more about.
Humans are notably passionate about naming things and defining terms. Not only do definitions shape the way people experience reality, but there’s a massive cultural and often economic prize to those who define what words mean.
The positions of both progressives and conservatives on the subject of white privilege (eg. whether it exists) get interesting when you look at what the conservatives say differently (or in many cases, are not saying), starting with the way that they define “racism”:
Jordan Peterson: “To attribute to individuals of a community the attributes of the community on the basis of their racial identity is called racism. That’s what racism is. There’s no other way of defining it.”
Wikipedia: “Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.”
Ben Shapiro: “If you’re accusing somebody of something because of the color of their skin, that’s called racism.”
Wikipedia: “The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.”
The conservatives - who both take great pride in their precise language - categorically do not acknowledge that superiority is a fundamental aspect of racism. Instead, their definition speaks to the outrage they feel when they are accused of something because of their race.
Conservatives perceive racism as an unfair, deliberate act perpetrated against the individual members of an ethnic group.
Progressives perceive racism as a passive, self-righteous system which oppresses members of less-powerful groups to maintain power over them.
I believe that both sides are arguing about different phenomena. This is a huge problem because it confuses any further discussion that doesn’t share a similar definition of racism. How can you find true common ground on a provocative subject with someone who is seeing different images and feeling entirely different emotions?
I run into this same issue when I use the word sexism. I hate using it, but I don't know what else to call it.
When I say sexism, I roughly mean systemic issues that lead to gendered outcomes. Most other people seem to hear "You are actively and intentionally on purpose excluding women because you are an evil asshat." So, they get defensive. They get mad. Etc.
It is not a good path forward for productive discussion. But I don't know what language to use that sidesteps the issue.
There is, of course, the pesky minor detail you're quickly glossing over, namely that the word's root is race, something I was (probably) misled to believe by conservative-leaning science teachers with a hidden agenda has a fairly agreed-upon scientific definition, which has much to do with DNA, and not much with economics, whatever Peterson's opinion may be.
Now, if the left (which is anything but "progressive" these days, just hearing you calling them that is borderline offensive) wants to fight its political battles via redefinition of the meaning of words, things are unlikely to get to any kind of constructive any time soon.
The fact remains though, that the article specifically mentions they only do business with black farmers. Use whichever language you'd like to describe this, the behavior is what it is.
Also, I apologize for not directly responding to your actual point.
Is it racist for a charity to only work with black farmers? The reason I wrote what I wrote is that the answer entirely depends on whether your definition of racism includes the systemic oppression of the less powerful for the specific purpose of keeping them less powerful into the future.
Based on my research, a conservative (and I am using these terms to describe teams, so it could be "shirts" vs. "skins") would say it's racist because it consciously discriminates against white people. End of story.
A progressive would contend that white farmers already have all of the inherent advantages of their whiteness, and therefore it's wholly appropriate for a self-organizing group to serve less powerful communities to the exclusion of the ruling class. (Class as in group, not social strata, although I'm confident that black farmers are farmers who are black, and therefore part of an oppressed class. They are free to decide who is oppressed in the same way an editor is free to decide who to publish.)
The truth is not up to me to decide, but it's a shame that we can't have two parallel conversations where both views have a good point.
So, if we assume for the sake of discussion that the author of the article is not playing identity politics games and is truly trying - to sort of quote you - to help those in greatest need, then don't you think the criteria should objectively be those in greatest need instead of relying on some sort of questionable correlation between one's skin color and one's economic condition to pick and choose who's most deserving of their help?
I think what is truly driving a certain category of people (which I belong to) nuts when they hear that folks base their decision on people's skin color is exactly that: instead of relying on some dubious, questionable, to-be-proven, and most certainly never a 100% accurate, equivalence relation between one's skin color and one's economic (or other) condition, why not just call an effing cat a cat and just say you're trying to help people who need it the most?
To me, there's only two explanations: you're either not very smart by equating two very different things, or you have an identity politics agenda. Either is a source of frustration.
Finally, "the inherent advantages of their whiteness" . And you're trying to tell me you want a constructive conversation when using language like this? Please. The 50's are long gone, time to move on.
Yes. I agree with you, in the ways that are important.
Fourth paragraph:
I was doing my best to represent the thinking and position of that group of well-intentioned people. You don't have to agree that there's an inherent advantage to whiteness.
I don't have to agree, either. I believe that there's an inherent advantage to being of the majority and that whenever a class has power, it will work overtime to stay in that position of power.
Do I think that the issue of race equality was solved in the 60s? No sir, I do not.
> something I was (probably) misled to believe by conservative-leaning science teachers with a hidden agenda has a fairly agreed-upon scientific definition
Thanks for your comment. It's interesting to me because I am a progressive who is actively disenfranchised by "the left" for some of the same reasons.
So, knowing that I see the mainstream left as a tone-policing, virtue signaling, intellectually numbing quasi-fascist dumpster fire... does that change the tone of your reading?
Passing a law to shoot the homeless people on first sight will clear it up real quick.
Really sick people can be put to medical prison camps where we make them to grow oraginc food food (charging tech companies cafeterias billions) or perform miracle drug testing (charging big pharma billions) on them.
We can recruit Americans (Using first amendment for the rescue) with gun for this task based on volunteering.
I don't understand. Now it's bad for people to buy food waste, because otherwise food waste is donated?
TFA smells like anti-capitalism, upset that someone is doing something profitable with the source of their charity work... And double upset that capitalists might have a (gasp) positive impact.
Personally, I am angry and upset at this Phatbeets, for taking food waste away from the hard working farmers who would otherwise use it for compost. But I'm also angry at the farmers who, by using ugly food for compost, are stealing jobs from the good folks of the waste department. Stop undermining our social systems, you capitalist farmers!
The ugly food should be ground up, fermented, and turned into whiskey moonshine for the homeless. The spent grain should be fed to pigs to make bacon. Any other waste should be ran in my flattop 1946 Ford 9n tractor to make more ugly food, with manure from the pigs and free labor from the homeless, in exchange for the whiskey moonshine and bacon diet. Win/win
I spent nearly six years homeless. I ate at soup kitchens and got food from food banks for a small portion of that time.
I grew up with a garden in the back yard. My dad hunted and some of the meat on our table was squirrel and deer he killed. My mother cooked from scratch.
I'm used to eating well for relatively little money. Most of the food at soup kitchens and food pantries fails to meet my expectations for food quality.
Food stamps (EBT) are a good program. You can use them to buy the same food from the same stores as anybody else and you get to decide what to spend it on. (Though the program could use more funding. They tend to last only 3 weeks of the month.)
Soup kitchens and food pantries tend to suck, even the better ones.
I'm not saying we shouldn't provide compassionate support to anyone. I'm just saying some programs for doing so would be acceptable to people with middle class expectations and some wouldn't be. For many reasons, including germ control, we need to be shooting for programs that fit middle class sensibilities and not act like "beggars can't be choosers."
Furthermore, if you are homeless, you are living without a fridge. Produce doesn't keep well under those conditions. When I was around a lot of other homeless people for a time, it wasn't unusual for free produce to go to waste, in part for that reason. Some idiot would give a homeless person some giant bag of apples. They could eat a few of them before they rotted, but not all of them. Maybe they managed to give the rest away. Maybe they didn't.
Last, I have serious reservations about creating systems to serve the poor instead of creating systems to help them resolve their problems. Systems designed to serve the poor tend to actively keep poverty alive, a la the Shirky Principle:
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle
> Food stamps (EBT) are a good program. You can use them to buy the same food from the same stores as anybody else and you get to decide what to spend it on.
Food stamps tend to suck for a lot of the same reasons food pantries do. You're still telling people what to buy. It's not as bad because there are more choices, but it's still the same general problem where you have a bureaucracy telling you what to buy instead of being able to buy what you need the most like anybody else.
Sometimes what you really need is food. Sometimes -- or some specific days -- you have access to food and what you really need is to save up enough for a working car or gas to put in it so you can go to job interviews. Or something else that the person in question knows they need but arbitrary politicians have no way to predict.
But if you give people food stamps, they'll buy food with it. Even if they already have suitable food, because it's free money that can only be used for one thing. Then it costs the taxpayer $1 and provides the person with $.05 worth of value, which they take because $.05 is more than $0.
Meanwhile just giving the person $1 cash would give the person $1 in value and cost the government less, because then it isn't necessary to administer a system to force people to buy the thing they needed less instead of the thing they needed more.
And eliminating that bureaucracy reduces the Shirky principle problem.
Food stamps don’t suck just because they don’t solve all your problems. Rather, they solve a baseline universal need, and they do it in an extremely attractive way which is even better than handing cash.
A lot of people don’t realize that “food stamps” are just a debit card that you use to checkout at the supermarket, yes, even Whole Foods. There are some limits to what you can buy, but generally speaking if it’s unprepared food you can pay for it with the food stamp debit card.
I was on food stamps for a short while. While the value of the balance wasn’t literally cash, it was equivalent because I was spending at least that much on groceries anyway. You can also carry a balance forward from month-to-month so there’s never a need to spend it down wastefully. It’s only about $100/person/month so it’s never too much for just food.
Food stamps have low administrative overhead and low levels of fraud. It’s a government program I have very few gripes about, which is indeed saying something.
And it’s not a small program either, around $100B per year (less in the last couple years due to very strong employment numbers).
> While the value of the balance wasn’t literally cash, it was equivalent because I was spending at least that much on groceries anyway. You can also carry a balance forward from month-to-month so there’s never a need to spend it down wastefully. It’s only about $100/person/month so it’s never too much for just food.
This is kind of the point. In all the cases where the person is spending that amount on eligible food regardless, it's already equivalent to cash so it might as well be cash without the administrative overhead. They'll spend the food stamps on food and the cash they would have spent on food on whatever they want.
