A fresh batch of basil at the grocery store is essentially a luxury item, exclusive to those who can afford it. What doesn't sell is waste. Perhaps it's time to consider community kitchens residing alongside grocery stores. This would be a place where a meal is always available, all hours of the day, for free, to anyone who walks in. These kitchens can consume food waste while providing a useful benefit to the population.
It's surprising we don't have this already in North America given how much surplus food is produced.
> A fresh batch of basil at the grocery store is essentially a luxury item, exclusive to those who can afford it
I grow a fair amount my food on my allotment, and one of the interesting things I've noticed is how little the grocery store prices are related to the effort it takes to grow it myself.
For example, I no longer grow potatoes except for rotation purposes, because the time and inputs (fertilizer, etc.) aren't worth it compared to £0.5 per 1kg of potatoes from the supermarket.
On the other hand, basil is extremely fast growing and doesn't need any fertilizer, other than a bit of manure/compost at the start of the season. From my basil bed, I get about 50kg in a season, which has an ASDA street value of about £1000.
This obviously comes down to things like the ease of mechanical harvesting, the complexity of cold chain logistics, etc. Still, if you have a free windowsill and find supermarket basil ludicrously expensive, it's worth sticking a few Sweet Genovese on there.
The reality is that farming only works in medium to large scale, people that try to grow food for themselves do it either because they have no other option and will die otherwise or they have too much money and time in their hands.
My grandpa was a medium scale farmer for most of his life and when he retired he kept a couple dozen cows for milk and he paid every single month to keep it going. It was his hobby and he knew that, he said he'd need a couple hundred again to make it at least pay for itself.
It's one of the reasons I LOL hard whenever I hear tech people saying they will "retire and become farmers", these people have no idea what it is like to work on a farm for real.
> people that try to grow food for themselves do it either because they have no other option and will die otherwise or they have too much money and time in their hands.
Most people that I know that have backyard gardens aren't doing it for the majority of their calories (I don't know people growing wheat in their backyard), but lots of people grow in their backyard because it is more convenient and the vegetables are always fresh and flavorful.
I grow an herb garden with stuff like basil, chives, parsley, oregano, etc. plus some smaller vegetables like peppers and tomatoes. I grow the herbs because many times they don't even have fresh herbs available at the supermarket or are inconvenient (e.g. a giant thing of parsley when I just want a few snips), and the vegetables taste better.
Herbs should be anyone’s starter for a garden and absolutely makes for an easy break-even.
We had a great run with heirloom (Cherokee Purple) tomatoes this year, purchased for $5.99 per plant at Lowe’s. Our raised bed cost about $100 to build and fill with soil. I spent $100 to build a deer fence. I also bought a $20 jug of Miracle Grow feed. Let’s just cocktail-napkin the water at $10 for the season, and say I have $250 in input to start my garden this year.
I got, at most, $15 dollars worth of tomatoes for the two plants. I could increase that and get into canning to reap some more value, but it’s a hobby to produce neat exotics I can’t even buy if I wanted to. Hopefully I can amortize the upstart costs over the years and achieve a break even on a long enough timescale :)
I'd love to grow tomatoes, but I live where it's too hot and they'll stop flowering sometime in June.
But I'm wondering if you're not growing your tomatoes right, or the cultivars you have are not great? One of the biggest issues I run into when I lived somewhere I could grow is the plants getting so large they uproot the posts I have them staked up with if it gets windy.
Good soil goes a long way, you'll want it to be mostly a decomposed manure. Then you'll really want to get the biggest plant you can find at the store as early as weather allows, then bury most of the plant you buy. If you're just planting it like a normal plant, you've wasted a ton of its potential.
In one of the best years I've had my plants grew nearly 8 feet tall and with only 4 bushes I had to have the kids load up a wagon with tomatoes and give away them to the neighbors I had so many.
Cherokee Purple and Black Krim are two of my favorites, but they admittedly don't always grow quite as vigorously as some other (less tasty) varieties. Still, they grow 5 to 6 feet high and produce 40+ pounds of fruit per plant. And the tomato growing season here is only mid-May through mid-September.
I've had great success with the 40% setting tomatoes all season and my temps push 110F in the summer. One thing I learned the hard way, in addition to this, leave the plants bushy so it shades internally.
Eh, this year we had over 60 days of 100F+ weather, with temps not going below 85 at night for a considerable portion of that. Even if I grow them in the shade of the porch they won't get flowers for a month at a time.
Ya I live in a very dry climate and the nights cool down and evapotranspiration cools a bunch, so maybe that's why it works so well.
I was very impressed with the material though. Complete game changer in my environment. I can grow all kinds of things through summer. Parsley, lettuce, I even had Brussels sprouts and rhubarb go through the heat this summer looking perky the whole time.
So you buy a tomato that is 8" tall at the store. When you plant it you'll only want 2 to 3 inches of it sticking out of the soil. You bury it deeper than the soil and roots it comes with. The now buried stem will grow roots and the existing roots will also grow and reach more deep soil.
