Obesity? Is It A Moral Issue?

[mistermack]

It's even easier for a farm to keep pigs and chickens.

And supermarket waste can be collected and fed to pigs on a more cost-effective scale.

[cronus]

You are all off-loading personal responsibility onto imaginary paradigms that don't involve you changing, yourself. Moral cowardice.

[pErvinalia]

Stop trolling. It's not an individual problem. It's a systemic problem.

[mistermack]

You are all off-loading personal responsibility onto imaginary paradigms that don't involve you changing, yourself. Moral cowardice.

It's not a moral question.
There's enough food on the planet.
There are too many people in some places. It's not the fault of fat westerners if poor people in Somalia or Ethiopia have too many kids.
Don't have all those kids, and you won't have to feed em.

[Hermit]

You are all off-loading personal responsibility onto imaginary paradigms that don't involve you changing, yourself. Moral cowardice.

Yes, we are morally responsible for starvation elsewhere, but our failing does not consist of eating more than we need to. It consists of doing nothing about capitalism. It is you who is evading the issue. Think about it next time you spend hours taking photos at steampunk meets and more hours processing those photos. Really helps those in need, doesn't it?

[cronus]

You are all off-loading personal responsibility onto imaginary paradigms that don't involve you changing, yourself. Moral cowardice.

Yes, we are morally responsible for starvation elsewhere, but our failing does not consist of eating more than we need to. It consists of doing nothing about capitalism. It is you who is evading the issue. Think about it next time you spend hours taking photos at steampunk meets and more hours processing those photos. Really helps those in need, doesn't it?

Done my stint at being a revolutionary. No one is interested. Nor will they be until they are really hungry. So losing weight is a shift in the right direction there.

[Hermit]

You gave up. How morally astute. Now get back to taking pretty pictures. That really helps the starving.

[pErvinalia]

Yeah, sounds more like scumple is projecting due to his own moral failures.

[cronus]

Yeah, sounds more like scumple is projecting due to his own moral failures.

Everything is a projection. I don't doubt that.

[JimC]

It wasn't so long ago that we actually HAD the answer to food waste.

When I was a kid, most families in rural Ireland kept a pig. The pig ate everything that the dogs couldn't stomach. And the chickens ate whatever was too small for the pig.

No scrap of food got wasted. And the pork and chicken tasted a lot better than what you can buy now.

In many poor countries, people keep pigs and run them on the rubbish dumps.

We have pointless green waste bins for garden waste. Change that to a special bin for food waste, and feed it to pigs. Food waste problem solved.

All of our food scraps go into the compost, as does most of the garden clippings.

[Seth]

It still ain't right that fat slobs exist in a world with hunger is it though?

Just assume that they are stimulating the economy and are keeping farmers and ranchers in business...Which allows those farmers and ranchers to overproduce and thus create surpluses for the poor.

[Seth]

It wasn't so long ago that we actually HAD the answer to food waste.

When I was a kid, most families in rural Ireland kept a pig. The pig ate everything that the dogs couldn't stomach. And the chickens ate whatever was too small for the pig.

No scrap of food got wasted. And the pork and chicken tasted a lot better than what you can buy now.

In many poor countries, people keep pigs and run them on the rubbish dumps.

We have pointless green waste bins for garden waste. Change that to a special bin for food waste, and feed it to pigs. Food waste problem solved.

Yup, making food from food! Of course the side-effect is pig shit, which is why we don't do it anymore in any place with even moderate population density.

[PsychoSerenity]

Curbing our excessive intake of kilojoules won't make any difference to those who die of starvation. There is no shortage of food. We have trouble finding waste disposal sites for our butter mountains, milk lakes, rice ranges and wheat surpluses. Farmers regularly dig trenches with bulldozers and fill them up with tomatoes by the trainload and other produce they can't sell. Other farmers are actually paid to not grow things. The problem is not a shortage of food. It's one of capitalism. It's cheaper to bury the excess than to sell it to starving people who don't have the money to buy the stuff. Most of us don't want to know about that. Lolbertardians just laugh and jeer: "Serves you right, losers."

The problem with surplus food is not that poor people can't afford to buy it...Americans donate millions of tons of surplus food every year. The problem is that even if the tomato farmer wants to give the tomatoes away there is no way for him to get them to the people who need them without spending so much on transport and processing that any profit he might make from the rest of his crop disappears.

It's a delivery cost and logistics matter. Every step in that supply chain costs someone actual money, and the profit margins in foodstuffs are razor thin to begin with. That's WHY good food gets thrown away, because it's cheaper to toss it or recycle it than it is to try to get it to someone who needs it. Farmers are not charitable organizations that are funded by donations so they can grow and transport food to market at a loss. When someone comes along and offers to take the crop and move it where it is needed at no cost to the farmer, he's happy to let them have his surplus. These sort of charitable "gleaning" operations are seen all the time in farming.

Certainly there are problems with logistics, but they could be easily overcome if the money was there. There's no shortage of food in Dubai, and it's not because it's so much cheaper for farmers to get it there than to where it's needed in Somalia. Fundamentally it's a problem caused by a particular sort of market failure - or the inability of the theory of supply and demand to take into account wealth inequality. Theoretically markets are supposed to deliver goods to where they are most valued. But the theory actually measures 'most valued' in terms of 'willingness to pay' i.e how much people are willing to pay for goods, and they actually measure 'willingness to pay' as how much people actually do pay, which is therefore necessarily limited to what people can actually afford to pay. So according to the theory of supply and demand a market is considered entirely efficient (in terms of goods going to where they are most valued) despite the fact that it has to consider starving people with no money to be people who don't value food. This tends to be entirely glossed over and ignored in many economics text books.

[Seth]

Certainly there are problems with logistics, but they could be easily overcome if the money was there. There's no shortage of food in Dubai, and it's not because it's so much cheaper for farmers to get it there than to where it's needed in Somalia. Fundamentally it's a problem caused by a particular sort of market failure - or the inability of the theory of supply and demand to take into account wealth inequality. Theoretically markets are supposed to deliver goods to where they are most valued. But the theory actually measures 'most valued' in terms of 'willingness to pay' i.e how much people are willing to pay for goods, and they actually measure 'willingness to pay' as how much people actually do pay, which is therefore necessarily limited to what people can actually afford to pay. So according to the theory of supply and demand a market is considered entirely efficient (in terms of goods going to where they are most valued) despite the fact that it has to consider starving people with no money to be people who don't value food. This tends to be entirely glossed over and ignored in many economics text books.

That's a very good point. Then again, it is the altruistic instincts of Americans (and others) that cause them to voluntarily supply the logistical support to move that food to where it's needed at no cost to the starving people. As I said, it's almost always political obstruction that keeps the food from the people who need it. And that's a different kettle of fish entirely.

[laklak]

Just eat the fat fucks. Problem solved.