The only time it matters is when the person wouldn't be spending that much, i.e. they have an alternative source of food that doesn't take food stamps. In which case it only produces inefficiency. If you're content to eat free stale bagels and ugly produce every day so you can use the money for something else, you can't without breaking the law. Nor does it help you to try to stretch the money past the limit of the benefit amount.
So people go to the grocery store and spend all the money, because a fresh bagel tastes better than a stale one if you have to spend the money on that. And if you have a consistent way to get by on $80/month in groceries, accumulating an extra $20/month in food stamp balance every month still doesn't put gas in your car.
The same dynamic plays out in all the other assistance programs. There is money for low income housing assistance, but the natural thing to do there is to get together with multiple other hard off people, pool your resources and share housing. Which is not allowed. The programs generally prohibit methods of improving efficiency or stretching money.
Even if you're dead set on not letting people spend the money on vices, why is there a whitelist instead of a blacklist? You can't spend assistance money on alcohol or cigarettes, fine. But if there is food assistance and housing assistance then why can't you spend excess food money on housing or excess housing money on food? Why is there a ban on business cards and brake pads?
$100 / person / month. $100B a year cost.
100,000,000,000 / 12 = would feed one person for 8.3B years.
Or a billion people for 8.3 years.
You can see where this is going.
$100B should be able to feed one hundred million people for 83.3 years. Assuming $100 / month could feed a person.
You can buy a lot of lentils, rice, and potatoes with $100.
But you're saying food stamps costs $100B a year.
Where is all this money going?
(I posted this before but made a mistake in the math, I think this is right now.)
The latest numbers in Wikipedia say that SNAP costs $70.9B and distributes an average of $125/month to 44.2M people.
That means the cost is $133 to distribute $125, or an overhead of $8 per person per month.
Still not great but not nearly as bad as I was expecting, to be honest.
That actually does sound very bad. Even US health insurance companies, rightfully derided for profit mongering, manage to come in at single-digit overheads.
The NIH estimates that the average person uses $316k ($419k in 2018 dollars) in health care spending over an 80 year life.[1][2]. That puts the value of health insurance at $5,237 per person per year.
The average health insurance deductible is $4,358 and the average premium is $321 per month.[3] That means that on average US citizens pay $321 per month for (5237-4358) / 12 = $73.25 of expected value. That's a 4X markup over the expected value of insurance.
Health insurance companies might be reporting single digit overheads but they are providing $1 of value for $4 and are inefficient.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361028/
[2] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/11/05/when-your-shitty-...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/06/23/heres-how-much-the-avera...
> The average health insurance deductible is $4,358 and the average premium is $321 per month.[3] That means that on average US citizens pay $321 per month for (5237-4358) / 12 = $73.25 of expected value.
Your calculation makes no sense. Healthcare insurance pays out for catastrophic events, hence the deductible, not evenly every year. You need to know the distribution of payouts to get a meaningful result.
Families in [3] are doing better than the individuals you use to calculate the multiple.
I guess it's still a whole number factor sort of thing.
I also wonder if those numbers are accounting for Medicare and Medicaid (which add costs to the private insurance system).
Costs in the last 80 years are not representative of costs today or in the next 80 years.
The NIH numbers quoted above didn't use costs over the past 80 years. They instead estimated current costs based on current demographics.
>> To estimate lifetime health care costs, we employ a method based on a current life table, also known as a period life table model.
Thus, these costs are representative of recent costs.
In the next 80 years, both the expected value of insurance and the cost of insurance will change. Health insurance premiums are expected to increase by double-digits in 2019.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/05/26/whos-ready-for-a-1...
Wouldn't profit mongering result in a strong push for efficiency? Unless they count profits (or dividends) as 'overhead'...
I believe you forgot to divide by the $100
That is not a realistic or useful analysis of the economics of any food stamp program.
There's a math error there. You divided $100 billion by 12 to get person-years, which would imply a cost of $12 per year.
$100 billion / 12 months
= $8.3 billion per month
/ $100 per person per month
= 83 million people
so $100 billion per year could give 83 million people $100 per month.
$1000 should be able to feed a person for 83.3 years?
You didn't at all consider the reason why food stamps might exist in the first place. I don't know anything about them, but I'd assume it has something to do with a correlation between homelessness and life problems that make financial discipline extra hard (eg addictions).
I'm not trying to imply that all homeless people are addicts (quite the contrary) but if I'm a crack addict and you give me money I'm not sure I'd be using it to save it up for buying a car one day.
> You didn't at all consider the reason why food stamps might exist in the first place. I don't know anything about them, but I'd assume it has something to do with a correlation between homelessness and life problems that make financial discipline extra hard (eg addictions).
I wouldn't assume that, since food stamps aren't particularly focussed on the homeless.
In fact, the original purpose of the food stamp program was clearing agricultural surpluses (hence why the program was created in the Department of Agriculture and not the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare where you would have expected it to be if it were a welfare program and not an ag industry support program); you originally had to purchase food stamps, and for every dollar you got $1 of unrestricted (but still only for food) stamps, and $0.50 of restrictes-to-items-deemed-to-be-in-surplus stamps.
The exact restrictions and mechanisms changed over time in subsequent iterations of the program (and it's hard to find a clear purpose for many changes because lots were compromises between competing visions with fundamentally opposed goals.)
If your a crack addict, you’ll prob sell your food stamps or the food you bought to get crack.
Unprocessed trauma coping circuits (aka addiction) highjacks intelligence to get the dopamine trigger, it doesn’t nessesarily eliminate intelligence.
You can't sell food stamps so easily anymore. They used to be paper currency, but they are in the form of a debit card now, still possible to sell, just requires some planning
Every few weeks I get a person approaching me in the grocery store offering to buy me $2x of my groceries for an $x cash payment.
Exactly this. More food for less money is a good deal if you are just-over-the-line for getting food stamps or the ones you have don't go far enough to really feed your family.
To be fair, folks will do the same if they need cigarettes or need to fix a car to get to work and back.
I agree. Folks will find a way to get their needs met.
You don’t solve trauma with cash, but you also don’t make it worse and the benefits to others seem to be greater.
A regulated nervous system is a need, and if someone never developed that capability and doesn’t have awareness or resources to develop it as an adult, it’s actually a pretty logical move to use drugs.
> * the original purpose of the food stamp program was clearing agricultural surpluses (hence why the program was created in the Department of Agriculture...*
This!! I am always a little disappointed to see so many people on HN talking about gov't programs as though they are some form of altruism. They (usually) are not.
SNAP/WIC/EBT (what people are referring to as food stamps, which I don't think exist anymore; the 'benefits' are managed and distributed via a card provided by JPMorgan last I read) is a corporate welfare program.
Every time there's political talk about cutting the 'food stamp' program, the lobbyists come out. Whose lobbyists? Kraft, Walmart, JPMorgan, et al. If you use your 'Googles' you should be able to find a few articles about what % of revenue the program(s) account for some of these programs. One year Kraft said it was something like 14% (I have this on paper somewhere in my archive, but the info's available on the interwebs). Because of this, these programs aren't going anywhere.
This is also why, when you look at the food stuffs provided to students via school breakfast and lunch programs, they're often crap. Food nutrition is not the goal, getting Vitamin $ to companies (and maybe a few small farmers) is.
Meats and grains are heavily subsidized by the USG, produce not so much. IIRC this goes back to the doing of Nixon's guy, Earl Butz.
Wow! I didnt know any of that. These clearly-presented, insightful posts are why I love reading your comments. Esp on business or law. Learned a ton from them. :)
Good point and it's an active concern in development economics. Most often giving people cash will lead them to either use it for not-food (incl. things that are outright detrimental to their wellbeing), or to get low-nutrition (and high-energy) food such as snacks or soda. Not quite desirable either way.
Is this true?
I’ve seen a number of studies, reports, NGOs, etc. advocating for giving cash directly vs. inkind donations.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/07/5416096...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/we...
https://www.vox.com/2016/1/23/10810978/cash-transfer-givedir...
> I'm not trying to imply that all homeless people are addicts (quite the contrary) but if I'm a crack addict and you give me money I'm not sure I'd be using it to save it up for buying a car one day.
Drug addicts make up a negligible percentage of people getting a helping hand. The statistics show this and it has been born out by the states that introduced drug testing for assistance recipients: they cost more to administer than the money saved by kicking people out of the assistance programs because the numbers are so tiny. Even in SF where it seems like all the crazy homeless people are strung out or tweaked, well, that's a sample problem: indeed many of the crazy ones are, but they are a minuscule, though highly visible, percentage of the people in need.
If you're struggling to make ends meet you don't have time to take drugs.
Whereas if you start out OK, become drug addled and fall out of the system, you probably by that time are too out of it to ask for help.
But if I give you food stamps, you could just sell them and buy crack. Is there any reason to believe food stamps help solve the problem you're describing?
I think the problem is more complex than you're bothering to give it credit.
For example, food stamps may go to a family, where they are dealt with responsibly, in a way that money, which is very easy to grab and walk out to buy cigarettes with when things go badly, is not.
Obviously, it's not a full solution, and a cynical recipient could sell them, true... but we're not talking about individuals acting in isolation for purely selfish reasons; that's a contrived subset of the problem.
What's the alternative you're proposing?
Just hand out cash?
The research shows that people suffer severe difficulty in managing fiscal matters when under financial stress. It's the old 'why do people who are poor buy so many lottery tickets?'?
Money isn't the correct solution; and maybe food stamps aren't either... but they're a better solution, and don't think that's even in doubt.
...but if you have a different one, I'm happy to hear it.
"why do people who are poor buy so many lottery tickets?"
Answer, all people buy lottery tickets at the same rate for tickets which might materially change their life. If you are rich, spending 20 bucks for a 1 in a million chance to win 10k is not going seem worthwhile.