No offense but that seems like most expensive way to farm it. I mean I get it, you want something that looks nice and works, and not is just an old bucket filled with dirt (which is perfectly fine way to recycle broken bucket, just ugly one), but if you just want tomatoes you don't need to spend all that much so that cost is a bit overcalculated imo.
But still, yeah, at that scale its not much more than a hobby, certainly not a way to save any actual money.
> Hopefully I can amortize the upstart costs over the years and achieve a break even on a long enough timescale :)
Or some disease or insect will destroy it. The wonders of farming...
Buy seeds, plant some in a beer cup of potting soil ~30-45d before the last frost. Don't need to worry with seed starting mix. Don't worry about how tall they get, just plant it almost all sideways.
> I got, at most, $15 dollars worth of tomatoes for the two plants
What were your lbs of yield per plant?
I do cherry tomatoes in 5gal buckets and get ~1.5-2 lbs per bucket. Soil mix is leftovers from contractors mixed with composter stuff and peat moss. Actual garden does better. Retail price for that qty is $7. I have too many buckets set up...
I own a farm and while I agree that people generally have no idea what goes into farming, I feel like the "tech workers would cry if they ever had to actually farm" statement that is so common on these types of threads is usually coming from someone with experience on a conventional farm.
There are alternative methods of farming like permaculture, and people all over the world use them to grow an abundance of food in an area not much bigger than a large backyard. They are specifically geared towards better utilization of space, and creating natural systems that replace the need for traditional inputs and labor.
Growing someone's entire diet is no small challenge, this is true. But it's also not an all-or-nothing proposition. Someone with zero experience farming could plant some perennial herbs on their balcony, and discover the joy of cooking with them (and replacing a $5 plastic clamshell of Thai basil.) From there, year-by-year, people can get more ambitious with what they grow.
> I own a farm and while I agree that people generally have no idea what goes into farming, I feel like the "tech workers would cry if they ever had to actually farm" statement that is so common on these types of threads is usually coming from someone with experience on a conventional farm.
But it's comparison of "job in IT vs job in farming" (i.e. actually making money in both cases), and not "just farming enough for your food needs"
"making enough for your needs" is few crates of apples, not working whole day with a bunch of temporary workers gathering it while tractors are going around gathering the crates, often in burning sun.
Turning it around it would be like saying "job in IT is SUPER easy" but meaning just setting up a home router once a week (because that's what "farming for yourself" is compared to running profitable farm)
I broadly agree, and certainly for staples and root crops, it blows my mind how cheap supermarkets can be. The amount of work, land, pesticides, fertilizers, seeds, etc. it takes to grow a few kilogram of carrots manually is insane compared to being able to buy at 50p/kg at the supermarket. That really shows the level of industrialisation and automation involved in large scale farming.
Which is why I focus on specific crops that I've identified as being valuable or useful to me.
Basil, of course, I already mentioned, and similar to basil is other green and leafy veg, such as spinach, mint, coriander, rocket, spring onions and cress. They grow so quickly and easily that I guess the majority of the cost in a supermarket is the packaging and logistics. I also grow a lot of soft fruits such as strawberries because supermarket fruits are expensive and bland tasting compared to a freshly picked ripe strawberry. Squashes are good to grow as they're quite prolific producers without much effort, yet fairly expensive to buy in the supermarket. Garlic, chilli, tomato, runner beans and leeks I grow mainly because I can choose the cultivars I like, and find they're tastier than the ones I can get in the supermarket.
Of course, the biggest input I'm obviously not accounting for is my time, but as it's an enjoyable hobby that's good for my physical and mental health, that doesn't factor in for me. Plus, I think it's a good life skill to know how to grow food, and it's interesting to try and do it in a sustainable way, e.g. permaculture, supporting pollinators, producing your own compost, propagating your own seeds, capturing and storing water onsite, etc.
I certainly wouldn't quit my job and become a farmer, but I do think growing some of your own food is something everyone should at least try once if they have the space. Also as a general rule, animals require a larger scale to make a profit than do vegetables.
Tech saying "I'll become farmer" to escape tech is very amusing, especially how data-driven the large scale farming is, and how small scale farming is getting priced out by large scale farming.
I'm not a farmer, but I did some tech for farming and you would be surprised how tech driven it is. Agriculture was probably the first industry that used satellite imagery outside of military on the large scale.
If someone is Silicon Valley web app developer and went farming, they actually could be going deeper into tech than escape it.
I think most people expressing this sentiment are referring to small scale homesteads or hobby farms, which I have found to be a great break from desk time.
This dynamic changes if they are growing produce to manufacture value added,preserves items.
If you are producing cheese, or tomato sauce, or pesto, for example, the farming activity makes a lot more sense financially. Trying to grow and sell produce is a non-starter. If you can turn it into a shelvable, in-demand, item you can diversify and greatly increase or even just capture profit that you would normally lose.
As I mentioned, diversity is key. You can just deal in one or a few crops. You have to have a range of crops and value added products distributed to a variety of markets and you need to be selling directly.
We have some ultra small farms working here in Ohio doing very well and many have been for generations. It's damn near foolish to shop Kroger for produce here. I know I don't. Not until the ice hits.
