During Mattieu\u2019s lecture, the tweet about Amazon really stood out to me. It made me think of the AmazonGO store, and then about how they donate their expiring foods to the homeless shelter where I work. Which lead me to take a look at the social implications of donating expiring food to those who cannot afford to buy it. Looking closer into the social differences we place on food waste, and donations to food banks.<\/p>\n
Every few days, hundreds of food items arrive at our door, and most of it is organic, health conscious, incredibly expensive food, that is about to expire. Food that was not deemed as \u2018sellable\u2019 anymore by AmazonGO, but IS acceptable to eat if you\u2019re homeless. They have claimed to have lowered their food waste because they donate it, but every day I watch hundreds of pounds of food get thrown out. It raises this notion, that the first level of throwing out food, goes to those that cannot afford to buy it.<\/p>\n
Many believe that if a company gives away all its food right before it expires, then it is cutting down on wasteful buying practices AND sustainably feeding those who struggle to buy food. The reality is that donating food does add a link in the chain, but ultimately a majority of donated food still<\/strong> ends up in the trash can. Those who are receiving it, are not usually able to utilize it due to issues with cooking and storage. The most difficult barrier, is a lack of adequate time for safe consumption (ie: getting a weeks worth of food that will only be safe to consume for 2 more days).<\/p>\n When discussing food waste, it is critical to look at all the factors, including societal, that make food inaccessible, and eventually be thrown out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During Mattieu\u2019s lecture, the tweet about Amazon really stood out to me. It made me think of the AmazonGO store, and then about how they donate their expiring foods to the homeless shelter where I work. Which lead me to take a look at the social implications of donating expiring food to those who cannot afford to buy it. Looking… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":95,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,12,25],"tags":[55,70,71,30,43],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food-waste","category-industrialized-food","category-other","tag-consumption","tag-amazon","tag-food-waste","tag-industrialized-food","tag-public-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/95"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":739,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions\/739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}