The problem food stamps are solving is to keep a lid on the brow beating from taxpayers toward the poor. It is a mild form of punishment masquerading as help. It would be cheaper, easier, and more effective to just give cash (and because it would be cheaper, you could give more).
The main issue poor people have in managing money, is simply that they do not have enough.
And that they'll do things like spend their last penny to get the latest iPhone, or on buy $400 sneakers.
Or if they inherit 50k, immediately go to Vegas and lose it all.
These are all real examples I've known personally.
The people you're describing exist but it's hard to imagine someone who is great with money staying poor for years and years, considering almost everyone in America moves between income quintiles during their life and most spend time at the top.
If free food is punishment please sign me up to be punished.
Also, I'm interested in the source for your lottery ticket info. It sounds fairly absurd in a world where many jackpots are over 5 million, which is enough to change almost anyone's life. I've never even heard of a lottery for 10k.
I think maybe you missed my point. Everyone is bad with money (mostly), it is just rich people have more. And perhaps they have had more time to form good habits with ever increasing amounts to ride over the rough patches. I have known way more rich people bad with money than poor, it just didn't have the same effect.
That is because you don't buy them I guess. Scratch tickets, poker machines, plus lots of small state lotteries that start at 5-10k and top out at maybe half a mill.
Yeah, just hand out cash, and make it very easy for people with medical problems like addiction to get help without getting arrested or going bankrupt.
I don't know very much about this topic and I'd love to see the research you're talking about. Are poor people worse at managing finances? Intuitively that sounds wrong to me, but intuition is usually useless in economics. Do food stamps result in better health outcomes than cash?
> Just hand out cash?
That's what we do in most (all? I can only find a handful of dated references to a program in the UK) parts of Europe. Seems to work fine.
Most European countries have things like free medical care and maternity leave that we lack in the US.
It isn't really a comparable situation. Acting like it is doesn't do anything constructive for American problems.
Of course you can draw comparisons regarding access to food for the poor between those two continents.
Looking more at other countries is imho benelovant for the states.
I was a military wife for a lot of years. Trying to talk about the differences in compensation and lifestyle between the American military and American civilian jobs is quite challenging. If you want to talk about what works in Europe, you need to talk about all the factors that make it work.
People in this discussion are saying "If you give cash to an addict, they will spend it on drugs." Well, most poor Americans have serious health issues. It is one of the things that makes them poor.
If you need medical care and you have to pay for it and it's very expensive, giving such a person money won't go to food. It will go to medical bills.
If you want to give Americans cash instead if food stamps, first you need to give them free medical care. We really need universal basic health care in the US.
If you need medicine more than you need food, why is it bad that the money is going to medicine? How is it better to give someone medicine + [cost of food] than to give them [cost of medicine + code of food] and then let them buy medicine and food as needed? It's the same number of tax dollars in benefits and fewer in overhead. And more value to the recipient because they get to decide if it's worth $5000 to have a marginally effective surgery or use the money for something else, instead of having a bureaucracy decide they can't have it when they want it or they can have it but not the cash equivalent if they need something else more.
I guess I can see that if say, you have a person with an addiction, if they don't have access to free healthcare to treat that addiction, giving them straight-up cash might be a poor idea.
Of course that's just another reason to implement universal healthcare, not to shame poor people with food stamps.
The whole “food stamp recipients = crack addicts” is a lie created by tax cutting politicians. 44 MILLION people receive food stamps. There are not 44 million crack addicts in America. There aren’t even 4 million.
You’re not looking at this from the money supply side in a democratically chosen policy environment. I am a high taxpayer and I’d happily vote for increased EBT distributions at the expense of my own tax rate. I would not do the same for unrestricted money. I’d vote for even more if luxury foods were eliminated from EBT. There are many like me. I don’t want anyone to go hungry but I am also not volunteering my wallet at their discretion.
Giving them cash would take fewer of your tax dollars to achieve the same goal.
> if luxury foods were eliminated
If someone who's dependent on EBT money is spending it on caviar and filet mignon, they're going to go hungry for most of the month. Restrictions just add administrative overhead without benefit. (They also make the program more paternalistic and potentially stigmatizing, but that's a different argument.)
I’ve seen a person buying organic ribeye steaks with EBT. I assume they were not going hungry because they were morbidly obese. And paternalistic is fine with me, that means like a father which is what buying someone’s food is, really.
Anecdata:
I lost several dress sizes by eating things like organic beef. I have a medical condition that causes malabsorption. It is routinely treated with expensive prescription digestive enzymes, plus large amounts of prescription drugs.
I'm a former military wife. Technically, I should be able to get the $100k/year or more worth of medical treatment I am supposed to need for free, at taxpayer expense.
Eating right is vastly cheaper, saves all kinds of tax dollars and also gives me a hugely higher quality of life. Win/win/win.
Does anybody thank me for doing the right thing here? No. Instead, I am frequently attacked for any number of reasons, some of which seem to be rooted in this idea that poor people aren't entitled to eat well, and their health be damned.
You have no idea what that person's needs are. Being able to see that they weigh a lot and what they purchased on a particular day doesn't really give you enough information to know if they were spending wastefully on frivolous purchases or not on that day.
If organic ribeyes is saving this person’s life maybe they need to be in a hospital. How about if you need an organic ribeye you can get your doctor to prescribe you one and then your EBT card works for it. I sure as hell don’t think that people who earn their wages and can’t afford organic ribeyes should be buying them for people who can’t afford them.
Is that really feasible, though? Fungibility of money and all that, how can restricting EBT actually restrict what people use the money to buy? Unless EBT is literally the only money they have.
There are two basic ways to provide funding, either you force people to ask for it and deal with a long approval process, or you trust them with it in the beginning and subject them to an audit process. Approval processes suck because they take too long and the bureaucracy stunts your ability to react to changing conditions, which is why most private sector companies use audit processes internally.
And even though the public sector incurs real costs due to an approval process (you're not just paying the salaries of the overview bureaucrats, but also the salaries of the project workers who need to sit around and wait for funding to come in), it persists because it is viewed as more legitimate and more protective of legitimacy.
If you ask the public whether they would prefer for a public program to cost $100 million, including $20 million which ended up being embezzled into private pockets, or $150 million spent entirely legitimately, most members of the public would rather spend the $150 million for a legitimate program, even if you could show them how the additional taxes needed directly affected their personal bottom lines.
The reason why we don't give poor people cash directly is simple: even if 99%+ of beneficiaries will use the money responsibly, a tiny minority will not. That tiny minority will get written up in the press, and the perceived unfairness will politically doom the program. How public money is spent is, unfortunately, important.
All the more reason to support $600/adult type of UBI, IMO.
So rent can increase by $300.
So build more housing.
Money is fungible, not spending money on food means you might be able to spend some on gas. The advantage of food stamps over cash is that it helps overcome middle class voter's judgmental attitude towards the poor.
> But if you give people food stamps, they'll buy food with it. Even if they already have suitable food, because it's free money that can only be used for one thing.
Well, no. A lot of them will sell the food stamps at a discount to people who do want food, but would like to pay a little less for it. The poor person gets money and so does the grocery shopper.
A lot of commenters are focused on the reselling of food stamps...
They're not physical stamps anymore and haven't been for at least a decade. It's a debit card that gets money deposited monthly. You can't sell the money without selling the card and your future access to the money going to the card.
In other words, the fraud you're all worried about has already been addressed.
You can easily sell the money without selling the card. You just need to ask what people want, and buy it for them.
> Some idiot would give a homeless person some giant bag of apples.
Is that the appropriate word for that person?
It looks like correct usage to me:
https://www.wordnik.com/words/idiot
The hypothetical person is certainly not offended, and previous usage as a medical diagnosis is considered archaic.
Yes?
No.
I'm also not really sure why apples were singled out here, since they're an example of produce that does last pretty well without refrigeration.
It was an actual incident that I witnessed. Perhaps it stuck with me precisely because apples keep relatively well. But there they were, going bad.
If you aren't homeless, no one expects you to sit and eat a giant bag of apples all by yourself within one to three days. People in housing who are gifted a large amount of produce or whose gardens overflow will post questions to forums concerning creative uses. They will can, pickle, etc the excess -- the amount they can't reasonably eat fresh. People expect you to eat an apple or two in a day, not twenty or thirty of them. Unless you are homeless, I guess. Then suddenly you should be grateful for 30 apples instead of revolted at the idea of trying to finish them by yourself before they rot in the heat.
Canning, pickling etc is beyond the means of a homeless person. So I have no idea why any middle class person would think giving a huge bag of a single type of fruit to a homeless individual in hot weather would make any sense whatsoever. I cannot fathom it.
If you give a big enough bag of even a hardy fruit to someone with no means to preserve it, it will rot. Even apples.
As a rubber tramp, I have EBT/SNAP (for the next 2-3 months until the Republicans take it away), 2 propane burners and Costco but no fridge (it needs servicing). It’s often buy fresh as-needed, which is expensive, or buy things that keep like protein bars and bag of rice/lentil/quinoa. Giving homeless people canned goods is a waste because they usually require can openers or are too heavy for the amount of food contained.
Grocery Outlet and WinCo often have hydroponic LiveLettuce for cheap that keeps for a long time. Apples and some citrus last. I wish I had fresh tomatoes, they’re so good. Fresh tomato, basil, onion and garlic salad is to die for: see FrenchGuyCooking on IG. If I had a solar-powered hydroponic greenhouse trailer, I’d grow all of my own vegetables. One modern adaptation is some farmer’s markets take EBT and offer extra incentives... which all well-and-good if you have refrigeration.
The bigger problem in the produce industry is the parallels with swipe dating apps: optimizing for looks, but not taste or nutrition... hence why store-bought vegetables taste like cardboard. As an example, a former coworker had a job at one of those fruit stands. Blemished fruits and vegetables were fine to eat but wouldn’t sell, so they went into pies and soups. It seems to me shrewd farmers and shoppers would find a way to rate/compete produce, shorten the supply chain and deliver naturally-ripened food.