Even producing value-added items is a lot of work and mostly a labour of love than of business and this is assuming you have all the stuff you need available around you. These farms in Ohio are the outliers, even here in Florida, where you can technically grow almost the whole year, small farms are rare and usually pretty close to the big cities, most of the time serving as tourist destinations.
If you're going to make cheese, you'll need a lot of cows (even for cheap cheese you'd need at least 10 liters of milk to get to a kilo of cheese) or someone near you that produces enough milk for you to buy and make cheese out of it.
Food production is a heavily specialized, mechanized and complicated job, you need a lot of support and resources around you even for basic canning and dairy products. And then you also have to figure out a way to sell these products to someone at a price they're willing to pay.
It's not by accident you'll see areas heavily focused on specific products (like Winsconsin and cheese) because everyone is, intentionally or not, pooling resources and creating the infrastructure to make it all possible.
There's a traditional soft cheese that is a staple where I'm from in Brazil that is made like queso fresco, but we mix in clarified butter at the end of the cook (it's called butter cheese/queijo de manteiga) that is at risk of disappearing because it's getting harder and harder to produce it locally due to the lack of milk producers and other infrastructure as most milk production has moved elsewhere.
> There's a traditional soft cheese that is a staple where I'm from in Brazil that is made like queso fresco, but we mix in clarified butter at the end of the cook (it's called butter cheese/queijo de manteiga) that is at risk of disappearing because it's getting harder and harder to produce it locally due to the lack of milk producers and other infrastructure as most milk production has moved elsewhere.
are there no vertically integrated cheese production there ? If there is demand for milk why cow farmers are moving away?
Because due to climate change and human action the land has been drying up over the past 50 years and it's not economical to raise cattle there anymore.
Do you think people who say they will retire and become farmers think they’re going to become like legit, money making farmers? Or do you think they know they want a constructive hobby close to the earth to do while they wait to die, and “farming” (almost always meaning hobby farming) sounds like a constructive hobby to wait out the end?
It’s a meme at this point to make fun of people who want to do some form of labor that doesn’t make a good career when they retire. Of course farming is a worse job than being a developer, that’s why this person is a developer! But many things that make hard or even terrible jobs make great hobbies when you’re not doing it to make a career. And people who like to get things done still often don’t want their last accomplishment before they die to be “delivered corporate value in Q3 by…”
Yeah, if your granddad kept 24+ cows just for his own milk needs then that's surely a loss, but that's atypical and extremely inefficient. My family is similar, and my grandfather was a dairy farmer, but that was the first thing to go. A dairy is one of the things that scales very well and is just cheaper and easier to buy mass produced milk, but we still garden and raise animals for meat and produce an abundance on a few acres. Grazing animals take up a lot of space so I'm referring to just the garden. Cows, goats, chickens, geese, hogs to root out nutgrass. Deer and rabbits are so plentiful they are a problem. Our main external input that we can't really self source is fuel for the tractor. It's not a massive operation by any means and not a major source of income as everyone has normal non-farming jobs. But it's not a loss, produces far more than we need with not an extreme amount of labor. It's a 100+ year old farm and is mostly forest and timberland now but used to be cotton fields.
It's really not that crazy of an idea to be a mostly self sufficient farm. I would say that including non-grazed pasture we have under 8 acres for crops. Probably an additional 30 for grazing. Of course we buy groceries of things we don't grow but if that wasn't an option we would still eat plenty just less varied.
The important thing is to just have good land I think. Most of Americas farmland isn't great land for farming, it's just flat or ideal for a specific crop, which is great for mass production. The downside is that it's less productive and requires a ton of inputs with a limited and very time sensitive growing season.
My dad pretty much went from "doing well" to "dropping it and getting different job while selling land to development" within the span of my childhood and teenage years.
Small farming was viable few decades ago, now you'd have to make some speciality fancy food there to be profitable, not anything mass market.
Small vinery? Sure you might have some chance. Potatoes and wheat ? Good fucking luck.
> It's one of the reasons I LOL hard whenever I hear tech people saying they will "retire and become farmers", these people have no idea what it is like to work on a farm for real.
Clarkson's farm is essentially a documentary about that lmao. Rich man invests a lot and with ton of help earns less than a thousand a year from quite a lot of land.
When they say that, they might mean they live on a house on acreage and a stablehand feeds and maintains the horses and such. Such arrangements are actually pretty common among the "farmer gentry" class. I've even seen this expanded to the farm becoming a full on small business with sales done at the farmers market, again though the owners are not the ones digging in the dirt or selling product, they hire hands.
I largely agree, but I think there's room for small-scale operations to grow hard-to-transport food (mulberries!) while preserving local varieties and serving as a genetic repository. In a sense, it's insurance against failures and shortcomings of the global food system - it'd be more efficient to go without, but it's nice to maintain a backup system of plants, systems, and knowledge.
> It's one of the reasons I LOL hard whenever I hear tech people saying they will "retire and become farmers", these people have no idea what it is like to work on a farm for real.
When I hear this sentiment expressed and/or express this sentiment myself, it generally has nothing to do with the farming, but is rather meant to convey an interest in a life as far removed as possible from the stresses and bullshit and growing moral conflicts of working in tech.
