RapidcreekJoe Biden pledges $1.7 billion to end hunger across U.S.
dan1101Noble cause but they already spent 8 billion 2 years ago and there is plenty of hunger. I’m not sure how another 1.7 billion will fix it.
There is plenty of food but the distribution is a big part of the problem, hopefully they are addressing that.
I mean, his admin is ALSO currently trying to block the Kroger/Albertsons merger, for example. So this is clearly not the only thing going on.
Completely different group within his admin. FTC isnt gonna have a hand in ending hunger
RanvierThe FTC price increases in foods due to monopolizing is absolutely having a hand in helping to reduce hunger.
Another thing I can think of off the top of my head the Biden admin and democrats are doing is fighting to increase funding for SNAP and resisting republican efforts to impose more restrictions on the program and make it harder to use.
Also the 8 billion isn’t already spent and nothing happened, it’s in the process of being spent and this is more being put on top.
While these are all fine and good, personally I still think a universal basic income would be the best way at reducing hunger. A totally unrestricted program like that though be very hard to push, despite all the evidence of their effectiveness, when there’s fighting over whether or not SNAP should be taking a fine toothed comb to exactly what foods people are or not allowed to buy with it.
Agree completely on the UBI part!
While these are all fine and good, personally I still think a universal basic income would be the best way at reducing hunger. A totally unrestricted program like that though be very hard to push, despite all the evidence of their effectiveness, when there’s fighting over whether or not SNAP should be taking a fine toothed comb to exactly what foods people are or not allowed to buy with it.
Conservatives won’t be satisfied until the entire budget for any safety net program is consumed in administrative costs, leaving nothing for the actual people it’s supposed to be helping.
The government spends hundreds of billions on infrastructure every year.
Have we fixed potholes permanently?
Also, $8 billion is a bit less than $24 bucks per person in America. Do you really think $24 is enough to permanently solve hunger in a country? Do you think that another $5/person is reasonable, a few years later?
I mean, we aren’t all go hungry, obviously.
Waste of money; fight the high prices instead of this pr crap
Man I hate when politicians try to help people
DeceptichumThis will help for what, a year or two?
He could spend his time and effort trying to fix the issue long term . . . or at the very least address thee root cause (capitalism) and donate the money for a temporary fix.
The funding builds on the $8 billion already committed to fighting hunger in September 2022.
And yet lack of access to food and hunger is still growing, almost like throwing money at the problem won't ever fix it and all it takes is one Republican government to come along and stop throwing money at it for this house of cards to come crashing down on the most needing.
How do you know that’s not part of the plan?
Also, the president can’t address the “root cause” or “capitalism”, that’s the domain of Congress.
Because he’s an unashamed capitalist.
Really he can’t ever give a mention of it during say a state of a the union? Because by address I mean do the bare minimum and use his words to explain to the public what the issue is.
Okay, so then he won’t do the thing you want. End of story.
Right, so he won’t do anything to actually address the problem, only kick it down the road.
Glad you’re fine with not attempting to fix hunger.
No one seems to get it do they? Or they’re all down voting us because “Biden good no matter what!”
They really think 1.8b for however millions of people hungry will last long, and will provide them with unlimited food for life, lol.
It’s nice that people have such naive views of how to fix things, but it’s not realistic.
As I said, this is just for pr before the elections.
Yeah, at least it’ll be the same as last election where the day afterwards people will go back to actually being critical of Biden again.
Can’t even hold him accountable during the primaries for these fanatics.
“Biden good no matter what!”
For those in the audience, this is an excellent tell. Only right wingers think in this manner. They exclusively think in this manner. So if someone accuses you of thinking “Biden good no matter what” it’s a pretty good clue that they’re a troll, because they’ve shown you a glimpse of how their mind works and it’s working Republican.
You don’t understand the root issue it seems
Just tell me the root issue is capitalism and that it’s the root of all evil so we can move on
How does one “fight high grocery prices” exactly? You can’t legislate lower margins for companies.
theneverfox… Of course we can. Why couldn’t we?
