When I'm sitting in my chair and reading about bakeries throwing out day-old bread, it sounds wasteful; when I actually go to buy bread, I'm looking for the freshest, warmest loaf I can get. And thanks to privileged, illogical, fresh-bread-seeking bourgeois like me, the bakery's inclined to toss perfectly good bread.
Thinking about this, I'm convinced it's all just because we have enough resources to allow this waste. Nobody weeps over the trillions of dollars that mutely vanish under a "Obsolete Inventory" accounting line item every year; when plentiful, food is just a particularly charismatic inventory item.
Morality aside, food in San Francisco physically cannot feed people anywhere else! Personally I try to clean my plate when I eat. But your values may vary, and as we live in an affluent area, there's no objective reason why you shouldn't toss half your food, if you felt like it. So the thinly-veiled finger wagging in this article is a little silly... Americans wasting/not wasting some of their surplus food (in America!) is not going to affect starving people elsewhere, aside from making us look bad.
Thinking about this, I'm convinced it's all just because we have enough resources to allow this waste. Nobody weeps over the trillions of dollars that mutely vanish under a "Obsolete Inventory" accounting line item every year; when plentiful, food is just a particularly charismatic inventory item.
Morality aside, food in San Francisco physically cannot feed people anywhere else! Personally I try to clean my plate when I eat. But your values may vary, and as we live in an affluent area, there's no objective reason why you shouldn't toss half your food, if you felt like it. So the thinly-veiled finger wagging in this article is a little silly... Americans wasting/not wasting some of their surplus food (in America!) is not going to affect starving people elsewhere, aside from making us look bad.