Of course, there is probably no industry that is immune from any of these things, or even immune from tech itself.
But consider all of the posturing of the "farmer" being of-the-land and small-town and away from the chaos of city life and away from Silicon Valley ivory towers. All the folksy hokey drawl and front-porch iced-tea that people like to put up, especially politicians and entertainment performers in the country music industry. All the idyllic glorification of the people who "feed the world." It's all beautiful sunrises over fields of grain, people in work clothes who don't have much but still have it all. Obviously, none of that reflects reality any more than a tech worker jumping into that world. It overlooks the backbreaking, bank-breaking labor involved at the lowest levels, and the exploitation of an entire sector of the economy from top to bottom, beginning with government subsidies handed out to a rapidly growing corporate oligarchy swallowing up family farms that have produced our food for generations and converting them to nightmarish factory farming operations of unspeakable horrors. But if golden sunrises is what people want to pretend it is, then that's as good as anything for a tech worker to pretend to want when they fantasize about standing up from their seat at a row of workstations in a FAANG labor facility and walking out.
Of course "these people have no idea what it is like to work on a farm for real." Nobody who hasn't done it does. Just like nobody who hasn't worked in tech knows what it is like working in tech for real.
The point isn't to sincerely go into farming. The point is to imagine getting out of an industry that mills "intellectual labor" into advertising revenue for billionaires. If people like to imagine "flyover country" being some unspoiled unappreciated paradise, then people who genuinely want to get off of the "elitist coasts" are going to imagine going there. If it happens to call the cultural bluff on farming being some quaint, pastoral life of simple but rewarding hard work, that's hardly the tech worker's fault. The blame for that most likely lies with the people in power who stand to benefit from sustaining that fantasy — who are often among the same people who benefit from the fantasy that tech work is all pinball machines and free sodas for typing on computers.
LOL, if that's your coping mechanism. But while one might laugh at a worker wanting to jump from one bleak industry to another bleak industry, the people who profit from all of this bleakness go on profiting. If we have a problem with the fantasies, then maybe we should do something about the realities first.
I was taught by a couple of friends from Italy about how to harvest the seeds and re-grow them, very easy to do. Probably my favorite plant to cultivate now considering how simple it is to grow it, it's always nicer to have fresh herbs than store-bought (often going bad) or dry (no flavour). There is a key time to harvest but I think it depends on the climate you're in so I can't really advise on that unless you live in köppen zone AF.
Mint is about the same and I think even more easy.
One of the things about herbs is that alot of them are great chelating agents for soil. It's something to be aware of because if for example your soil is rich in arsenic, cadmium or lead, you can remediate some of it out with oregano or thyme but since these things absorb enough of that to become a potential hazard to health it's actually fairly prudent to grow your own as consumer reports has pointed out that all brands they have tested in stores have this crap in them [1], especially if you're gardening in an urban setting [2]
If you're growing the herbs in planters, it pays to use a custom potting mix that is 1 part peat moss, 1 part compost, and 1 part vermiculite. It eliminates most risk of heavy metals and provides a very light and fluffy medium with lots of aeration and water retention.
As fantastic as peat moss is, I have to recommend considering an alternative. Peat moss isn't sustainable, and at least in Europe, we don't have too many peat bogs left now. Coco coir is my favourite peat moss alternative, but as it's sterile, you do need to use a bit more organic matter or add some leachate/"compost tea".
Honestly the water retention alone is more than worth the soil costs with the potting mix. Many herbs can be very sensitive to water/heat and good control here allows the plants to grow much larger and more resilient.
So I haven't been keeping on top of this so please correct me if I'm wrong anywhere, but what I've seen to get around this in some experimental hydroponic designs is using piezoelectric ultrasound emitters to make a fog that plant roots hang into, keeping them at a certain level of humidity. The issue I recall they encountered was that the roots ended up making these dendrites that kind of went nowhere and it inhibited growth. I wonder if they've come up with some kind of hybrid method at this point which solves any of these problems because that sounds like a pretty good use case for that kind of technology if water retention is important. I think I saw something like this at a ritz grocery store in California growing basil somewhere but it didn't really look like it was making the best basil I've ever seen or anything, and I didn't really look that hard to see how it worked but it did look a little foggy in there.
I tried growing basil in my windowsill. The problem was that I don't use basil at a constant rate; I use it in big bursts or not at all.
Which just doesn't work. I needed to use a bunch of basil, and it was either cut off all the leaves or buy it at the store. So I cut off all the leaves and that was the end of it...
The "big burst" problem is usually solved by a few (say 4) plants, not one.
But another thing about growing anything is that it works better if you work around it's schedule rather than the other way around. Hothousing and international shipping have got us out of the habit of thinking seasonally or by growth cycle of a plant, but it's not hard to adapt to.
Also for a lot of our food stuffs, they exist specifically to deal with an excess you can't deal with at the time of harvest. Things like tomato sauce, various jams, etc. All of that is designed to take a bounty of a crop, and turn it into a form you can eat in the middle of winter when everything is dead outside. Today though, we think nothing of the implications of this as we buy a jar of ragu once a week.