There’s also all sorts of laws that aren’t being enforced, but should be. Such as anti trust laws, which could be used to split almost every company at the grocery store, as well as most grocery stores themselves
There’s probably laws still on the books related to price gouging for basic food specifically too
Our country wasn’t always like this
bhmnscmmToo bad many states will just refuse the money.
FranklinIt’s the best he can do given the political landscape IMO
That’s probably the reason he is pledging it. It will help democrats in those states.
return2ozmaI don’t get this part…
The full details of the package are expected to be announced by Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, at an event at the White House later on Tuesday.
Why?! Biden should be doing this! He needs to be out in public looking strong and “doing things”! SMH This makes him look like everybody else is doing his job for him.
… who the fuck cares?
Or like at least Harris. She could sure use a win at some point during this presidency. She’s done plenty of work shoveling shit, give her at least one video clip of doing something good. No one’s going to put Doug Emhoff on the news.
My god that picture.
“What’re you looking at smooth skin”
Can we not find a source for the news that isn’t owned by an East Asian religious cult since 2018?
Newsweek is an American publication, owned by American publishing company Newsweek Publishing LLC.
Let me help:
In 2013, IBT Media acquired Newsweek from IAC; the acquisition included the Newsweek brand and its online publication, but did not include The Daily Beast.[11] IBT Media, which also owns the International Business Times, rebranded itself as Newsweek Media Group, and in 2014, relaunched Newsweek in both print and digital form.
In 2018, IBT Media split into two companies, Newsweek Publishing and IBT Media. The split was accomplished one day before the District Attorney of Manhattan indicted Etienne Uzac, the co-owner of IBT Media, on fraud charges.[12][13][14]
Under Newsweek’s current co-owner and CEO, Dev Pragad, it is profitable with revenue of $60 million and also growing: between May 2019 and May 2022, its monthly unique visitors rose from about 30 million to 48 million, according to Comscore. Pragad became CEO in 2016; readership has grown to 100 million readers per month, the highest in its 90-year history.[15][16] The operations of the company were researched by the Harvard Business School; they published a case study in 2021.[17]
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek
Then just check into those companies and the CEO.
dephyreI’m really curious to see what these projects are going to look like. It’s estimated that 30-40% of all food in the US is wasted (usda.gov)
USAToday also has a recent story where they discussed some of the climate impacts that could be contributing to.
Food Waste FAQs
How much food waste is there in the United States? In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply. This estimate, based on estimates from USDA’s Economic Research Service of 31 percent food loss at the retail and consumer levels, corresponded to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010. This amount of waste has far-reaching impacts on society:
This right here. We don’t have a food scarcity issue or even a price problem for most things. What we have is a logistics problem. Way too many people live in what are called food deserts. If they have easy access to “food” it’s usually of the convenience store variety, overpriced and extremely bad for you.
I know not everyone can afford it but those that can should look at misfits marketplace. They sell the oddball produce that most people won’t buy so it doesn’t make it your local store, when a design changes drastically or is printed wrong, etc.
Tackiing hunger in this country will take money because money makes thing happen but it will also take more than just buying a bunch of food and handing it out. It’s going to take a push for more community gardens, maybe allowing agriculture inside limits where it isn’t at the moment, etc.
TimLovesTechI have seen some videos on things like vertical gardens in shipping containers that seem like they would be a great way to bring produce to urban areas that is both fresh, and nearby in terms of logistics.
This looks like a decent article about it from a few years ago on a company in Denver. There are a growing number of companies working on this also, and maybe with some government funds it could spread faster, and in areas most in need first.
This is definitely one of the ways forward. Many, many, many, many moons ago I attempted to run a blog about growing fresh produce in an urban environment. You can’t feed a family on what will fit in a window box or on an apt porch but you can have tomatoes for a salad or on a burger, lettuce for that salad that is actually good for you and more.
