bittersnurr:

cumaeansibyl:

slashmarks:

there’s a big difference between “food waste” as in “farmers destroy tons of food to avoid exceeding quotas” or “supermarkets throw away this much edible food because it doesn’t sell”

and “food waste” as in “it is not actually within the capacity of humans to perfectly predict and track household food consumption, so a certain amount of food per household inevitably goes bad and has to be thrown out every year”

don’t take long showers, don’t leave the lights on, don’t turn the heat up too high, don’t buy too much food – over and over we’re told that waste and scarcity in the world are our fault as individuals and not driven by businesses’ decisions

almost every single PSA about food waste I’ve ever seen has mentioned how much the average American household allegedly throws out per year, a number they invariably got by dividing overall food waste by number of households – this is a Spiders Georg level of not accounting for the outliers, leading to ridiculous headlines like “Americans Throw Out 40 Percent Of Their Food, Which Is Terrible For the Climate” 

(I mean, check out the claim in there that food waste amounts to $400 per American per year… I get that they’re trying to contextualize a huge number, but it sounds like every person is literally throwing away $400 of food they personally bought and I guarantee you no one is doing that)

obviously it’s best to avoid throwing out food because it’s good for the grocery budget, just like conserving energy reduces the utility bills, but you personally are not responsible for overburdened landfills or food insecurity if something goes bad in the back of the fridge or you don’t compost your fucking leftovers

Also like, water use in california for example, is mostly agriculture. Grocery stores are throwing out still edible food.

But here is a fun fact, it took me rewording the google searches at least 3x, with more and more specific examples (I had to have “california” for the first and “grocery store” in the second), to get any results that were not “naughty consumers need to give up food and water or they are personally killing the planet”. Seriously.

So basically, if I did not know specifically, that most water in california was used by business, and that grocery stores throw out unexpired food, I couldn’t have even sourced those claims I already knew about, because the search results are so bogged down on victim blaming shit I couldn’t have found the results ever. Like you literally type in “environmental harm by corporations” and only get corporations “fighting” environmental harm by not being totally apathetic about the damage they cause.

The earth will die because even if everyone is perfectly obedient that’s not going to matter when 80% of the harm isn’t on our end. Personal responsibility will not save the planet because it’s not what is killing it and the fact that people only seem to push this kind of environment shit makes me so mad because god. If the earth is gonna burn regardless there’s no reason to not have air conditioning..