Would you 'freegan'?

I don't know about eating out of a dumpster; but it does go to show there is a lot of waste in this society. For instance, we used to be able to buy "day olds" from Horton's when I was in school. Perhaps a little stale but perfectly edible and inexpensive. (We had a "coffee club" in our drafting class so two bags of day olds a day kept us quite happy.) But they do not have them anymore. They just dump them in the garbage, rack after rack. What is sad is that the donuts they have these days... The "fresh" ones are as stale as the day olds were fifteen years ago.

I used to work in a Grocery store, and there was so much waste. Like the time we dumped an entire order of cookies (two skids) into the compactor because the management would not get someone on day crew to put them on the shelf. They were taking up valuable space, and since "directs" were not to be touched by the night crew; and we were ordered to clean up the back room - we contributed to the waste of so much. And so many other items were needlessly wasted.

There is more than enough food for everyone in the world; just if we had a system of eliminating stupidity and waste...

I don't think there's any 'simple solution' to the problem of waste, but one thing I would really like to see addressed as quickly as possible is the system of tax deductions. If corporations (and individuals) were not permitted to 'write off' many of these costs, it would become profitable to find ways of making their systems more efficient.

Tax deductions for 'shipping expenses' is what makes it cheaper for a grocery store to sell apples from New Zealand in Alberta than it is to sell Apples from BC or Washington. Similarly, being able to write off operating losses like food that goes bad in the store room provides little incentive to ensure that it is at least donated to a food bank for a charitable donation receipt.

A few simple changes to our tax system would make our economic system a lot more efficient. Many things would appear to become more expensive, but it would simply be the actual costs being reflected in the sticker price, rather than most of the costs being born by tax deductions.

Cheers