[energy123]

The same thing happens in food processing. The low quality stuff gets sold under a different, cheaper brand, or reprocessed into another product.

I'm not going to cast stones at this practice because as always the alternative isn't some magical world where all produce is perfect, the real alternative is that it gets thrown in the trash and wasted, and everyone is worse off despite feeling better about themselves.

[close04]

> the real alternative is that it gets thrown in the trash and wasted, and everyone is worse off despite feeling better about themselves

Depending on what's the minimum quality you consider acceptable for the product, you might want to throw away something and have good reasons to feel good about yourself doing it. There is a point where something dips below good ("less effective medication") and even neutral ("it's an empty pill"), into actively harmful ("it will kill you faster"). Discarding it instead of monetizing it is the positive outcome.

[SeriousM]

Happy to live in a country with very strong food control. Yes we have the alternative labels yet it must be at least as good as the original.

[yorwba]

They only need to be as good as the minimum standard for the category they're sold in. If you have a "good" bin and a "bad" bin, and the good bin easily exceeds the minimum requirements while the bad bin just barely meets them, that's fine, too. Or the good bin can be sold as class I, while the bad bin needs to be labeled as class II. Of course those categories usually aren't about safety-relevant aspects of quality, but things like weight or shape or appearance.

[energy123]

I want more good regulations, and less bad regulations, so I am not necessarily against anything you said here.

[hinkley]

If the product is ineffective you’re stealing from people. And in the case of pharma, probably ruining their lives in the process, since we rarely do more than two care plans at once and if one is busted then they should be doing something else instead.

[nosianu]

> the real alternative is that it gets thrown in the trash and wasted

My view is a bit different nowadays, but this is very much an extreme bird's eye view from very high up, looking at only the smaller processes I have no disagreement. So, my point is more like an alternative co-existing higher level view, not a replacement of what you and others say. You will still be right to want to optimize your processes of course.

I view it as different streams. Everything is a circle. There is a significant cost - energy (and time and space and effort). As long as we use ancient sun-energy dug out of the ground it's bad, but if we could power the circles with current sun energy it would not matter much.

You have one overall stream or flow, all materials, and output streams are various sizes of end products. The good stuff stream flows to the customers (and forms bigger circles), the mistakes are instead rerouted into the recycling stream.

In chemical engineering and in manufacturing you have the same. Making food, whether completely natural, or including any kind of processing even if it's just separation and packaging, will have similar properties. Quality varies, and you have additional processing streams for various qualities.

Sure, one would want to optimize the streams, but if we did not have the fossil energy source limitation, and maybe also space, if you have to go back to the growing fields, it would not matter too much.

----

Imaginary picture:

Imagine in the far future somebody set up a fully automated closed system for making food, from growing to putting it in a huge cafeteria buffet, fully stocked all day. But there is no more people. As long as there is energy, food is created, processed, put on the buffet, and then recycled, since there is nobody to actually eat anything.

Is it a waste? Well, yes and no.

The whole of earth is like that!

As long as there is energy the cycles continue. What is "waste"? If you take the very big view, everything just "is".

But again, our actual limitation is the energy source for our food cycles. Using ancient stored sun energy releases the carbon stored underground, and it also slowly depletes those stores. The real problem first of all is where we get the energy for our cycles from, not really if parts of it don't make it to the end customers. Opportunity cost, what we could use the space and general effort for instead of on recycling cycles comes a distant second, I think.

[jorvi]

The alternate also happens though.

Over here in The Netherlands, the milk for all milk products comes out of the same cows and is processed in the same tanks. When you're paying 2x the price for brand name milk, you're getting seriously scammed.

[hinkley]

There are a couple cooperatives here that own their own processing facilities. As food businesses got bigger the distance between processing plants has grown and grown and it ends up netting the farmers less and less.

I learned recently that there was a small coop near where I live that got bought up by a larger one, Organic Valley. Which has a semi famous permaculturist as a member (Mark Shepard), and the only reason I knew it to be a coop. They don’t advertise that fact well.

[throwawayqqq11]

A quality increase does not mean "perfection" and so "magical" turns into "more expensive".

Id like to live in that world.