I love how this comment thread perfectly echoes what the article is talking about.

From a sibling comment by imtrigued:

> Almost a billion are still going hungry.

"The world is awful"

And then from your parent comment:

> Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare

"The world is better"

And finally your comment:

> it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve

"The world can be much better"

These three are all true, and I suspect each person already knew all three. It's just that each person chose to focus on a separate aspect.

It seems to me that the first two are statements, and the final one is a conclusion, which is the only one that's productive to focus on.

I think they all achieve different purposes.

"The world is awful" highlights a problem that needs solving, a concrete goal

"The world is better" tells you that something is working, which you can build on top of or improve

"The world can be better" gives a proposal for a course of action

While the 3rd might seem like the most useful, the 1st is extremely important too, because if the proposal fails then you need to fall back to thinking about the problem. The 2nd is important for both motivation, and also for promoting incremental progress

It's a nice narrative but the accuracy of it is questionable, there isn't really some grand historical march away from famine. We've just had a great run from 1980-2020. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/03/Famine-victims-si...

The situation in 2022 is not good, it will take time to see exactly how bad.

Famine correlates very closely with war -- if our recent period of relative global peace comes to an end it will probably return with a vengeance.

Some food should be wasted. If 100% of food were consumed, that would mean that any slight disruption would result in not enough food, or that we were already in a state where there is not enough food. Wasting some food is better than having food shortages. Much better.

We've built a society that's so litigious that companies are incentivized to recommend throwing away food even if there's less than a 0.01% chance of food-borne illness. Our waste is in part out of fear of getting sued or sick, but I'm not convinced the waste is the lesser of two evils. Food poisoning sucks, but it's survivable. Unlike starvation.

A good example of this caution is eggs and refrigeration, for which American's and European's have opposite ways of handling things.

I think the point missing is that food that get wasted could not arrive where it is needed before getting rot. Letting aside the expenses to do that. The problem is not that we waste food, as it would not solve starvation, the problem is that in those places where people has no food, there is no production.