If we are talking feeding the most people at once from a central location, hydro and aeroponics is what is needed, combined with leds of varying colors and you can cut the growth time down by 50% or more, that means 90 day tomatoes in 45 or so with aeroponics and 60ish with hydro iirc.
I’m a proponent of multiple avenues. Do the vertical farming and focus on community gardens where kids especially can get their hands dirty and learn something about the planet we live on.
The big problem with advanced (indoor) farming practices is that it defeats the purpose of what makes farming so very cheap…
The sun is providing the power for free. Running lighting for plants will take electricity we aren’t currently collecting from the sun and now adds a cost. Water, soil, and light are all basic ingredients you can get by going for a walk in particularly arable climates. But become controlled variables that need to be heavily paid for in advanced techniques.
It’s not scalable to large scale farming and not using the sun is a huge error in trying to make things more sustainable. Not until mass adopted solar arrays or some kind of passthrough system for light.
All of this is wrong. It sounds like you don’t know how much more efficient hydro and aero is with leds that can be programmed to trick the plants into thinking it’s whatever season you want. Not to mention being able to grow tomatoes in Canada in the winter.
Indoor, vertical farming with aero/hydro is many many times more efficient. The 2 plants I have real numbers for (because they are similar) tomatoes and weed will grow up to twice as fast without manipulating the day/night cycle.
As for energy use. Solar is fucking dirt cheap and even without solar, it’s extremely cheap to run the lights and other systems.
Seriously my dude/dudette. Do yourself a favor and look into this. I highly doubt that everyone who is investing in this and using it now is wrong and you are the only one who knows better. There is a reason why the best weed is always hydro or aero especially when you can grow it anywhere.
No I know all about how incredibly efficient hydroponics can be and even deeply loved reading a research paper on using just nutrient enriched water for roots systems without the need for soil. Super cool stuff.
But still doesn’t take into account electricity use is way more power than just using the sun. There is a reason greenhouses are standard still in that they are cheap and only require basic maintenance but still let you harvest the sun as an energy source.
But scaling that to feed an entire country is basically impossible. Power use becomes outrageous and you get limited by size. You need a skyscraper to feed a city and nearly as much energy.
It works on small scale and can be much more efficient than local wild growing for small scale productions but that’s about it.
The math for how much energy we take from the sun and how much of it is absorbed by plants is not negligible. And it will not work for all crops in our current energy needs to run it. Especially with our current production rate and system.
Sorry but it’s the truth. It’s just not there and won’t be for a while.
You really need to argue don’t you?
This problem you are stuck on isn’t actually a problem. Why? Because of how much more efficient it is. No one is saying that one vertical farm will feed the entire country. We will still have local farms, home gardens, etc. This is the future of growing food both produce now and meat in the coming decades.
Yes, the solar panels only convert like 18% of the incoming light, but, again, $ for $ growing things with solar and aero/hydro is way way cheaper than dirt, relying on the sun, seasons, etc.
Seriously. Maybe stop focusing on what you think is wrong and work to improve things.
Vertical farming is the only way we will feed people in the coming decades.
There’s an inherent geometric problem with using solar for vertical farms. They use the volume of the space, which increases by a cube factor. Solar, however, increases according to surface area, which is a square factor.
You thus quickly hit a limit where you can no longer power the lights for your vertical farm by solar panels you stick on the roof. You have to have either a field of solar panels elsewhere–which might have been used to grow food the old fashioned way–or you have to use something that scales differently. Wind also scales by surface area, so not that. Geothermal or nuclear are maybes.
Possibility one way around this is tweaking the spectrum of lights that plants use. Taking full spectrum sun lighting, converting it to electricity, and then using LEDs to create full spectrum lighting isn’t going to work. However, plants primarily use only a narrow space of blue and red light as part of photosynthesis. This isn’t the full story, either, as plants do use the rest of the spectrum as signals for other biological processes.
