[m0llusk]

The waste generated is also a major challenge. Having fresh food always ready means trashing a lot of meals. In the US there are networks of food banks and such, but it can still be difficult to keep up with the flow of unpurchased food that is no longer fresh.

[charcircuit]

You can just throw food in the garbage.

[GuinansEyebrows]

hey, this is actually Not Good

[ssl-3]

How is this waste dealt with in Japan? Why can't whatever-that-is be implemented in the US?

[rjh29]

Badly. Until a few years ago there was a franchise-wide rule that no food could be discounted even if it was close to expiry, so either the staff/owners bought them and ate it themselves, or it went in the dumpster.

Giving expired food to homeless people is not really a thing there either.

[ginko]

South Korea has extremely strict food waste laws and a pretty well developed systems of convenience stores. I wonder how things are handled there.

[skhr0680]

Convenience stores changed a lot around 2010 when they started real time tracking Every Damn Thing. Even in the mid 00s staff ate, took home, or gave away whatever they wanted to from the expired pile.

[ssl-3]

If that works (badly) in Japan, then why can't it work (just as badly) in the US?

What new impediment does the geography bring to the table?

[rjh29]

I was merely answering your question about how Japan deals with it (by trashing it, mostly). I guess the US could do that but unlike Japan, I'd expect people to break into the dumpsters and steal the food out of it. The trashing of food might offend people more in the US.

In terms of geography though, Japan has an extremely efficient and well developed cold chain and the country is pretty much a line from north to south. The US is clearly more spread out and significantly larger than Japan. That causes problems with both delivering the food to stores and (as other people have mentioned) efficiently moving waste to food banks.

[m0llusk]

People and customs related to food are not primarily geographic in nature. Japan is a strongly ordered society, not a roiling chaotic mess like the US. When people run into trouble they often hide their shame and starve themselves rather than beg for food. And it isn't like the network of food banks in the US was easy to set up or keep running.

[thaumasiotes]

It can, but probably not in advance.

It wouldn't make much sense to develop infrastructure around a source of rapidly-expiring food before that source existed. But once the food is there, demand for it will quickly develop.

There's a general theme in policy discussions of people saying "system X has a feature that system Y does not have; therefore, moving from system Y to system X must require a fully-developed auxiliary system to be in place for dealing with that feature before the move can even be considered a possibility". This is complete nonsense; it's what people say when they want to object to something, but don't have any reasons.

[ssl-3]

That's kind of what I was leaning towards. It's a problem that needs solved, but it's not necessarily hard to solve, nor does it need solved in advance.

It's the kind of problem can often very nearly resolve itself.

Here in the States, I've seen what can happen at the end of the night at a busy Little Ceasers in a not-great part of town. They've got a lot of unsold pizzas, already boxed, that they simply need to get rid of so they can close up and go home.

So they walk out the back door with armloads of pizzas and... casually give them away to the people who are waiting out there. It's a very calm and surprisingly tidy process that goes by quickly. This happens at the same time every night.

The only apparent cost is whatever it takes to maintain the base amount of humility required to let this happen instead of dutifully marching the pizzas over to the dumpster and tossing them in.

This routine is almost certainly an invention of evolution, instead of planning.