this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts

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The idiom of "doesn't grow on trees" as a metaphor for scarcity falls apart when you realize that food does grow on trees yet is still very scarce. (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Extremely not-fun fact: collectively, humanity currently produces more than enough food for every person. But a huge part of it is either wasted or inaccessible by people that need them, which usually results in them not going to anyone and being wasted, which is why we still have food scarcity.

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[–] Jakdracula@lemmy.world 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Under capitalism, food isn’t produced to eat but to make profits. When it’s not profitable to sell, they will rather dump foods, starving the people rather than to plainly donate.

We produce enough foods to feed the entire population. But the sole purpose of food is to not feed the people, but to feed the greed of the producers, the farmers, the corporates.

Capitalism created an artificial scarcity of food where we produce too much food for the obese and throw the rest away to rot in front of the poor.

[–] Deuces@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

In general yeah, but let's not blame the farmers. They're shit on from so many directions it's wild - they're often locked into deals with specific companies with contracts that can sometimes cost them more money than they make. Tyson is especially notorious for this, requiring the farmers to build specific chicken houses that the farmer pays for, on land that the farmer pays for to raise chickens they're only allowed to sell to Tyson, all while Tyson can and regularly does choose not to buy the chickens if they're not selling enough. Farmers have managed to find themselves indentured servants on their own land.