Finally, a Russian hustler friend of mine fregans all sorts of stuff: steaks, salads, takeaway meals, whatever. I should do that more TBH because expiration dates are very conservative.
From my old homeless blog:
https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2014/08/l...
Best.
The vast majority of canned goods I buy these days have tear tops. Is this not the norm in the USA?
I’d say 95% or more are still stamped ends, requiring a can opener. (Though a field can opener [P-38/P-51 type] is light and cheap, so shouldn’t be viewed as an impenetrable barrier, IMO.)
Thank you very much for mentioning and linking to the Shirky Principle. I've been thinking about the idea for a while but didn't know that it has a succinct name.
>Our BeetBox CSA supports small farmers of color mostly farming under 50 acres, [...]
...
>Imperfect Produce is only able to make a profit by working with the larger global agribusinesses, not the picturesque small and mid-sized farms they project in their marketing campaign.
Can someone explain what I'm missing? They get their produce from small farmers, Imperfect Produce gets their produce from large farmers, where is the overlap?
>it certainly doesn’t help small, local farmers or address the source of waste: overproduction by industrial farms as they produce the perfect produce sold in supermarkets.
So in this context, the over production is being considered "waste" but once Imperfect Produce uses it, it's perfectly good food that food banks and soup kitchens no longer have access to.
Also, there is a lot of implication that all of the food waste going to support communities is being utilized effectively. But certainly they, too, discard some portion of food, not to mention issues with quality or sanitation.
Clearly I'm missing something. That, or they really called it on the "sour grapes" thing.
They (Phat Beets) are operating under the common misunderstanding that small farms are always 'better' than larger ones, and that 'local' produce is, ipso facto, more sustainable than produce grown elsewhere and transported efficiently in bulk.
There are valid arguments to be made against high-input agriculture. None of them are discussed in this blog post, which seems to be not so much a case of sour grapes as one of rigid ideology.
As an aside, a valuable lesson here about what matters to consumers: people buy things to address their own needs. The business that makes it easier for consumers to feel good about themselves wins. 'I eat ugly vegetables' is an easier, even more fun consumer story than 'I help fight entrenched societal ills by buying vegetables from bad neihborhoods.' All else being equaly, IP would still dominate here based on resonating with more consumers.
The only reasonable interpretation I could come up with was based on this quote: Small, local and urban farmers are losing their CSAs–their lifeline to economic viability.
The argument would be: IP took a large chunk of customers away from these farms, which also supplied PB.
Not that I buy it necessarily, but it is in keeping with the common theme of manipulating conscious but ignorant consumers. (E.g., how some companies might say "Our crazy amounts of single use packaging are totally recyclable")
My girl signed us up for the ugly fruit box, and I’ve done a couple shifts doing processing (sorting) at two food banks. Maybe this is different elsewhere but the two streams of food had very little in common.
What has shocked me is that I expected ugly food to get turned into processed food. You know, lopsided potatoes made into soup or Pringles. Weird looking apples into fruit juice.
What I get instead is oranges the size of grapefruit, grapefruit the size of oranges, and a reality check. The food I’m picturing is made on machines. Machines like to work with uniform inputs and usually can’t cut out bad bits. So maybe they’re turning all the apples that are between three and four standard deviations below normal size into applesauce, but they probably aren’t turning giant or scabby grapefruit into my breakfast beverage.
It does kind of make me wonder if there’s a market for making machines that can do that though. We have to be close to building that sort of tech at a competitive price.
4 standard deviations excludes 63 in a million. Why would a designer of food prep automation design around that? Why would a market for such outliers form? At some point, it’s cheaper and more efficient to compost 0.006% of food than to design ultra-flexible processing equipment.
What’s surprising to me is that the alternate market for such outlier food evolved. It would seem cheaper to just compost it. I actually wonder how much of the market is genuine economically driven vs “feel good”/signaling.
OK nerd. When was the last time you saw the word “maybe” in sentences that are intended to be scientifically accurate? But I’ll bite.
Do we know for certain that fruit sizes are a normal distribution? If not then you can’t estimate sigma the way you did. Most of our tree fruit comes from genetic clones, with a different root graft tuned to soil type. So size is going to come down to weather, health and inputs (water nutrients and sun), but not really to genetics.
Compost should be the third or forth option for this process. The one cull we did, all of the rotting fruit went to compost, and the too far gone or gouged fruit went to a farmer for his cows. Pigs should work just as well (better, really, since pork is much more efficient than cow, caloricly speaking).
Maybe free range chickens too. My friend who is somewhere between overachieving gardener and homesteader gives her spent cider apples to her chickens. And I know of small scale chicken farmers who collect restaurant waste and let their chickens forage on the piles. But at industrial scale it probably goes to compost.
But even compost and manure can still have a life if the right people are involved. We should be doing more of that.
New Belgian Brewery (a B Corp), last I heard, double composts their spent grains. First anaerobically to get methane to fire the boilers, and a second aerobic composting which gets spread on the property.
And one voice in the permaculture community, Mark Shepard, rotates his cows and chickens so the fly spawn on the cow patties are in the larval stage when the chickens arrive. Good protein and the manure is dispersed “for free”.
Even the food we don’t eat can do good.
My guess would be that the selection of processed foods happens at a different level. Ugly produce is sorted out of batches that go to places sorting produce for retail. Whole other batches go into processed food. They are probably different varieties, harvested at different levels of ripeness.
Like no one would can any tomatoes that were harvested for retail, because those canned tomatoes would suck.
I had the exact same thought as well 'nobody cares what the jam, canned, or juiced fruit looks like'. I guess it might depend largely on the exact mechanics used for what is feasible for what application and how much they need to care about the end product. Like say if one attempted a juice or alcohol precursor pulp production by just pulping or pressing everything, leaves and all and then filtering out unacceptably sized bits.
There are some fruit juice places that do use everything. Growing up we toured a couple local farms that would outright use all oranges no matter what. It was kinda gross to watch but I guess that’s part of learning where food comes from.
It’s probably more of a cost thing for the large companies. Just cheaper to only use a certain grade to entire their product is consistent.
>Imperfect Produce claims they’re 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.
I've been chewing on this for a while. Who's in charge of setting up a social safety net? Whose responsibility is it to make sure people don't starve in the streets?
I thought I paid taxes to my government to socialize the issue across my representative district, but my government (in the USA) has disagreed with me - that money is to be spent on fighter jets (to quote the executive branch), while the churches are responsible for taking care of the homeless. And by the way, the homeless are responsible for policing themselves (to quote my mayor).
A couple weeks ago Domino's Pizza filled a bunch of potholes and stamped their logo on the asphalt after. I thought that would cause a national discussion. I thought at the very least, the city that it happened in would be humiliated enough to make the foolish mistake of maybe trying to slap back at Domino's for putting their logo all over the street. Nope, business as usual.
In other words, why suddenly are people starving again because imperfect produce found a capitalist way to reduce waste?
The article's term "gentrification" has a more specific focus than overall social welfare, and I think it's spot-on. Entrepreneurs notice an "underutilized" resource (housing / food waste) and create a new distribution network, disrupting the old one. This is good ol' competition (which I am a fan of), but it's important to acknowledge that it impacts people who aren't "competing", like food bank visitors. Even if the new network captures more value than the old one, it may also redistribute that value -- as the article contends, from food banks that would get more donations to "conscious consumers" who prefer this to traditional groceries, and of course to Imperfect Produce via profits.
Regardless of how you feel about the ethics of the above, it's at least part of Imperfect Produce's identity. If they are marketing to conscious consumers, this article helps those consumers consider more broadly their social impact.
For my own value judgement, I feel like I'm missing some important data: - If IP is taking waste produce from larger farms, are they actually competing with BeetBox for the supply of produce? - Downstream of above, has IP's activity actually reduced the amount of food donations being made available to food banks?
If IP is mainly competing with BeetBox for the "conscious consumers" that subsidize their charitable work, maybe BB can focus efforts to marketing their distinction from IP. Maybe this article is the first step.
Alternatively, if the BB folks are prioritizing social impact, have they tried to convince/train IP to work with the same social gaps they fill? If IP is more efficient in extracting conscious-consumer dollars, they have more surplus that could be poured back into the community.
I bet Domino's worked with the city and had some sort of explicit permission.
> found a capitalist way to reduce waste?
I don't know anything about either of these groups, but the article says that this is simply the marketing of Imperfect Produce that doesn't bear out in reality. Do you have information contradicting their points that you decided not to share?
I don't think I understand what you mean... But I almost certainly have less information than them or probably you, so am happy to hear more.
IP assert: "This food was going to be thrown out & going to waste. We are using it for something!"
Article asserts: "That food wasn't being thrown out it was going to food banks and homeless shelters."
So while IP is almost certainly helping the farmers by paying them for produce they can't normally sell they certainly aren't reclaiming mountains of food otherwise destined for rot.
> why suddenly are people starving again because imperfect produce found a capitalist way to reduce waste?
They don't. They wont. The article is nonsensical and ignores basic economics. Suffers from "we know better" attitude.
Small farmers are struggling. If the ugly produce helps them become little more profitable it is both good for them and also good for the food security of the nation. More available food would mean food will be cheaper for everyone. Will the world be better place if small farmers are out of business and a large businesses like Amazon takes up farming ?
Personally do not think there is anything ugly about ugly produce.
Note: I am not a rich techie. I earn less than $10K a year.
It's not small farmers that this is helping though. The article quotes Imperfect Produce as saying they need to be able to take at least a truckload of produce off a farm each week for it to be economical, so they don't deal with small farms. This is helping the large agribusinesses, not the mom and pop farms.
Yet so many people want to live in SF.
