It’s so gross and hypocritical to frame food waste as a personal failing. Like, people are dying of hunger because someone forgot some leftovers at the back of their fridge and ended up throwing them away. Major chain grocery stores throw away millions of pounds of food because it’s “too much work” to donate it, and then poison it and destroy it when they throw it away to punish dumpster diving.
Waste is not a personal failing. It’s engineered by corporations, and they profit off of obscuring that.
Much like water waste – shaming a dripping bathroom faucet for wasting water, while hundreds of gallons get wasted in industrial settings.
Always be suspicious of micro-focused framing of environmental issues, when there’s the possibility of macro-level issues hiding behind them.
This focus on individual responsibility for waste – in particular for recycling – was deliberately created, from the 1950s onwards, by corporations such as Coca-Cola. During this period, the new focus on environmentalism threatened to produce legislation to require companies to take responsibility for their own waste (for example, by restricting or banning throwaway containers). In response, groups like the National Soft Drinks Association ran ad campaigns about the importance of personal responsibility for litter (with slogans like, “People Can Start Pollution, People Can Stop It”), to take the focus away from corporate responsibility. They were also key supporters of the move towards recycling, and lobbied successfully for the creation of federally funded municipal recycling programs. Our cities, governments, and households only hold responsibility for corporate waste because the corporations wanted it that way.
(for more on this – in the soft drinks industry, at least – have a look at Chapter 8 of Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism by Bartow Elmore.)
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Mooncustafer 