The best thing about this sort of farming is you get ready access to heirlooms basically whenever you want thanks to how many indeterminate varietals there are these days (if you have greenhouse or no frost in your climate zone you can have a fruit bearing tomato plant at pretty much all times). Occasionally I can get an heirloom in the grocery store but its a toss up what exactly it will be or if its even available at the time. Meanwhile I can pick out of the catalog some very bizarre looking tomatoes or other plants, grow them up before long, and in a few square feet end up with more of these heirloom tomatoes (that might be sold for like $5 a pound normally) than I could ever know what to do with.
I can also grow various different herbs that are normally tricky to source, e.g. thai basil that can't be found outside asian grocery stores. Plenty of these heirlooms would be impossible to get other than growing them yourself because they have characteristics that make commercial sale a nonstarter: e.g. my heirloom tomatoes basically cannot be stacked up and sold in a market stand because they are sometimes larger than grapefruits, aren't very sturdy like perhaps a roma tomato is, and will crush themselves.
I make a lot of pesto also and freeze it to use it throughout the winter. Garlic is one of my favourite crops. It's not as cost beneficial to grow as basil, but being able to pick the cultivar is amazing.
It's unfortunate that pine nuts are so expensive. We base most of our pesto on other nuts to save money, but you just can't beat the taste of a pine nut pesto IMO.
In my opinion cashews are acceptable, but pine nuts definitely the best.
I make a vegan pesto using the following ingredients: basil, pine nuts, garlic, miso, olive oil. The miso adds the fermented and creamy flavor of the parmesan.
Remove stems from basil, wash and tap to dry, don't spin (a little water is good). Add ingredients to the food processor and blend until desired consistency. Scrape down sides and add oil as needed.
Walnuts are where it’s at (but agreed pine nuts are clearly the winner). Homemade pesto with homegrown basil was a revelation in our house. Better than any store bought and a fraction of the price.
I really think there's a market for a grocery store "herb bar." A self-service bed where herbs grow and customers just take what they want. I would think this could greatly lower the expense of selling fresh herbs, since it's probably a easy thing to set and forget with a little automation.
I maintain my own herb garden. $10 of plants and some regular watering keeps me very well stocked with everything I need from spring until fall. I haven't refreshed the soil in five years and everything still grows to fill the entire pot by summer.
Honestly it's one of those things you just have to try and figure out a bit through trial and error, especially as a lot can depend on your local climate, soil type, etc. If you have any local gardening or allotment groups, the wisdom of the elders can be invaluable, but sometimes you have to go your own way to find out what works for you. My advice would always be start small with easy things like herbs, then work your way up.
Besides that, there are a lot of great resources on YouTube. Personally, I mostly watch the British videos because - bluntly - Americans are very wealthy and always have loads of land, power tools, cheap resources, pick up trucks, backhoes, etc. and I don't have any of that. They also seem to be a lot more serious about it, with homesteading or even borderline industrial setups. The British videos tend to be much more about bodging things on a budget in a small back garden for fun, which is much closer to what I'm doing! Also I don't have to worry about climactic differences that way.
With that being said, some of my favourite channels are alexgrowsfood, GrowVeg, Charles Dowding, homegrown.garden, My Family Garden, Down to Earth with Jim, Castle Hill Garden, and of course, BBC Gardeners World. I also love (and am a member of) the Royal Horticultural Society.
I noticed the same thing, a few stores have basil plants for sale at prices which always confuse me. Buying a $6 plant (not sure what Trader Joe's has them for these days), even if I was immediately stripping all the leaves off it is sometimes a better deal by itself.
I think it's about 4 metres by 2 metres. I plant quite densely compared to what you'll normally see recommended on the back of a seed packet, and to save on space between rows, I built a wooden frame that I can use to walk over and harvest from the top. Probably not very safe, but luckily I don't have to report to the HSE!
I also start them off indoors and plant out early since London has a rather mild climate.
but what do you do with 50kg of basil... I love pesto and it's a great addon to many things, but I don't see myself using more than a couple hundred g per week.
Once you have an abundance of it, you can really just put it in everything. Anything with tomato is better with basil, plus any sandwiches, salads, pizzas, pasta dishes. I have rabbits, so they get through a lot of fresh herbs (especially the stems) and give me fertilizer back in the form of... little round spheres.
Besides that, I preserve it by making it into pesto, chutneys and other basil-based sauces, oils, jars of dried flakes and freezing it.
Anything I have left over, I give away to friends and family.
The subsidy/grant/handout system for food production and distribution is very nuanced and piecemeal so the individual price of foods ends up seemingly random.
I went to exactly this a few weeks ago in Ocean Grove, Vic, Australia.
A cafe and ‘market’ that was entirely sustained by ‘expired’ goods from the local super markets that was otherwise destined for the garbage bin. Trucks kept rolling in as we are.
The cafe was only open weekend (volunteers) but the market was open everyday.
It was a ‘pay what ever you can system’, and $0 was fine. There was a 2 bag maximum on goods you could take away from the market.
And any payment made was a tax deductible donation.
The market had an obviously limited selection of goods, dependent on what came from the supermarkets.
