Since that time nearly everyone works, and we have a literal war for attention (ads). At least in the school district where I had my education we also lacked any class about how to cook properly.

If as a society we want to make that choice I believe the logical conclusion is to have more community kitchens where workers (and automation where possible) make healthy, and also tasty (maybe not healthy) options for people to eat. We've outsourced that to fast food, generally, since that's also cheep "food". However the healthy, diversity, and quality are often lacking.

I live in the suburbs and I have to really, really, think. If I want something that isn't deep fried, isn't a burger, or a salad with 'BS' leafs (but is actually a salad with strong content and non-filler material): I struggle to think of even one place, let alone a selection that I could drive to within the local zone. Let alone anything I could hope to walk to in a reasonable duration of time.

Maybe if the automation revolution allows the average worker to have a 2-4 hour a day job (mostly supervising the automation and the paperwork) we can have an alternate future with time for rotating dinner parties and actual uses of the food.

Now we make women work for money, but the total amount paid across all workers is roughly the same. (Wages have been flat for 40 years, mostly because we have twice the "paid" workers—men AND women—but consumption is basically flat.)

It's regressive. Women have ALWAYS "worked" [0], but prior to the financialization of Western culture, that "work" was—as you pointed out—on activities that we can't put a price on, things like:

* building happy homes and families

* proper nutrition, which is extremely time consuming even today

* birthing and raising children (women had universal "time off" to have kids until we put those same women to work making widgets)

* helping out other families in the local community

* building and maintaining community institutions, schools, churches, etc.

* helping others in humane, non-financial ways where there isn't any money to be made

We've given up a lot of these things just to keep wages down for the Capitalists. At least the rising inequality over the last 40 years shows someone benefited. Just not us, or our children, or our communities.

Decline is a choice.

[0] I hate that our culture only values things that can be expressed in terms of money. Calling what women do "work" (or as the OP calls it, uncompensated "labor") is demeaning to women. What women do day-to-day is vastly more important than whatever bullshit men have to (gladly) do to build and maintain civilization for their families.

If you want cooking, cleaning, and childcare so badly, why don't you volunteer to do it instead of telling women it's our place. I think I'll take my job over being a man's property.

I help watch my nieces and nephews when needed already anyway, I'm very stubborn about keeping my living space organized and sanitized(in fact i cleaned my grandparent's entire house of mold(they are hoarders too so it involved tons of lifting/reoganizing)), and I've been into fitness/athletics my whole life, which entails learning to cook healthy meals.

If a women were to ask me to come do any of those things for her I would head right over enthusiastically and I don't expect anything in return either as long as she kept me company. This applies regardless of whether I'm romantically interested in her.

People should have the freedom to choose how they live their lives; they should be able to contribute to society in any way they please.

Suggesting that assigning jobs at birth is superior to our current system is rather silly. Yes, we have new problems to solve by ceasing that behavior, but regressing isn't the solution.

I do agree that we don't need two people per household doing bullshit jobs like selling advertising.

But civilization is perfectly capable of decline and disaster even if we were still organized around single income households. So what if out our children have good nutrition, if we are faced with total environmental collapse or nuclear war?

Or you could say that women choose to work for money. The concept of single earner households can indeed work very well, but it has to be a choice of those involved regardless of gender. There are other possible arrangements, too: more communal living, part-time work, inter-generational arrangements, for example. And a true UBI.

That is, at least to me, a very interesting way to describe a patriarchy that was backed only by bible interpretations for centuries.

EDIT: "interesting" should be pronounced with a strong, British accent.

Nobody in big cities knows their neighbors. And very few people organize against poverty, against their bosses, landlords, and police abuse. They could have a good life if they did, but don't underestimate the capacity of an oppressive system to isolate people (because it's the only way it can survive).

You can have lots of housing, cheap housing, and quality housing, but never really all three. Vienna, which a lot of people like bringing up as an example of a friendly masss housing program, recorded flat or declining population every decade until 2000, and has still not recovered from its pre-WWI peak, which wasn't even very big at 2M people.

People respect the rules (otherwise they face consequences for asocial behaviour) and this makes the city function like a well oiled machine.

The same scheme wouldn't work in many Western cities, too many self-absorbed people thinking they're more important than their community.