Now, do they need the rest of that spectrum all the time and at full power? Depends on the plant. It’s complicated, and we may end up customizing lighting for every crop.
Even then, the square-cube problem will put limits on how big vertical farming facilities can get while being powered by solar and/or wind.
Thank you. I had someone explain this to me before in this kind of directly data driven way but I studied astrophysics and macro-xenobiology so I am not the person to be explaining it back out.
But yeah all that.
It makes me wonder if you could build a vertical farm like a big greenhouse made of glass though and direct light from the sun through the building using reflectors without overheating and cooking the plants but, with green energy production you really get to a point where it’s the fields for growing crops previously are now covered in mined advanced electronics that need replacing and the farming structure itself which isn’t as scalable as just adding a field to your crop rotation.
You really need to argue don’t you?
This problem you are stuck on isn’t actually a problem. Why? Because of how much more efficient it is.
Seriously. Maybe stop focusing on what you think is wrong and work to improve things.
Vertical farming is the only way we will feed people in the coming decades.
This isn’t the problem you two think it is. No one is talking about feeding an entire city from one skyscraper. But, you could feed an entire block from one or two levels of a skyscraper.
I’m now going to block you two twits because I don’t have to time for this shit right now. Going out tonight to see Gladys Knight and I have to respond to someone helping me grow my business.
You know, if you feel the need to block people who are laying out arguments and being civil, then maybe you should rethink having Internet discussions altogether.
They ignore people providing data and argue their opinions are worth more than facts, call people rude names and take the chance to brag about themselves every chance they can take.
So they are the average American apparently and exactly the right level of self assured to be the desired group to sell anything too.
They really shouldn’t be here but none of us are ever gonna get that through to them. They will be right whether or not the have to ignore everyone else to be so.
I’m American.
Thing is, I actually am interested in this stuff and am working on setting some of the ideas up in my own backyard. I just have some idea of the limitations and what problems are yet to be solved.
I know I know. We aren’t all like that but seriously they are all over this comment section being like this. Literally just above is one where someone says after providing a research study for emphasis "you aren’t entitled to assume a study is wrong just because of a gut feeling and this guy responded with:
“Actually I am. That’s kinda how thinking for yourself works.”
And I just can’t think of a more stereotypical, Self Assured American™ thing to say.
I’m just trying to be practical and know that nothing is perfect, and have read up on some of the limitations of this to think it’s better than just ecologically friendly farming practices for widescape use.
I noticed that thread, too, and had a good pounding-my-head-against-the-wall session about it.
This reminds me, too, of a thread I had some years ago on Reddit that was also about hydroponic farming. The other guy also had the idea that hydroponics would change everything, and would also shake off all the corporate control of farming. As if large scale hydroponics wouldn’t also become the new large scale corporate farms. Or that Monsanto would see the market shift and go “whoops, guess we’re irrelevant now”.
I bring this up because I’ve noticed a trend of hydroponics advocates. They see the problems with our farming system, which is fair, but drink deep of the hydroponic flavor-aid and don’t understand the other problems of what they’re talking about. This tends to overlap with techno-fetishism. Grow plants in dirt? Like we did when we first learned to make fire? Move over, because I’ve got something that will make it way better without knowing how the current system works.
Sorry to sorta necro this but I had a couple of his numbers floating in my head and I had to do the math.
He suggested that you could feed a city block with only 2 floors of a skyscraper which is already an insane ask but whatever.
But that means for a city like Philadelphia, you would need a total of around 16,000 buildings with 2 floors each dedicated to farming which widespreads your farmers. Or if you decide to dedicate each building to farming only you still need 322 skyscrapers each 100 floors high to feed the city.
Which means water pumps and infrastructure to support all that water for 322 buildings which is about the current number of high rises and skyscrapers in Philadelphia combined.
You need to convert your entire city to food production just to feed the city that is just existing to feed itself.