But when I was there,
- unlimited breads of all kinds (like shelves and shelves and shelves, including very nice sourdoughs)
- capsicums (green)
- milk
- yogurt
- lettuce
- carrots
- few other misc veg
- a lot of soy and protein powders
- juices
- and frozen goods, which I didn’t explore.
You couldn’t survive off it alone (unless you had to). But it was a cool option to have. Love the concept.
The market approach is different from the soup kitchen model. The opportunity to pay, the ability to make your own choices in produce, and the experience of using something like a grocery store are things that help people feel dignified. That sense of human dignity can matter a great deal, especially to those clinging to it by their fingernails.
Food waste is a super-weird thing for people to worry about, IMO, because it’s directly related to food being very cheap relative to labor. As you point out, the labor-cost of saving this food really doesn’t make sense.
You fix it by making food expensive. I doubt anyone’s too keen to do that.
The problem is that ~20% of the population has food & housing insecurity when we're supposedly ridiculously rich.
I'd argue that the problem is labor is artificially expensive - which prevents all types of things like this from happening - because you can't buy labor for less than $15 an hour after taxes in most cities.
So you can't serve people that make less than a certain amount of money effectively.
People could be employed, making money working in these places - rather than people donating labor - and these same people working jobs like these would have access to these cheaper prepared meals, too.
But, we'll never get that. Nor will we get boarding houses back, because instead of having "slums" we'd rather have a homeless problem and high housing "costs".
Reducing the price of labor isn’t gonna bring that food insecurity rate down.
And food being very cheap is definitely why there’s so much waste. There wasn’t, within living memory, and it’s because food cost a way bigger share of the median wage than it does today. Talk to some folks who grew up poor in the 40s and 50s about their cuisine, and they’ll tell you about what low-food-waste living looks like.
> Reducing the price of labor isn’t gonna bring that food insecurity rate down.
The goal isn't to reduce the cost of labor.
The goal is to unlock low-cost labor that is currently priced out.
We only have ~60% workforce participation.
The ultra-poor community could be served BY the ultra-poor community - and then a large percentage of them could go from ultra-poor to regular-poor, having a place to live and struggling to make ends meet instead of being homeless & hungry.
But that's not possible. Because we decided if you're not worth $15 an hour - you're worth nothing.
I highly doubt the minimum wage is the cause of these issues. In places like urban Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage is still 7.25 USD, there's hardly any jobs that start at $7.25. The real issue with labor participation is no one can survive on $7.25/hr, so it becomes more realistic to sit at home and collect disability. The government should be subsidizing labor at the low end -- maybe paying workers an additional $5/hr under a certain wage -- to incentivize work
You don't tend to have high amounts of ultra-poor people in low-cost-of-living areas (which also have lower minimum wages than the high-cost areas with the higher minimum wages).
Montgomery, Al is known as a "poor" area - and yet there are only ~330 homeless people in a city of ~200k people (0.165%). In SF you have about ~8800 homeless people in a city of ~880k (1%).
If you're looking at somewhere like Rural PA - you're already not going to be able to employ people at low wages - because you're going to need to pay them almost $4 per hour just to get to and from work.
Have you… lived in those kind of places? One side of my family’s from not even that bad of one, and there are tons of the ultra-poor. They’re the ones living in a house with a blue tarp on part of the roof, three broken cars in the yard, overgrown weeds right up to the foundation, et c. The land’s owned by some family member (all three crappy acres are worth $2,000 total—the house is worth negative dollars—so it’s not like they’re giving up a fortune to let them stay there) or is an illegal rental. They often have one or two even-worse-off buddies living with them. Income and hand-me-downs (clothes, anppliances, old cars they’ll break and not be able to repair within a year which’ll join the front yard scrap pile) are from family and churches. Income, if any, is government assistance (lots of vets) and odd jobs. They have a bunch of health problems and are probably addicted to something. If they don’t have family to get them to the hospital 90 minutes away, they do without. They die decades younger than they might.
These are my people, and it gets worse than that. Rural America is shockingly poor. The cost of living’s low because nobody there can afford to pay more, and because they have no local public services to speak of.
[edit] the reason, specifically, there aren’t more homeless those places isn’t because it’s better, but because 1) nobody moves in, so 100% of people have family ties of some kind, at least some background that gets them access to a hovel or something, and 2) if you’re actually homeless there, you get picked up and shipped somewhere they can actually serve homeless people (or just go to prison), or you die.
> Montgomery, Al is known as a "poor" area - and yet there are only ~330 homeless people in a city of ~200k people (0.165%). In SF you have about ~8800 homeless people in a city of ~880k (1%).
I'd have to imagine that police in Alabama are probably a lot more aggressive in "running off" homeless people.
> I'd argue that the problem is labor is artificially expensive - which prevents all types of things like this from happening - because you can't buy labor for less than $15 an hour after taxes in most cities.
You can barely buy labour for $18 an hour. If there were a ton of surplus labour with the limiting factor being the law, labour would be priced at $15 an hour and unemployment would be high. But it seems to be priced well above that at the moment and unemployment is low.
