2y ago

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.

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.

62 comments

Food isn't scarce. It's just poorly distributed.
- Food isn’t even poorly distributed. Almost everybody eats, and the only places people don’t eat it’s from other people with weapons actively preventing them from getting food, and actively preventing others from bringing it to them.
  I’ve been homeless in America, twice. Both times I had all the food I could eat, as soon as I was willing to accept it.
  The first time I relied on strangers and I ate like a king. The people of Cambridge MA just straight up gave me more food than I could eat when I asked.
  The second time I stayed in a shelter in Denver. I had three square meals a day available to me, though I only ate dinner since my job didn’t permit me to attend the other meals. It was good food, donated and prepared by volunteers.
  I am sick of people trying to perpetuate the myth that we have starvation in America. It’s one area we succeed in beyond the wildest dreams of anyone even 50 years ago, but haters just can’t stop hating on our society.
  We feed people. We feed them extremely well.
  
  9 million people starve to death every year
- It’s actually efficiently distributed, to where the profit is
  
  Nothing efficient about throwing away food. Not even from a profit perspective.
  
  In many cases, it’s not that, either.
- Yeah, hard to truck food when the roads are in bad shape, especially since food can go bad easily.
  Logistics are harder than many people think.
There are unmet food needs in our world. Too much so. But I’m not sure I would say, overall, “food is very scarce.”
- Yep, I would hazard a guess the amount of food waste alone could easily feed everybody but something something profits
  
  It's entirely a logistic issue. African countries are insanely difficult to traverse. You can have all the food in the world but we don't have a way to move the food to everyone.
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.
- 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.
It's not really scarce. If you know the amount that's thrown away
- And where and exactly when
  
  What ?
Food is far from scarce in the developed world. There's so much food that people can easily become obese, and millions of tons of food are destroyed each year.
- Uhhh, yeah, no idea where the "food is scarce" came from, we've got so much food in developed countries that we could easily feed the whole world with it.
  
  There's a lot to be said for encouraging self sufficiency. See the damage done to African textile industries from a glut of charity clothing.
  Of course, in an industrial age "encouraging self sufficiency" also means making competition, and a lot of dummies start talking about bootstraps instead of supporting education and investment.
  
  Not easily, nor safely. Most food waste is from retail and Healthcare. It's very hard to repurpose that already consumed scrap for others to eat. Let alone ship it across the world.
Food grows on trees if your ancestors planted and cared for those trees. An apple tree that's been uncared-for for fifty years may produce nothing but nasty bug-ridden rotting inedible fruit.
- Fruit trees been around longer than we have, they can care for themselves
  
  Not the cultivated fruit trees that have been selectively bred by humans for thousands of years, no.
- This also falls apart when you check out the price of apples lately. :(
Dewey, go easy on the orange juice. That stuff doesn't grow on trees - wait, it does. So why is it so damn expensive?
- Literally the first thing that came to my mind after reading the post title.
- If this wasn't linked within the first hour of this post, I would have been amazed. Such an awesome show!
- Bold of you to assume that "that side" can / will read.
  (s btw, as I'm sure you guessed but others may not have so... just in case:-D)
  
  I’m on that side and I read. Quick list all the books you’ve read in the past year, then I’ll show you mine.
Upon learning American dollars are made from cotton:
"Money doesn't grow on trees!"
"No, but it grows on a bush!"
Turn of phrase DESTROYED by FACTS and LOGIC
More crops go to feed in animal agriculture, than crops to humans. And farmers tend to monocrop instead of utilising all the possible crops that would do well in that environment. (Retooling, investment, skills, time, industry experts, ...)

62 comments