In all seriousness, banning plastic straws is a much lower hanging fruit than solving the homeless situation. The money to build and maintain affordable housing has to come from somewhere, probably by raising taxes. Would the SF residents, lots of whom are high income earners and who ironically are the ones feeding the crazy housing and rent prices, be willing to chip in to solve the problem or just sit on the sidelines and complain about the homeless?
> Yet so many people want to live in SF.
They do mainly because of the promises of a high-paying job in the tech industry, not because a politician focuses his policies on plastic straws instead of taking care of people in need.
How many board of supervisors meetings have you been to? Various programs and policies related to homelessness are discussed constantly.
Can you name a supervisor you think is more concerned with plastic straws than homelessness?
SF spends over $300M a year on homeless and we still have homeless people defecating openly on Market Street during the day. They don’t even collect metrics to figure out if the money is working (which it’s not) or have any accountability.
Surprisingly (to me) it seems this is approximately true [1]:
> San Francisco reportedly is set to spend nearly $280 million in its next budget fighting homelessness – an average of $37,300 for each of the city’s estimated 7,499 homeless residents
I live in a place where I don't see homeless people even on a monthly basis. Maybe a fuew time's per year when I've ventured an hour or more from home. So I'm sure there is a lot of nuance to the problem of homelessness that I don't understand. Still, considering these facts naively, I fail to see how such a large amount of spending can fail to address the issue:
1. $30k per year is more than enough to enable a person to be not-homeless. Rent them an apartment, buy them groceries and medical care, etc.
2. If they refuse to live in that apartment because they have itchy feet, schizophrenia, or just don't like the wallpaper, then perhaps we should suppose that they don't consider their homelessness to be much of a problem.
3. If any of those folks who don't take the city up on the free apartment do something illegal, like defecating in public, they can probably be incarcerated or institutionalized for $30k per year.
4. Some of the people from #2 might not be eliminated in step #3, because they don't break any laws. Being that that's the case, even if we consider them to be a nuisance, shouldn't we just get over it and ignore them?
[1]: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/07/19/san-francisco-continues...
Hi - small note from someone who has worked extensively with homeless. While each bullet point you make has a superficial logic, they are (unfortunately !) Incorrect due to erroneous assumptions.
If the "problem" was as simple as you assume, the solution pointed out would have already worked.
It's a complex problem, which requires complex solutions. In my experience, the major element is mental health. Many people are on the streets due to mental health issues, or develop mental health issues when on the street.
One take away note: most people are only two simultaneous life disasters away from being on the streets. One disaster (health / family / relationship / job) can typically be weathered, but two or more at once is typically catastrophic. There's many a PhD / CEO / father of four on the street.
This is a fallacy - for all we know, SF might be spending that money to help 20,000 people to find homes, and 7,500 homeless people are still left or newly homeless.
> If any of those folks who don't take the city up on the free apartment do something illegal, like defecating in public, they can probably be incarcerated or institutionalized for $30k per year.
Should a non-homeless person be institutionalized or incarcerated for defecating in public?
Really there is a small but seriously problematic population of people in need of a high level of mental health care who I would guess are the primary perpetrators of public defecation + urination (schizophrenia, addiction/intoxication, etc.). The 1,320 homeless people needing the most aid required $106 million in emergency medical and mental health services in 2015. Putting this money to work institutionalizing these chronic cases seems like a sensible and responsible thing to do – and it isn't hard to pick these individuals out. Staff at the General know all the regulars.
I mean, I feel you, but having witnessed first hand the hell of an incorrect psychological diagnosis followed by state ordered psych ward imprisonment, things can get ugly fast.
We'd need a very very good mechanism for deciding who gets institutionalized if we're going to start suspending legal rights. Far better than we have now. A Galaxy better than "staff at general recognizing" someone.
FYI:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17485109
It seems you're implying that we should pull that money out of "on homeless" (not exactly sure what that means, can you clarify?)
So then what happens? The homeless die? What solution do you want?
There’s a common refrain that “SF doesn’t spend enough money on the homeless, because they are rich and greedy etc etc. if only there was some compassion!!!!” In fact SF spends as much money on the homeless as they spend on the streets and parks. This shows that throwing money at the problem hasn’t helped.
how about measuring the effectiveness of the programs using that money, and improving them at least even if you want to keep at the same budget? why is bad acceptable when you spend 300M a year?
Do you have evidence that the city council is not measuring the effectiveness of that money, and improving methodologies?
If they are, then it looks like they are pretty bad at what they are doing. And since its a public program all measurements should be public as well, by definition.
"on homeless"?
I'm sorry, but are these even people to you any more? Most might say "homeless people" at least.
The current thought is not to identify a person based on their primary characteristic at all any more.
These are not "homeless people."
These are "people who are currently homeless."
Not to point you out specifically as others in the discussion are using word choices like yours as well.
Lets put the person first.
This pointless flamewar began by breaking this site guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." There are plenty of other plausible interpretations you could have reacted to, especially since the comment used the phrase "homeless people" a couple of words later in the same sentence.
Worse, you went for personal attack downthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787724). We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And what is the primary characteristic of a homeless person? "homeless" describes it pretty good.
How about being a person? Or friendly? Or a good father?
When someone goes bankrupt most don't say "Oh this bankrupt person tried to [blah blah]."
It just seems weird to me with homeless we replace their entire personality with the trait.
The following sentences say the same thing but I feel they come across vastly different.
"The mentally handicapped person went to the store."
vs
"The person, who is mentally handicapped, went to the store."
Because it's more informative. "a person" doesn't tell anything descriptive at all; "friendly" or "a good father" would be relevant if we were talking about their personalities, but if we're talking about their economic needs, then "homeless" is the single property that's most relevant to the discussion.
With your examples about mental handicap, the same principle applies - it matters what's the topic of the discussion, what's the next sentence, and thus where the emphasis should be. If the fact that that person is mentally handicapped is irrelevant to the rest of the story, then "person" is the part that should be emphasised; but if the mental handicap is the key factor for what happens next, then that is the most salient information of the sentence and it should be emphasised.
Then what is wrong with "person, who is homeless"?
Describe the man, don't define him.
>How about being a person? Or friendly? Or a good father?
First one is obvious, every person is ... a person. 2nd and 3rd are not determinable by looking.
So then let them be people. Why do you need to distill a person down to one adjective?
Anyways, I can see this is pointless. I hope your day is as pleasant as you are.
I know they are people. Why do you think otherwise? Don't you think about people when you read "homeless"? Makes me wonder, since you so strongly react to it.
Artist? Mother? PhD?
Since we're firing off arbitrary primary characteristics, let's just choose "male" for me. Could be that I'm homeless. Could be I'm a billionaire. I could be a Nazi with heads in my freezer.
Dimunitive language dehumanizes. Why the effort to classify with a single word?
>Why the effort to classify with a single word?
Reduce redundancy. Other "occupations" do this as well. You say "painter", not "people/person who paint(s)".
One, you choose your occupation.
Two, if you really want to reduce redundancy just use "person/people." Everyone knows if you say "homeless person", that that person is, in fact, a person. Seems like an extra word there.
If you want to be precise and point out someone is homeless, use "person, who is homeless." If two words and a comma is too redundant for you, see my first point.
yeah, with the extra word being "person", not "homeless"
I answered as well without seeing your comment but you phased this much better than I did. Thank you.
I'm all for humanization, and some people can really be cruel. But I also think it is important to point out that 55% of the homeless population in SF has been homeless for a decade or more, and are not just "people who are currently homeless."
And at some point we have to accept imprecise language in service of useful abstraction (which is all language is).
I wouldn't say its imprecise or anything.
Just that focusing on the fact these are people first, and that homeless is something they are experiencing and not something they are, is important.
Well, sure?
Banning straws is easy. Solving homelessness is not. It's not as if the SF Supes can just have a "No more homelessness" vote.
Sure they could. Just pay for housing for all homeless SF residents. The only reason it doesn't happen is because people with money and power don't care enough to make the material sacrifices required to solve the problem.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. Would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Homelessness is rooted in two things: very serious personal problems that have no easy answer combined with a dire shortage of genuinely affordable housing in the US.*
We need to dramatically improve availability of affordable housing. That would get a lot of retirees and the like off the street.
But the ones who would, say, burn the house down while you weren't looking need a lot more than a free place to live.
If you care deeply about this issue, work on affordable housing. But please stop acting like homeless people are all puppies that need to be adopted by some well-meaning stranger. It's incredibly dehumanizing and tends to compound the problem.
* https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...
I've been reading you on here for a while and I respect your experience and deep thoughtfulness on these issues so I'm really interested in your opinion on this: what about the other half of the problem? How can we navigate the balance of providing mental health services vs. forced incarceration? I want this to be government funded, but our government has a track record on mental health that literally includes long periods in which "put them on an island" was the official policy for "treating" wide varieties of mentally ill people. What things could we do that would actually make a difference here? Is there any meaningful way to make progress without reducing the freedom of the mentally ill?
Better nutrition would help a whole lot. It is more effective and more humane than the drugs we prefer. If psychoactive drugs help a mental health issue, you can assume it has medical roots for at least a portion of the problem. Treating the medical roots, which can include various infections, is a good path forward.
There used to be an article online called "Diseases of the mind." One thing it talked about: When antibiotics were invented, thousands of people in asylums were successfully treated for syphilis and then set free. Another point it made: Mental illness tends to occur in demographic clusters exactly like infectious disease, which implies it might actually be due to infectious disease.
Let me suggest this for a little related reading:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867
Edit: This is what I am working on:
http://pocketputer.com
Being homeless and helpless is crazy-making. I want to help people start making money, setting goals, etc while still homeless, like I did.
Video from The Loneliness Project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYc85A8f2CM
It's aimed at the issue if isolation in the elderly. Homeless people also suffer from social isolation.
It's late. I'm tired. I will add that not all personal problems are about being crazy. Some people have learning disabilities or other barriers to regular employment.