Farm labor (in the USA) has much lower minimum wage and safety protections compared to most other work, enforced by federal law, though I don't know how consequential the farm cost part of the equation is by the time the food gets to the restaurant or dinner table.
Farm labor in the US is largely divorced from the minimum wage because it largely uses undocumented and illegal immigrants, with threat of deportation for any back chat. This was true even in Northern Maine, 2000 miles from the border. These people do NOT make $15 an hour. I don't think they even make $7.25 an hour.
It's a climate and biodiversity concern: overproduction wastes farmland that could be, or used to be, wild. The energy put into food transport and storage was used for nothing. Wasted produce rots, giving off methane, and wasted meat or dairy represents double waste, as the animals were raised on crops.
Land would not be wild if it wasn't producing crop X. That land is put into productive use because it has been bought and sold to be put into productive use. If its not a field of cattle its a field of soy. If its not a field of soy its a junk yard. If its not a junk yard the owners are desperately trying to get a housing development or an amazon warehouse built, etc. No land owner in this country buys land content to let it sit wild generating no money and incurring costs, unless they are rich as hell and don't want neighbors nearby. If you want more land set aside to be wild, it comes from establishing preserves, not changing how one particular land using industry works. That's just cutting off one snake off the head of medusa, there are dozens left you haven't cut, and rest assured two more will take its place.
The “acting responsibly” part costs money in labor, if you apply it to the parts of the supply chain that really matter. This is just another way of arriving at “raise food prices”.
It has to have some cost or we’d already do it. Right?
Recovering waste in production and transportation is labor costs. If it were cost-effective, they’d already do it. Recovering waste at the grocery stores costs labor and/or loss of sales in excess of the cost of the risk of waste. Same at restaurants. Again, if it wouldn’t cost them more to avoid that waste, they already would.
Admittedly, at home, it’s mostly a time cost, but good luck convincing people to spend even a couple more hours a week in the kitchen and meal planning and pantry organizing to save small amounts of money (and really cutting home food waste takes a lot more than a couple hours a week)
If food is inexpensive compared to labor and, therefore subject to be wasted, that seems like a good thing overall (at least as compared to the alternatives) rather than a thing that "must be fixed".
Right—it’s not gonna happen, so food waste isn’t gonna get meaningfully better, which makes the constant worrying about it kinda a silly distraction. Unless we do want to talk about increasing the price of food.
It sounds like the third missing component, on the other side of the cafeteria from the grocery store, is a culinary school. Give (low-paid) students an opportunity to hone their skills, face daily challenges (what ingredients are available today?), and give back to the community.
RE: Basil. If you have a window that gets a lot of light, it can be very easy for a basil plant to thrive in it. We spent around $15 setting this up in June -- including the cost of a pot, soil, and basil starts. We've been eating basil since, in many meals. That's not free, but it's resulted in very low cast basil for us, always on hand. We also have rosemary and thyme growing in the window. A window with good light and space for plants can result in low cost, high quality herbs, with relatively low effort.
I usually put grocery store basil in a glass of water on the window sill until it gets roots, and then transplant it. Basil has a tough time in the winter (not enough light). It works with sage, rosemary, thyme, and mint. I've even done this with the thai basil that came with take out Pho.
Carrot family plants like parsley and cilantro will not get roots.
I also have rosemary, thyme, and sage outdoors - they survive year-round in Seattle. Not everybody has the space or climate for it, but they're low maintenance and it's nice to just go out and grab some fresh herbs.
What sort of soil do you use? We regularly buy and kill basil plants at TJ’s, and I think I’ve narrowed down the issue to the fact that they give you junky soil that won’t sustain the plant long (regardless of watering or sunlight).
You need to break apart the basil and distribute it evenly in a larger pot. Supermarket basil has fertilizer that makes them grow super fast and look good on the shelves, but what you're buying is actually a bunch of little plants that will exhaust the nutrients unless they're broken up.
If there is really one trunk then you can't break it apart further. However, most basil plants sold at the grocery store are just a bunch of small ones grown closely together. To break it up, just prepare a bigger pot, with potting soil, and then remove the basil from its store-bought container and split it apart with your hands. You want to create a few even groups to go in the new, bigger pot. Ideally, there would be one plant per group, but you don't want to break them up too much and risk tearing the roots too much. I just did four quarters and it's worked fine. I have a huge basil thing now and I did it in a long, skinny rectangular pot.
As a rule, offering a service that people feel low-status when using is a sub-optimal approach. Eating "expired" or "old" or even "didn't sell" produce doesn't feel dignified to most people. It feels like being a charity case, like being pitied. This can be acceptable in private, but having to take action in public and be visible is humiliating. People care about feeling dignified and will make personal sacrifices to maintain that feeling.
What you're describing is a soup kitchen rebranded. Plus some extra logistical issues from the 24/7 model.
With that in mind, you may want to investigate how your local soup kitchens get their materials. Your idea may be closer to reality than you think.
Reminds me of when I was young I did a volunteer session at soup kitchen for the needy. After dinner was served we went around and collected the used dinnerware from the patrons there.
I went to one lady and took her plate, upon which she angrily scoffed at me "I can take my own plate up! I am not one of the guests here!".