My God this really isn’t the win they think it is. Technology will certainly save us but man I don’t see it in the pie in the sky scifi answers but something boring like protein manipulation in yeast cultures.
Not surprised at all. Beyond that, I suspect even two floors is already too many to effectively power the thing with solar on the roof of the same building. Even converting solar to electricity to a narrow spectrum of light at 100% efficiency for the entire thing wouldn’t get you there.
Almost half of food waste is people buying food that they let go bad before they eat it.
That’s substantially a price problem, in that people are more willing to let a cheap banana spoil than a prime rib or lobster. Food being cheap makes people more willing to let it expire.
But fixing residential food waste by making food more expensive would make hunger worse.
Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.
Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.
I’d argue that the largest source is actually grocery stores followed by restaurants. I’ve worked a few grocery stores including target when they added pfresh. The food that gets tossed by deli/bakery alone will piss you off. Second harvest would only come around once or twice a week so the rest of the time tons of bread, fried chicken, cakes, etc would get tossed in the trash. And thats not even accounting for the vendor trash. At least once I rescued a ton of little debbie stuff from a dumpster, it was all still boxed up and in date, the boxes had been smashed by something so the vendor tossed it.
One bread vendor I knew would take the close dated bread to the nearest good will so it had a chance to sell but I’m not sure about others.
You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you’re factually just plain wrong.
You’ve seen the centralized waste. But you haven’t picked through a neighborhood’s worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.
Understanding Food Loss and Waste—Why Are We Losing and Wasting Food?
The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) reported that approximately one-third of all produced foods (1.3 billion tons of edible food) for human consumption is lost and wasted every year across the entire supply chain. Significant impacts of food ...
I actually do argue that and I’m not in the mood to tear it apart. I know what the average household throws out despite mine being on the (damn near nothing) end of the bell curve.
If you had actually ever worked any grocery or restaurants, you would know what I know and just because it was done by the nih doesn’t mean it’s accurate at all or even well done.
I really doubt that the entirety of a week’s worth of grocery store trash in say a week would be less than that of the combined households that shop there. And as I said because I’m sure the study didn’t cover, thats not even accounting for the various vendors throwing out old or close dated products.
Some things like the aforementioned bread sometimes gets moved elsewhere and I’m sure some of them donate it to second harvest or similar but then you also have the chips, beer, etc that all come in via vendor and the trash/out date stuff goes with them so you can’t really track it because the store doesn’t have that in their system.
Oh and before I am done here. Please do yourself a favor and look up the definition for the word “argue”. I am not saying that I know for a fact, I’m saying that I would ARGUE that I’m right.
You have a nice day now.
LOL, you’re not entitled to just assume a study is wrong and that your anecdote or gut feeling is better.
Actually I am. That’s kind of how thinking for yourself works. I have years of experience that clearly others don’t. I’ve read enough and seen enough on just how much people throw out and it’s pushed me to reduce my actual trash to a min. For a household of 3 adults we trash way less than people who live by themselves. We compost everything we can, recycle/reuse what we can and burn the rest.
If you or the doofus I responded to had ever actually worked restaurants or grocery stores you would understand what I am saying, but, that would also assume that you have working braincells and aren’t going on just being contrary to argue and feel like you are more than you are.
You have a nice day now.
ripcordThat’s not thinking.
Anecdotes and feels are not data.
It’s really weird, but common, for people to think it’s actual data, like you’re doing here.
Wow. Add another one to the pile.
I’m not sure you know what an anecdote is.
I’ve worked for 3 different restaurants, 3 different retail/grocery and likely other jobs that those like you and the other pseudo intellectuals here have probably never heard of nor could you handle.
Me saying that I would argue that it’s grocery stores at the top Is A) The opposite of anecdotal and B) Something anyone who has actually worked deli/bakery, dairy, etc would agree with me on.
You fuckwits keep replying to me and I’ll keep blocking you. You have a nice life having to choose between breathing or thinking