I feel like this answer really sucks because of the framing of the problem in this subthread. I have tried to answer your actual question, which is a legitimate question, but I think the problem is more complicated than that.
:/
It seems that affordable housing as such isn't a problem in USA, the problem is with affordable housing in certain areas where the jobs are. Housing a jobless, homeless person can be very affordable, there is a lot of empty, cheap housing available in areas where population has decreased due to lack of jobs. If we accept that we're going to subsidize these people anyway, then the lack of jobs at those locations isn't an issue.
This seems like an enormously cynical way to argue to me. Yes, I'm sure there is still a lot of affordable living space available in the desert.
It's not just about availability of work, it's also about the availability of infrastructure, opportunities to make connections, in short, ensuring a decent quality if life.
If the current trend continues, this will probably push larger parts of the population to increasingly low-quality living spaces. This isn't even a problem restricted to homelessness.
But that's kind of the point - no matter what "should" be, it's an unavoidable fact that desirable real estate / desirable location of living is an inherently scarce, limited, exclusive resource; whatever you do, not everyone can have it. Living in the best locations is a luxury - the average person can't live in Hollywood Hills or NY SoHo, and yes, they have to to live in a lower quality living space that they can afford.
A homeless person wanting to live only in SF is just like a starving person wanting only caviar; it's a luxury good that they're not going to realistically get because so many others want it as well.
If you want better availability of infrastructure, better opportunities to make connections, and a better quality of life, then the question is how to improve the quality of life at locations which currently have low cost real estate - and decoupling income from jobs is one way that can happen; for many of these places the living environment actually is quite good (mainly because you can afford much more space), but the main (only?) problem is the lack of local jobs; if the local people wouldn't be forced to move to where the jobs are, there's nothing wrong with the infrastructure.
A homeless person wanting to live only in SF is just like a starving person wanting only caviar
Homeless people gravitate towards big cities because that's where the concentration of services tend to be. It is why I went to San Diego: there are enough soup kitchens there to eat every day, even if you have no money or benefits at all. I left San Diego after I got food stamps and had dealt with a few things where I felt I could cope without daily access to homeless services.
It's inhumane to suggest shipping people elsewhere and actively evicting them from a particular city because they are poor. This is a mentality similar to the one that was behind removing Native kids from their families, sending them to boarding schools, forbidding them from speaking their own language, etc.
I have a collection of websites I run. I actively encourage people to do things like develop portable income and move someplace cheaper. That is exactly how I got back into housing.
But one woman I spoke with couldn't move because she was currently a college student. She had huge student loans that would immediately come due if she dropped out of her program. She needed to complete her degree in order to have any hope of making her life work.
Other people have children and shared custody with the other parent, or they can't leave because they are on parole and are required to remain in the area or any number of other reasons.
Homeless people are still people. They still have many things going on in their lives that can give them ties to a particular place.
Homelessness arises out of complex, multifaceted problems. One-size-fits-all solutions do not work and tend to make things worse, not better.
> But that's kind of the point - no matter what "should" be, it's an unavoidable fact that desirable real estate / desirable location of living is an inherently scarce, limited, exclusive resource;
Yes, but the scarcity of real estate hasn't changed - there haven't been any holes suddenly opening up in the ground and decreasing the amount if available space. Nevertheless, housing prices have skyrocketed (and so have the number of homeless from what I've read).
So to stay in your frame of discussion, it seems the definition of what is "non-luxury" living space has shifted considerably.
You aren't the first person to say something like this to me.
I am willing to actively encourage poor people to develop portable income and move someplace cheaper.
I am not willing to agree that we should ship people with boatloads of problems to the middle of fuck nowhere with no services, no shopping etc because burned out hell holes have nominally cheap housing.
That's potentially an even emptier life than they currently have.
Do you earnestly think that setting up a fine for places that continue to use plastic straws is not considerably more trivial than creating a program to pay for housing for all the homeless in SF?
See my comment above. SF spends $300M on roughly 7500 homeless people per year.
SF spends as much money on streets and parks as they do on the homeless. It is a huge part of the city’s budget.
Well, consider that SF has a diverse population, with several different factions who disagree dramatically about homelessness, help for drug addicts, housing policy, etc., and many other topics of “concern”.
It sounds like you personally are not at all involved politically, other than maybe occasionally voting and chatting on this forum where none of the stakeholders or policymakers involved are likely to see it.
The way the American system of government works (and to some extent any system of government), problems get addressed when someone cares enough about them to spend their time and attention working on them, organizing, looking for compromises with other stakeholders, etc.
There are folks out there working on increasing Bay Area’s housing supply, helping the homeless get the help they need, building public bathrooms, drug rehabilitation, lobbying the city to change police priorities, and so on. You can look them up and lend some of your time / money to projects you think are important.
City government is done by you/us, the residents of the city. It’s not some abstract force beyond human comprehension, but people just like you who are willing to put in the effort to make things work.
Though, fair warning, it seems like you are more concerned with judging/condemning the less fortunate and maybe chasing them out of your town than really fixing any of the root problems. If you go into working on government/policy problems with that attitude, be prepared for a lot of frustration. Actually, be prepared for frustration regardless; democratic government is inherently frustrating.
> Well, consider that SF has a diverse population, with several different factions who disagree dramatically about homelessness, help for drug addicts, housing policy, etc., and many other topics of “concern”.
Yes. Like home owners and people looking for a place to live.
That's not a fair characterization. I would argue that dealing with the homeless population is significantly more complex of an issue than dealing with plastic straws.
That's the dumbest and most abhorrent strawman I have heard in a while.
Maybe so, but please don't react by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes this place worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sure, blame the local governments, don't blame the tax revolt that happened 40 years ago and has crippled the entire state since then.
The author seems to be saying “don’t sell imperfect produce to people... only sell them perfect produce so that you have to waste huge amounts of resources in overproduction so that the leftovers can be donated to the poor.”
No. Feeding the poor is important but there must be a better way than that.
It's not the strongest supporting argument, but I think you can make the case that Imperfect Produce also do a good job of destigmatizing eating and using ugly produce.
If you look at the formation of a lot of Western welfare systems, most had a focus on dignity. It's no fun to be the one kid with the ugly produce, or explicitly going to something that's for the poor kids. We see it a lot with adults as well - how many people don't take advantage of benefits they deserve, because they don't want to be people that have to take these benefits. If we can support a culture that says produce doesn't have to be perfect to be socially acceptable, then I think everyone benefits.
While I'm sure Phat Beets do good stuff, I'm not sure if their constant refrain on helping the poor and marginalised is helpful in the long run. In my view, a good local grocery store that sells fresh produce at an affordable price is going to be a massive help, and I think both they and Imperfect Produce do the same thing.
Finally Phat Beets only deliver in the East Bay. Imperfect Produce also come to San Francisco.
Food banks are charity which should be tackled by the welfare state. Food banks do good work. They do amazing work. But it's work which shouldn't have to be done, and it's an indicator oF economic failure.
Commoditising ugly fruit and veg is good. We should stop treating perfectly good food as reject and we should stop assuming the best use of ugly food is donation to the poor.
Poor people need jobs and state intervention not food banks
When they don't get state intervention, they'll need food banks, which is exactly the case right now.
What about when there aren't enough jobs?
They need other welfare services: food stamps, long-term unemployment benefits, medicaid, vocational training, minimum income guarantees, free daycare for children, etc.
These services should be provided by the local government rather than charities.
> It’s a clever money making scheme, but it certainly doesn’t help small, local farmers or address the source of waste: overproduction by industrial farms as they produce the perfect produce sold in supermarkets.
No...that's literally exactly what they are addressing. They are creating demand for the imperfect produce. That was the problem in the first place, lack of demand for imperfect produce and the inseparability of imperfect produce production from perfect produce production.
Does the food industry have a moral obligation to produce waste for the poor? It seems they discovered a market segment that had been previously overlooked.
Being transparent about where the food would have gone might make people think twice before lowering their quality standards, but in aggregate, I think the technology to route second-rate food to bargain hunters is a genie that won't be easily rebottled.
We are all, at the close of everything, equally human, and I would argue that there is not a human alive who has who does not bear some measure of responsibility for those who have not. Even a small measure at the very least, and getting shady at the expense of nonprofits and foodbanks is probably enough for, y'know...most Americans with the luxury--and it is a luxury, an extreme one--to found a venture-backed startup to surpass theirs.
> Does the food industry have a moral obligation to produce waste for the poor?
So, if private enterprises have no responsibility (because of free enterprise), the state has no responsibility (because of small government) and charities are strictly voluntary yet still compete against enterprises, then who actually does have responsibility?
I signed up for Imperfect Produce about 6 months ago. I'm relatively happy with the service. Despite calling the produce "imperfect" often the freshness and taste is better than what I find at the store. Caveat, I have not liked the quality of the fruit so I stick to their vegetable offerings. The main driver for me sticking with the service so long is that a) we do not have to make grocery trips as frequently, b) my diet has improved. I feel a pressure to eat the veg we have on hand before the next delivery, which means eating veg for breakfast many days. And lunch. And twice for dinner.
I also don't own a car, and having services like this helps me continue the car-free lifestyle.
I am sympathetic to phatbeets' criticism. Despite leaning towards not changing my consumer habits, I will have to mull over their points and evaluate my priorities.
At some point though, I need to eat and if the service fits within my overall lifestyle but I care about community hunger, maybe I can donate a box of produce to a food shelter through IP?
I’m beginning to think VC is the most important driving force of rising inequality. It replaces natural flourishing of community connected entrepreneurship with a winner take all market. It crushes the less connected and resourced with tactics that would be called dumping in other markets.
I strongly disagree. In my opinion, the relationship between VC and rising inequality is indirect at most. The primary factors which contribute to inequality in a given country are related to the number of available jobs, the distribution of wages among various subsets of the working population, the robustness of social safety net programs, and the underlying distribution of political and economic power.