If people in Singapore are more community minded, then why the need for the harsh enforcement? (You know, public whippings for putting your shoes on the wrong feet or whatever...)

Start checking out your local grocery stores. In addition to selling, well, groceries, most of them will have a deli section and a salad bar. Salad bars in grocery stores typically get charged by the pound, so you can pick and choose exactly what you're getting. Most grocery stores in the US will also have already-cooked rotisserie chickens, sides available by weight, and other precooked options. Most large grocery stores in the US basically have a fully stocked cafeteria in them.

Buy a bottle of olive oil and a bottle of vinegar (a fancy vinegar if you want, apple cider or balsamic, but not malt) then buy a packet of Italian spices (typically a blend of oregano, thyme, etc...)

Buy some salad greens, either a head of lettuce, or a box of spring mix or similar blend of greens.

To make salad dressing mix two parts oil to one part vinegar, put in a pinch of Italian spices, a pinch of salt, whisk.

Then pour over your greens, add some feta cheese olives and baby tomatoes, capers if you want.

But your typical large-format grocery store will have one. It's hard to talk chains and be comprehensive because American supermarket chains are not national. But whatever your market's equivalent of Wegmans/Publix/Kroger/HEB/Meijer/Albertsons/Hy-Vee should have one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

That could be anywhere up until 2019 or later.

But free definitely implies they did in exchange for nothing, which is false.

https://www.workingnowandthen.com/scholarstudent/reviews/sil...

But you may gladly go along with all of it, even the risk of death, because of what you care about. Your family, your town, your country.

Which is why claiming the work of either men or women is done for free is silly. There are so many other values in life.

As someone who grew up in a not so wealthy family (but not "poor" by any standard), this behaviour is... perplexing. Are people regularly buying far more than they can consume? If that's the case, I don't think changing the date labels will do much. We almost never discarded food because of, and used the dates more as an indicator of when to consume it.

Regardless of the date on the package, eggs at least last a really long time. Go ahead and buy a dozen. If you eat those dozen this month, you'll probably be fine.

I have seen eggs be fine after 3 months in the fridge. I have seen foreign eggs last 6 weeks without refrigeration, the latter part of it in the tropics. (Don't try that with US eggs--we clean them more, weakening their defenses.)

Delia Smith on how to tell a good egg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2OWXN80NZQ

Edit: Ironically (or sadly), I was a bit too quick to call for disposal of old eggs.

Lots of bulk liquids too, but I haven't seen milk.

When I used to spend time in the suburbs I witnessed people filling large cars with groceries to last for weeks. It is hard to estimate in advance what you will actually use working that way.

I prefer to live walking distance from grocers and go every day to buy a small amount of ingredients. I often still end up with leftovers, but I am pretty conscientious about using them before they go bad and before buying more.

You also save the money on gas/less wear on the car/gym membership.

Yes, and it's not limited to food. It's the same phenomenon as someone buying too many games on Steam or buying more books than they can read.

You are right in that labelling won't solve the fundamental issue, even if it could solve some of it: for instance making it more clear at purchase time how fast a product will degenerate could help lower impulse purchase. But then it will lower sales as well, we'd need regulation otherwise the key players won't buy in.

At some point I wonder if a model close to subscription to food services would work, in the same way Netflix doesn't make you buy thousands of movies you won't watch. If fixing our culture doesn't work.

I think often, the answer is a resounding "yes". In the UK there was a major push a few years ago to get rid of BOGOF deals on food as it often just led to more food waste.

I've not really seen much tangible change from that, but supermarkets are competing so much on "deals" that it's often better value to buy more than you need than trying to buy "enough".

I only recently replaced my half empty "Best-by Nov 2016" Costco Saigon Cinnamon with a brand new bottle of the same. The new bottle tastes a little stronger but I sort of regret throwing the old bottle away since I don't think it will actually matter.

Furthermore, you know that the less fresh one is at least |bestby(X) - bestby(Y)| days old.

If the difference in "best by" between two instances is three months, one of them is at least three months old already: it's three months plus the age of the newer one.

That's really the only accurate use of these labels: to leave the old stock on the shelf for someone who doesn't care. Once you bring it home they have little value.

The "best before" kind of date is the most common one by far, and it's used on things that will be obviously bad to eat before they start becoming really bad for your health. Milk, for example, will smell and taste bad before it's really unhealthy. If it seems ok to eat, it probably is - regardless of the date printed on the box.

