You may have seen videos floating around showing workers tossing dozens of donuts into the trash at the end of their working day. Link. Some people may look at this and call it a failure of the current economic system. However, I will argue that this gross surplus problem is infinitely better than the alternative; that is, shortages.
In an economy one may only have surplus or shortage. There is never going to be a way to exactly meet demand for anything. Thus, there are two options. Produce less than is needed, which leads to shortages and less for everyone. Or produce more than is needed, where the extra is, for the most part, thrown away. These are the two possible outcomes of the fact that markets (or distribution networks if you're not in a market based economy) are incapable of reacting to instantaneous changes in demand.
Example one: Szechuan sauce. In 2019, McDonalds cashed in on the hype surrounding the popular new show Rick and Morty by reintroducing the sauce that hadn't been seen since 1998. They grossly miscalculated the demand for the product and, as a result, people were furious and swarmed McDonalds locations all around the US. Packets of the sauce were selling online for a hundred times their initial value. The whole escapade was a footnote in the long run, but it really exemplifies what happens when there isn't enough to go around. Since this was a purely luxury product, it didn't affect individual well being. However, shortages of essential goods can cause havoc in a society, with the extreme worst case scenario being famine and death.
The floor of a shortage is much worse than the ceiling of waste created by a surplus.
You must realize that market conditions allow for the wastage or spoilage of surplus goods, especially perishable goods like milk and bananas, through an offset in the price of goods that are actually sold. The businesses that handle perishable goods understand that some of their stock will go to waste each week and plan for that. There are very smart economic analysts that are working day in and day out to calculate exactly how much waste they are creating and how to mitigate it. Because, in the end, wasted goods are wasted money. No business wants to waste their product. They do it because the alternative is worse.
Take two scenarios. In scenario one, a dozen donuts are left over at the end of the day at a donut shop. They are sold for $1.00 and cost 49 cents to produce. (These are random numbers I invented to make a point.) If the donut shop runs out of donuts before the last customer can purchase a dozen, they lose 51 cents. If those donuts are left over, they lose 49 cents per donut. The math works out so that having waste is more profitable than losing a customer.
So, you may say, isn't it bad that these conditions encourage wastefulness?
In a sense, yes. But the alternative is no donuts for the last ten people who walk into a donut shop. And we can't have that, can we?
On another line of reasoning, related the the infamous "broken windows" theory of economics, is that, even though the end product (the donut) is not eaten but thrown away, the flour is bought, the sugar is bought, the oil is bought, the worker has an extra hour on their clock, and the trash collection business has a little bit more work. Though the donut is thrown away, its impact on the economy is the same as if it was not wasted at all. Though there are some holes in the "broken windows" theory of economics, it is useful as a case study in how business waste is not actually as bad as the alternative.
A final note: not all food waste is actually wasted. A lot of it is put back into the system as animal feed or compost. Even though this is a small portion of the total waste, in the end we have to agree that too much food is better than not enough. In my final opinion, surplus trounces shortage.
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