Our startup movement, more so than any other segment of the global economy, embodies the idea of the "American Dream" that if you work hard you can be successful and move up the social ladder. It's not perfect, and clearly it's not a pure meritocracy, but to claim that the VC world is "the most important driving force of rising inequality" is very inaccurate in my judgement.
It is true that silicon valley style tech companies are more and more becoming an important part of the economy, but the types of startups which are part of the tech startup eco system are creating jobs and are disrupting existing industries as part of a healthy capitalist process.
Here are two factors which I consider to have a much more significant influence than VC's on the global trend of rising inequality:
1) It is well understood that middle class families keep on average the majority of their wealth in the form of a house which they own. The housing crisis, which was fueled by wall street excess, wiped out an incredible amount of wealth from poor and middle class families and the bailout and shorting transferred this wealth to the top 0.1%
2) Approximately 3 trillion is collected by the US government every year in taxes, and approximately 1.5 trillion is borrowed by the government, for a total budget of approximately 4.5 trillion. This money is handed out by congress members to powerful banks and corporations from their state as a form of quid pro quo for campaign donations. The budget deficit is then used to justify a never ending cycle of cuts to social safety net programs.
Article is terrible. At the last part
>A Case of Sour Grapes?
I thought there was going to be something interesting but no, that's only a header no content afterwards to answer that rhetorical question.
Also I am kinda bothered by the repetitive use of small farmers of color. This also surprisingly seems to be mentioned nowhere else on their pages. Why not just Precarious ? local? Engaged for affordable quality or whatever? Is really color the most accurate and essential way to describe the farmers in this project?
I already have no sympathy for this organization after reading what should be an unfair case that could help to bring traction about them.
Social programs should really plan for these types of disruptors more often. We've had Asda (Walmart to you US folk) trying to do the same by adding boxes of below commercial grade into supermarkets couple years ago. It really pressured our local small suppliers by people seeing the cost of two trips higher than the difference in prices. I don't think the author should feel more cornered though - imperfect food still makes perfect meals at a higher margin - perhaps they should use this encouraging response from their community to take their stock, teach to cook healthy and retain profitablity to support their existing programs? They would even be able to maintain a reliable % for food banks and reducing waste by converting excess into food for a later time.
Does anyone have a better source than this article on what's really going on in the industry?
I don't know anything about it, but I'm skeptical. I would have thought that an ugly carrot would end up as carrot juice or sliced up into bits and put into soup.
Many here are not getting the point of this article. Imperfect produce claim that most of the ugly produce used to get wasted , which is not true. Imperfect produce is also killing small non profits like Beetbox by taking away their customers.
Also, what happens when Imperfect produce gets big enough that there isn't enough ugly produce to source. This is a problem with investor driven, profit hungry companies. Other example is SeatToTable which claimed to deliver fish from local fishermen to your doorstep was actually sourcing from other parts of world.
It seems that industries have become negative-sum games.
In the software development industry, there is a similar problem; SaaS services have been replacing free open source solutions even though they are expensive and they take away flexibility from those who use them.
Advertising has become too powerful - It allows for-profit companies to use big VC funding to fund campaigns to trick people into making bad decisions. They end up paying more for the same thing.
In effect, they're changing the world for the worse but they're packaging it nicely.
With SaaS and as a business owner and operator, I see the value in a specialised company offering hosted X and charging for it. My general purpose sysadmin employee will never be as good at looking after whatever niche tool than the SaaS company offering it and charging me $500/mo or whatever.
Even at several thousand/month (approaching thr salary of a sysadmin), the economics can work out fine as you're being more productive and the sysadmin can be working on the really custom things that are core to your business like specific CI pipelines or monitoring and optimising our own software. It's the same argument as AWS. EC2 is really expensive, but it's still usually cheaper than actually running your own hardware at the same service level as AWS can provide.
Scale of operation changes things, but the vast majority of companies are small enough that spending money on SaaS and IaaS is usually better than building a local team of commodity staff doing nothing unique for the business.
The idea that it's difficult to self-host these open source solutions is often part of the marketing but it often isn't true. Many times, I've seen companies host their own HTTP servers but outsource their WebSocket servers even though they don't require much additional DevOps skills if they used the right open source tools.
Often, those companies would actually have benefited from being able to integrate their backend systems more closely.
Regarding back end services; I've used various Amazon AWS services at different companies and, every time, it made development and deployment way more complicated - For example, one corporation I worked at, there was only 1 person in the whole company who had the full knowledge to work with our Lambda setup; this person worked very slowly (probably not their fault) so they were blocking all other teams in the company. It would have been much faster if the company operated the server themselves.
Big for-profit companies have always been marketing against open source software; before, they would say that because it's free; it means that it's insecure and low quality.
Because it's now obvious that this is not true, for-profit companies have resorted to focusing their marketing on the idea that it's "too much effort to manage and scale" open source software.
>>> they would say that because it's free; it means that it's insecure and low quality.
It's not free, it costs money to setup and keep running. It's also often abandoned and unmaintained.
> SaaS services have been replacing free open source solutions even though they are expensive and they take away flexibility from those who use them.
What are some examples?
So they’re complaining that they’re being out-competed?
Why are the comments dissing about phatbeets produce? Their cause is immeasurably better than Ugly Produce.
Remember just recently there was a Chinese browser that received shit tons of money and turned out to be just Chrome browser?
There are plenty of shitty startups out there and this is an obvious case that Ugly Produce is one of them.
What comments diss phatbeets produce? I just read literally every one and I haven't seen anyone complain about the product.
Look: I live in Canada. I've never heard of phatbeats OR Ugly Produce, so it's fair to say that I don't have much of a horse in the race. However, it seems like your ultimate conclusion (UP is a shitty startup and they should DIAF) is based on logic that isn't nearly as "obvious" as you've decided that it is.
Please, feel free to add more information. I find this topic genuinely interesting.
I debated whether to say anything or not because this seems zero-sum and the potential for downside is huge. Yet, here I am at 4:30am, in Canada, being opinionated about a problem that I am far-removed from.
20 years ago, I was a 20y/o radical activist. I spent a significant amount of my time, energy and money participating in street-level activist organizing - all while holding down a job as a software developer by day.
I have protested the KKK (the Ohio police put us in a big cage while robed Klansmen hung out with a PA on the courthouse steps). I have personally been involved with shutting down white power skinhead concerts, which often involved physical confrontation. I wasn't "in Seattle" but I was "in Washington", for those of you old enough or inclined to catch the reference. I've held placards at Free Mumia rallies. I almost got arrested for jabbing Fred Phelps (the God Hates Fags asshole) with an umbrella.
I offer this - if you're willing to trust me - not to brag or signal virtue, but to offer some context when I say that holy fuck the language that they use in their call-to-arms manifesto is irritating to me.
Maybe it's true, what they say about getting old making you conservative. Maybe this post is giving me an existential crisis. And yet, I don't think so. What I actually think is that perhaps East Bay food activists are just guileless in their messaging and are completely tone-deaf to how incredibly elitist that this kind of intentionally polarizing propaganda actually sounds to anyone who might not shake their fist at the concept of capitalism still existing in the bathroom mirror every morning.
Ranting about how a startup is stealing your thunder / community groups because they are gasp effective is the literal definition of sour grapes. It has nothing to do with capitalism, which is true regardless of how many comments you delete.
Seriously, phatbeats: when did you get so scared to innovate? You don't have to do it in a capitalist framework, but you have to get creative and try new things or you won't have a legitimate argument to make to 99.9% of the population. Even Canadians who are moved to tears by Bernie Sanders find your tone to be grating.
I want so badly to support people who spend their energy making the world better for people. Maybe these Imperfect Produce folks really do have blood boys and drink the tears of orphans. But my knee-jerk reaction to your post, as life-long self-identified progressive, is to cheer for them. That should not be what's happening, and it's not just because I got old and sold out.
Meta: I am genuinely impressed at how civil this discussion is. We HN commenters often get a bad rap. We often++ deserve it, but today, we can have nice things.
I was kind of thinking the same thing. Calling themselves “PhatBeets” though a clever play on words, does little to describe their mission and implant a memory in viewers. They now have to compete with a startup, they need to be kick ass marketers themselves. Why just surrender the food supply that Imperfect is acquiring? Get out there and get some of that for the PB programs. Corporations have philanthropy programs, you just need to talk to different parts of the company. Expanding beyond taking supply from farms owned by people of color seems like a logical step to increase the supply in their system. Learn all that stuff and then do some training among other programs that are suffering.
Maybe all of my ideas suck and would fail. My point is I didn’t hear one word about what they’re going to do about the situation they find themselves in. They’re just whining that their business model has been disrupted.
And the key thing about their messaging. They’re not building themselves up, they’re tearing someone else’s thing down. That’s never a successful strategy. Though I am thankful for the reveal about Imperfect (who are greedy assholes)...I think hey would have done a lot better shopping this story to SF Gate or SacBee. And then using those stories as a touchstone for their new launch of how they’re going to overcome this issue.
Exactly this: it reminds me of how the ACLU joined YC to learn to think and act more like a startup.
The ugly truth is that perhaps the most real problem these folks have is the need to decide whether they are prioritizing fighting capitalism or feeding poor people.
It's quite likely that they cannot effectively do both at the same time, but would benefit from focused priorities.
Well said. I think the major problem here is not that PhatBeets is being out-competed by a more well funded company. The problem is that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone in the world and more, but because of economic inequality there are many people who cannot afford to put enough food on the table for them or their kids. It's not Imperfect Produce's fault that the world is so fucked up, and I love the mission of PhatBeet's. My take away is that if I was in PhatBeet's shoes I would be incredibly frustrated and would feel very powerless and might make a blog post with similar hyperbolic language lashing out at the easiest target I could find in a desperate effort to save everything I had been working so hard on for so long by any means necessary. If I were in Imperfect Produce's shoes I would feel like this ire has been misdirected at me when the real problem lies with extremely complex and difficult problems which exist in general in our society.