Maybe if our society didn't tie so much of your self worth and value to an job, people without jobs wouldn't feel so garbage on top of having a difficult life.
Just spin it right and you will be fine. Market it as a way to offset your carbon footprint and call it something hippy-ish, and instead of charging money make people plant something or bring in a battery or an old piece of tech to recycle. Whatever works for the type of community it is in.
It took me a little while to realize this. In Manhattan, I can get a pound of fresh pasta from Citarella for $6, their jarred tomato sauce for another $6 (quite enough for a pound of pasta), a lovely block of sufficient Parmesan for $3, enough onion and garlic for like $1 or something - but the garnish, basil, is $5 a bunch. And you can't get a tiny, garnish-sufficient amount either. It also works in the pasta itself, and you might as well throw it in there because you surely aren't going to use the whole bunch if you don't.
So $16/4 ~= $4 per portion for absolutely delicious pasta. And about $5 per portion with basil. Of course, it'll be even better if you make your own tomato sauce and all.
The bare-bones option is: $3 for Barilla pasta, $4 for jarred tomato sauce, and like $1 for onion and garlic. You'll skip the block of Parmesan and basil, of course. But then it's ~$2 per portion. Saving $2 for such a drop in taste is not really worth it. You may skip the cheese, just to avoid eating such a rich meal.
As far as I know, most chain grocery stores in urban areas already donate their expiring food. My local Trader Joes and Ralphs have each donated hundreds of thousands of dollars of food so far this year - they both have signs advertising their donations that they update weekly with the new figures.
The problem in my city is labor - there simply isn't enough manpower to convert all that produce into healthy food so they end up dispensing mostly the less healthy processed stuff, which also tends to have lower spoilage and higher "utilization" at the supermarket so there's never enough to go around based on peoples preferences. Whenever I volunteer at the local shelter, anyone who wants fresh produce can just ask for it but most people wanted (needed) hot prepared meals that tasted familiar and comforting.
Like others have mentioned the big problem with your idea is grocery chains already do this to varying degrees, except the food goes to local food banks, homeless shelters(that offer hot meals), etc.
Food Banks actually have a whole interesting economy they handle within themselves with "fake" money. It's pretty neat.
Grocery Outlet is the big chain that takes "waste" food and other smaller retail stores do the same thing(s).
It's not exactly the same as what you are talking about, as it's generally on the other side of the equation, it's all the "left over" food that never makes it to the grocery store, because the manufacturers over-produced, essentially.
Not all of the items are strictly near expiration, but a very large portion of them are near or past expiration in practice.
In the US, food banks I've volunteered at had very strict food expiration policies and wouldn't (couldn't?) offer any food very near expiration. They threw out huge quantities of food. Also turned away even more donations for same reason.
They were operating under federal funding, which the workers seemed to imply required the policy.
That must be new (I haven't volunteered since Covid) or just not implemented at the ones I've worked with. The ones I worked with totally didn't care about things like that, and let the customers make their own decisions around taking an item or not. We would occasionally pick out totally rotten or fuzzy stuff. None of them had federal funding though.
I regularly see past-expiration stuff at Grocery Outlet stores and other discount grocery stores like that still being sold.
It's my literal lifetime dream to open one of these. If anyone has any tips on how to get the right connections to make it feasible I'm all ears.
All the trappings for a commercial kitchen and getting a space to work out of is fine but it's the nonprofit fundraising and grocery store food-pantry connections that seem impossible. I've basically resigned to starting at micro scale to get around the first one but actually getting a steady stream of food without pissing off the powers that be is an uphill battle.
Work/volunteer/consult at grocery stores and food banks and you'll make connections with people at grocery stores and food banks.
Ask questions like "hey, who are those guys taking the stuff we pulled off the shelves cause it was expiring?" or "where does all this food that's right around the expiration date come from?"
The risk of customers becoming community kitchen dwellers could be too high for the store. Stores need people buying the produce from the shelf, rather than helping themselves from the bin.
This could happen in theory, yeah, but in reality (especially in America) I think there's zero chance of that happening at meaningful levels
The audience who buys high-margin grocery items is almost entirely separate from the audience who would even semi-regularly eat at a community kitchen.
> The audience who buys high-margin grocery items is almost entirely separate from the audience who would even semi-regularly eat at a community kitchen.
Also many of the people who buy "high-margin grocery items" won't want to be physically near anyone who would "even semi-regularly eat at a community kitchen." Any store that ran a community kitchen to consume food waste would likely attract a homeless encampment. Even extremely liberal/progressive upscale shoppers would angrily complain.
To add food for thought, could the basil be dried in a dehydrator immediately after being taken off the shelves after minor wilting but while the taste and nutrition are still there? The resulting product might be better quality than what is sold in the dried spices aisle that is much less fresh..
>A fresh batch of basil at the grocery store is essentially a luxury item
Not in Vietnam, and not in the Chinese (Great Wall)/Korean (Hmart, Lotte) grocery chains in the US. Eating a whole sprig of basil is common in various Vietnamese meals. My point is that basil doesn't have to be a luxury item. It grows very well without much effort.
It's surprising we don't have this already in North America given how much surplus food is produced.