Personally I feel bad when I have one tomato in the fridge that I didn't eat before it turned inedible, and here we have people wasting perfectly good tomatoes -just because they have enough to eat... I'm disgusted by this sort of thing.
Why? Food is cheap in the West so it is totally natural that we waste it. The only reason to have a bad conscience due to consumption is climate change and there are dozens of products you consume everyday whose production has lead to far more greenhouse gas emissions than one stupid rotten tomatoe.
OK, not precisely. Just like we have too much food we also have too many clothes precisely because the slaves in Southeast Asia produce them so cheaply for us. Seems to me to be a bit more of an actual problem than some rotten food in the fridge.
Do you know how many people go hungry in the U.S. alone? The nation that has so much it bursts to overflowing? Do you know how much food we waste, just in the U.S. alone?
The United States
wastes 1/3 of its available total food stock every year. That's
222 million fucking tons. That's almost as much food as the
entire sub-Saharan continent of Africa
produces.
At the same time,
6.8 million households in the United States have very low food security (which means there were times when they went
days without food).
Worldwide,
almost 800 million people do not have enough food to meet their daily needs. 2/3 of that population lives in western and southeast Asia.
So it's more than a minor issue. It's way bigger than that. Damned right there's a problem with sweat shops and manufacturing facilities that exploit labor, absolutely there is, but there's no need to downplay a real and genuine crisis as somehow less important.
