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.

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
    298·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yes, and only when people with guns are actively preventing them from getting food, and actively preventing others from bringing it to them.

        • mycorrhiza they/them@lemmy.ml
          4·
          1 year ago

          First of all, that means food is poorly distributed. You are just disputing the cause.

          And yes, conflict if a major cause of hunger. But what is a major cause of conflict? Fucking poverty. Al Qaeda doesn’t recruit from fucking Beverly Hills. Another major cause: US intervention, for the sake of profit and geopolitical dominance, with the dominance ultimately also being for the sake of profit. The world economic system functions as a huge siphon that extracts wealth from the global south and funnels it to wealthy countries where the major institutions of finance are located. Western financial instruments like the IMF and World Bank, alongside direct political and economic pressure, enforce austerity in poor nations, dismantle social safety nets, depress wages, and privatize resources, and this very predictably results in underdevelopment and poverty, which fucking benefits the west because lower wages mean larger profit margins, lower prices and greater market share for the western companies that source their labor there. It’s a fucking global sweatshop economy. And there are consequences to this, when everyone is fucking poor and uneducated and young men see no future for themselves except to become soldiers. It means conflict, which means starvation.

          • intensely_human@lemm.ee
            11·
            1 year ago

            If the world economic system is as you claim, how is it that people in the southern hemisphere are getting steadily more wealthy?

            The problem with people who criticize the free market is they’re so focused on distribution they don’t think about production. The answer is that as wealth is funneled north it is also generated at an even higher rate resulting in all humanity getting more wealthy as a result of the system that “concentrates” wealth.

            Like if I had air in a bottle and concentrated it all to one corner, that would result in no air everywhere else.

            But if I were to create an incredibly sense section of air while increasing the density of air throughout the bottle, it would be misleading to use the word “concentrate” for the action generating that air distribution.

            As for big rich countries causing conflict I agree 100%. In fact as far as I know al qaida isn’t causing nearly as much hunger as the House of Saud, which is the richest organization in human history.

            And I’m not talking about “there’s war and that makes the market break down” as the men with guns thing. I’m talking about “armies are actively blockading food”.

            So “poorly distributed” is really better described as “actively withheld”. It’s like putting a plastic bag over a prisoner’s head then claiming their suffocation was due to “poor distribution of air”, then trying to criticize the building’s HVAC system.

            There’s no HVAC system in the world that can solve the problem of a person being suffocated by a plastic bag, and there’s no economic system in the world that can solve the problem of armies actively blockading food from populations. That’s not an indication the economic system has failed; it’s an indication the political system has failed.