> holy fuck the language that they use in their call-to-arms manifesto is irritating to me
I still can't believe they wrote "gentrifies food waste" with a straight face
Is anyone else extremely frustrated with Phat Beets about this article? Or are we all too busy burning down a conveniently placed straw man? Phat beets haven’t produced any stats or facts of their own here. They just keep tearing down the ones that Imperfect is providing. Nitpicking statistics and shaming a company for trying to feed more people with less waste is just as bad as whatever greenwashing they claim to despise so much. It’s pretty undeniable that Imperfect is making an impact on food waste and until they or any other company are using all of the billions of pounds of food that aren’t getting eaten every year, it’s utterly counterproductive to try to tear them apart for trying to help this food find a home on someone's table. Why are they so obsessed with fact-less mudslinging? Why is Imperfect the chosen target and not a real villain of the food industry like Bayer/Monsanto, Walmart, or McDonalds?
Here are some facts for you: In 2017, Feeding America reported that they received over 1.47 billion pounds of produce. As a reference, Imperfect claims to have recovered 30 million pounds of produce to date. Feeding America and the NRDC also reported that over 6 billion pounds of crops go unharvested or unsold ever year. This study was based on 7 key crops so the total is likely much higher, but let’s assume its 6 billion to be conservative. This means that even if Imperfect went through 100 times the amount of ugly produce every year that they’ve recovered to date, they would still be using less than half of the available supply. Phat Beets, your math doesn’t add up! Provide meaningful statistics and facts to back up your argument or everyone will see through your emphatic nourishment of the outrage machine of social media for the reactionary
Zooming out, there’s also a huge aspect of this that’s a messed up apples to oranges comparison. Imperfect is a business with a social mission related to food waste, not a nonprofit solely focused on ending hunger. It’s great that they are making a difference while also making money but it’s not fair to ask a company to overthrow capitalism. Do you expect Lyft to overthrow the freeway system, or ask the computer that you wrote these words on to end exploitative mining practices that provided the copper for the circuitry? It seems like you’re making the good the enemy of the perfect and in so doing ignoring the reality of the situation which is much more nuanced than you portray it. Isn’t there a way for community CSAs to work alongside companies like Imperfect? It seems to me that these two groups are working towards admirable, but very different goals at different scales and this is actually a good thing. There is plenty of work left to be done and there is clearly more than enough food for both of you to achieve your goals and then some. Save the abstract critique of capitalism for philosophy class, the rest of us live in the real world where we have to make compromises and embrace the grey areas.
My sources- Feeding America report: http://www.feedingamerica.org/assets/pdfs/feeding-america-pr... NRDC report: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
>As a non-profit dedicated to food justice, we work with small farmers of color
Sometimes you can't discern parody from reality.
What's worse is that it's reality: it's a racist non-profit that refuses to work with white farmers, like in South Africa.
You're obviously going to get downvoted into oblivion for daring to say out loud unpleasant truths on HN, but you're nevertheless 100% correct.
TL;DR: my research suggests that different groups work with significantly different definitions of "racism", which I feel injures all conversations that build on fundamental assumptions - to society's detriment.
Recently, I did some research on the subject of white privilege, and I came to some troubling (or at least, intellectually interesting) conclusions that I wish people would talk more about.
Humans are notably passionate about naming things and defining terms. Not only do definitions shape the way people experience reality, but there’s a massive cultural and often economic prize to those who define what words mean.
The positions of both progressives and conservatives on the subject of white privilege (eg. whether it exists) get interesting when you look at what the conservatives say differently (or in many cases, are not saying), starting with the way that they define “racism”:
Jordan Peterson: “To attribute to individuals of a community the attributes of the community on the basis of their racial identity is called racism. That’s what racism is. There’s no other way of defining it.”
Wikipedia: “Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.”
Ben Shapiro: “If you’re accusing somebody of something because of the color of their skin, that’s called racism.”
Wikipedia: “The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.”
The conservatives - who both take great pride in their precise language - categorically do not acknowledge that superiority is a fundamental aspect of racism. Instead, their definition speaks to the outrage they feel when they are accused of something because of their race.
Conservatives perceive racism as an unfair, deliberate act perpetrated against the individual members of an ethnic group.
Progressives perceive racism as a passive, self-righteous system which oppresses members of less-powerful groups to maintain power over them.
I believe that both sides are arguing about different phenomena. This is a huge problem because it confuses any further discussion that doesn’t share a similar definition of racism. How can you find true common ground on a provocative subject with someone who is seeing different images and feeling entirely different emotions?
Thank you for this comment.
I run into this same issue when I use the word sexism. I hate using it, but I don't know what else to call it.
When I say sexism, I roughly mean systemic issues that lead to gendered outcomes. Most other people seem to hear "You are actively and intentionally on purpose excluding women because you are an evil asshat." So, they get defensive. They get mad. Etc.
It is not a good path forward for productive discussion. But I don't know what language to use that sidesteps the issue.
There is, of course, the pesky minor detail you're quickly glossing over, namely that the word's root is race, something I was (probably) misled to believe by conservative-leaning science teachers with a hidden agenda has a fairly agreed-upon scientific definition, which has much to do with DNA, and not much with economics, whatever Peterson's opinion may be.
Now, if the left (which is anything but "progressive" these days, just hearing you calling them that is borderline offensive) wants to fight its political battles via redefinition of the meaning of words, things are unlikely to get to any kind of constructive any time soon.
The fact remains though, that the article specifically mentions they only do business with black farmers. Use whichever language you'd like to describe this, the behavior is what it is.
Also, I apologize for not directly responding to your actual point.
Is it racist for a charity to only work with black farmers? The reason I wrote what I wrote is that the answer entirely depends on whether your definition of racism includes the systemic oppression of the less powerful for the specific purpose of keeping them less powerful into the future.
Based on my research, a conservative (and I am using these terms to describe teams, so it could be "shirts" vs. "skins") would say it's racist because it consciously discriminates against white people. End of story.
A progressive would contend that white farmers already have all of the inherent advantages of their whiteness, and therefore it's wholly appropriate for a self-organizing group to serve less powerful communities to the exclusion of the ruling class. (Class as in group, not social strata, although I'm confident that black farmers are farmers who are black, and therefore part of an oppressed class. They are free to decide who is oppressed in the same way an editor is free to decide who to publish.)
The truth is not up to me to decide, but it's a shame that we can't have two parallel conversations where both views have a good point.
So, if we assume for the sake of discussion that the author of the article is not playing identity politics games and is truly trying - to sort of quote you - to help those in greatest need, then don't you think the criteria should objectively be those in greatest need instead of relying on some sort of questionable correlation between one's skin color and one's economic condition to pick and choose who's most deserving of their help?
I think what is truly driving a certain category of people (which I belong to) nuts when they hear that folks base their decision on people's skin color is exactly that: instead of relying on some dubious, questionable, to-be-proven, and most certainly never a 100% accurate, equivalence relation between one's skin color and one's economic (or other) condition, why not just call an effing cat a cat and just say you're trying to help people who need it the most?
To me, there's only two explanations: you're either not very smart by equating two very different things, or you have an identity politics agenda. Either is a source of frustration.
Finally, "the inherent advantages of their whiteness" . And you're trying to tell me you want a constructive conversation when using language like this? Please. The 50's are long gone, time to move on.
For the first three paragraphs:
Yes. I agree with you, in the ways that are important.
Fourth paragraph:
I was doing my best to represent the thinking and position of that group of well-intentioned people. You don't have to agree that there's an inherent advantage to whiteness.
I don't have to agree, either. I believe that there's an inherent advantage to being of the majority and that whenever a class has power, it will work overtime to stay in that position of power.
Do I think that the issue of race equality was solved in the 60s? No sir, I do not.
> something I was (probably) misled to believe by conservative-leaning science teachers with a hidden agenda has a fairly agreed-upon scientific definition
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...
Thank you very much for posting this.
Thanks for your comment. It's interesting to me because I am a progressive who is actively disenfranchised by "the left" for some of the same reasons.
So, knowing that I see the mainstream left as a tone-policing, virtue signaling, intellectually numbing quasi-fascist dumpster fire... does that change the tone of your reading?
A CORPORATION selling ugly food. Definitely evil incarnate. I think this calls for protest marches and riots, at the very least.
Passing a law to shoot the homeless people on first sight will clear it up real quick.
Really sick people can be put to medical prison camps where we make them to grow oraginc food food (charging tech companies cafeterias billions) or perform miracle drug testing (charging big pharma billions) on them.
We can recruit Americans (Using first amendment for the rescue) with gun for this task based on volunteering.
It will cost very less.
We've banned this account for repeatedly trolling HN. If you continue to do this we will ban your main account as well.
> “Some may claim we have a case of sour grapes. This is capitalism at its best.”
Yep sounds about right
I don't understand. Now it's bad for people to buy food waste, because otherwise food waste is donated?
TFA smells like anti-capitalism, upset that someone is doing something profitable with the source of their charity work... And double upset that capitalists might have a (gasp) positive impact.
Personally, I am angry and upset at this Phatbeets, for taking food waste away from the hard working farmers who would otherwise use it for compost. But I'm also angry at the farmers who, by using ugly food for compost, are stealing jobs from the good folks of the waste department. Stop undermining our social systems, you capitalist farmers!
The ugly food should be ground up, fermented, and turned into whiskey moonshine for the homeless. The spent grain should be fed to pigs to make bacon. Any other waste should be ran in my flattop 1946 Ford 9n tractor to make more ugly food, with manure from the pigs and free labor from the homeless, in exchange for the whiskey moonshine and bacon diet. Win/win