The other kind, "last day of use", is put on things that can become unhealthy without you noticing - most common use in Sweden is minced meat and raw chicken. This is the type of date you should actually follow without thinking too much about it.

A lot of people don't know there are two types of dates, and treat all dates like the second type.

The thing is, most labels that I see have _sell by_ dates. They're intended for grocery stores, not consumers. But people treat them as _use by_ dates. Which is just awful.

It's important to keep in mind that people are making similar rational decisions when deciding to sniff or toss.

Same in healthcare. Somebody makes a proposal and immediately people come out of the weeds claiming "But look at this thing! this is much worse" and in the end nothing ever changes.

If I "cut" someone's pay, they get a "pay cut" or, in other words, their pay goes down. They don't lose their entire wage.

Meanwhile my parents have a fridge full of food and are constantly throwing stuff out

Having transitioned from the "buy supper and breakfast on my way home" to "week's worth of food in the fridge" myself, I see two components to this. One, buying just-in-time is easier when you're single, gets more complicated when you have a partner, and much more so when you have kids. Two, the "keeping fridge stocked" model affords going to a cheaper store less frequently, and buy in bulk, saving considerable amount of money on a monthly basis.

I'm the same as OP, for the most part my parents would be buying the same stuff at the same store. They'll also be buying at the price on their weekly shopping day and if that's on a weekend when a lot of people shop then stores aren't discounting, whereas I can take advantage of daily specials or late night discounts.

> Two, the "keeping fridge stocked" model affords going to a cheaper store less frequently, and buy in bulk, saving considerable amount of money on a monthly basis.

You can do both, most thrown away food is of the more perishable varieties, so you can buy that on an as needed basis and buy stuff like tinned food in bulk.

Probably. They make use of a farmers market heavily too & are probably more eco friendly on amount of packaging. So not really criticizing just find it crazy opening the fridge when I visit (once a year :( ) and am just stunned by how much food they keep for 2 people. At one point they had 2 full sized fridges.

I now fall back on HN's common knowledge about Electron to declare that you are being bad and should immediately seek to maximize the use of the shared storage areas in your refrigerator.

I do actual cooking too, but the turn around between buying ingredients and eating them is like 3 hours. Where my parents do weekly shopping. So tons of 2 week old stuff lurking behind other stuff etc.

>you are being bad

Def am on packaging. Quite difficult to buy stuff in bachelor compatible portions without it being a environmental shitshow.

Of course, when robots start cooking and restaurant quality meals on demand for the cost of the fresh ingredients, the need to store food will drop like a rock and this problem goes away.

Different countries just like, don't have them. Particularly on stuff like fruit and vegetables.

I pretty much just eat things if they seem edible. If a piece of fruit is mouldy, I'll chop off the mould and eat the rest.

Maybe that's why I'm so bonkers. :P

My wife and I do something else instead. We know we can eat all foodstuffs before their printed expiry date, but we got tripped regularly by products with have short expiry time after being opened - in particular, through not remembering how long such a product has been sitting in the fridge. I eventually glued some magnets to a permanent marker and put it on the fridge, and now we write current date whenever opening a fridge-stored product. This made it much easier to avoid accidental food waste due to uncertainty around spoilage.

I pretty much have fresh stuff that would go stale within weeks, and stable stuff that has effectively infinite lifespan. I don't find it hard to track the fresh stuff.

It's quite possible that my shelf stable items build up forever and so will eventually get wasted in 10 years or something though :P

I NEVER buy strawberries because they are ALWAYS moldy straight from the store.

What else should Americans do, use less water when showering, to fix 'water waste'?

Maybe the problem lies elsewhere...

To take it apart a little more - why is 40% of the food being thrown out a problem? What do we gain by cutting that down to 20%? Do we have a food shortage? Agriculture is 0.9% of America's GDP and less than 0.7% of the population is involved in farming and fishing combined. [0]

It's not at all clear there is any food 'waste' occurring and even if there is, it's not at all unclear where it sits on the list of priorities. I'd say somewhere near the bottom.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

Supply of workers has increased massively, while demand for the things being produced has obviously not increased in the same manner (because the women now in the workforce were already consumers).