Distributing free potatoes will likely cause waste somewhere else, as e.g. people will buy less potatoes in supermarkets. The waste just becomes less visible as supermarkets dispose of food every day.
Another current exhibit is the prohibition of using salt for removing snow and ice from the pavements because it's "bad for plants and the ground water". While that is true to some degree, the Berlin policy conveniently ignores all second-order effects: Sidewalks are more slippery, more people get hurt. I see people slipping on snow-compacted ice almost every day. How many trees have to be saved to make it worthwhile for more people breaking their bones?
You can apply for an exemption though, e.g. if you plan to use salt on a driveway to a hospital. Processing fees for such an exemption are up to 1.4k€ [1].
The rent cap is another one. But let's go there another day..
[1] https://www.berlin.de/umwelt/themen/natur-pflanzen-artenschu...
Rigorously considering second-order (and greater) effects is a massive undertaking, though. Like: how do you even know how many more people will slip and get hurt without salting sidewalks and how much the damage the salt does to "plants and ground water," without many careful and expensive research projects? And then there's the challenge of weighing such completely disparate things: how many injuries are healthier plants worth?
Basically is seems easier said than done.
But there’s no shred of enforcement and instead of calling for enforcement, politicians now call for relaxing the rules on salting.
Donating potatoes that were about to go to waste might cause waste elsewhere, but what you propose is that we never give food away unless we can be absolutely sure it won’t cause waste in another sub-system. That’s a tall order. These potatoes were going to be waste anyway.
Given this example is about 1T batches of potatoes, it could be used by a business that depends on cheap potatoes like a food kitchen, or a business that can absorb the input surge and convert it into a product that can be stored longer term like frozen foods.
I seriously doubt they did not know that. The whole point of salt is to prevent people from falling. Of course they knew more people will fall.
Also how do you choose between negative second order effects? Salting roads creates negative effects for groundwater and plants which are really hard to mitigate. On the other hand the second order effect of people slipping could at least be dealt with on an individual level by putting spikes on your shoes.
First off you have to identify them. Until you frame the costs and benefits of salting, it isn't clear that the real question is how can we improve pedestrian and vehicular traction without poisoning our plants and water supply. (I'd argue it's frequent ploughing, gravelling and dynamic signs for signalling when chains/snowies/AWD are required.)
That has a specific answer, like "twenty". But calculating it would be a hopeless task.
The **** is a death cult. They are very very happy to see you become an invalid if it avoids the death of a sapling. I know that this sounds hyperbolic to the point of being derisive, but it's the observable truth.
In this case, it seems that Berliner Morgenpost and Ecosia are doing shipping and distribution for free, for PR reasons or maybe as some kind of charitable volunteering project. It's nice of them to volunteer their time, but it seems strange to talk about “a story about the absurdities of our food system”. Are they saying that it is absurd that a newspaper doesn't permanently turn into a money-losing grocery distributor?
https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article410886475/gruene-woc...
Negative prices occur from time to time in the electricity market because some types of power plants are slow to ramp up and down. So if demand falls too rapidly, spot electricity prices can negative.
Stuff that didn't sell was called "Flush Out" and had to be disposed of.
You couldn't legally just dump the contents without paying money so I made an app that let employees get cases for shipping costs. It was popular, even though we were usually talking about weird flavours that no one liked (stuff akin to Apple Ginger ale)
They eventually got rid of it, but I was already out of the company so I didn't know the reason.
I know this is beside the point, but Apple Ginger Ale sounds legitimately awesome. I’ve never seen that flavor before, but now I really want to try it haha.
It was near the beginning of the pandemic, due to the demand shock of everything shutting down.
There were probably practical ways to profit off the low prices (assuming the risk of them not recovering), but I never did figure out something that would work for a retail investor.
But there also has to be a cost (or other liability) to keeping it, or you could just wait for demand to arise. (There generally is some kind of inventory/warehousing cost. But just saying.)
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/potato-co...
> A farm in Saxony has been left with 4,000 tons of potatoes in what Berliner Morgenpost is calling “a story about the absurdities of our food system”.
I dunno; it doesn’t seem too absurd, better to have too many than too few potatoes.
It is exactly four million kilograms. (Germany uses the SI metric ton)
https://langleyadvancetimes.com/2025/08/09/record-breaking-u...
At 2000 kcal/day average caloric expenditure, you could feed 1.6 million people for a day. Or 3.2 if it was only half the diet. That's a lot of food indeed!
The problem is most of the volume/weight is water; that's not very convenient. In comparison, an equivalent volume of cereals would feed 7 million people and are much easier to store long term, they are very efficient !
According to google a 200g potato give off about half a volt (0.5v) and 0.2mah
4000 tonnes = 4,000,000 kg = 4,000,000,000 g
num potatoes = 4,000,000,000 / 200 = 20,000,000 potatoes
volts = 20,000,000 x 0.5v = 10,000,000 volts (10megavolts)
I am not an electrical engineer, what could we do with this?
You'll also need to buy the metal electrodes.
Boil them, mash them, stick'em, stew them...
But other potatoes likely will be.
It's not like people are suddenly going to want more potatoes.
I did some math out of curiosity to better visualize this amount in my head. If we assume that a typical serving of potatoes in a meal where potatoes are an important part is 200g, then with 4 million kg of potatoes you can make 20 million of such meals (1/4 of Germany's population).
And nowadays, Belgians eat way more of them per capita than they do!
It seems that they acknowledge that they are doing thus because there is a supply glut so potatoes will go to waste in any case...
Ultimately this give away is a waste of efforts, too. Sometimes there is just nothing to be done...
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Given the direction of public school funding, and the sentiment of MAGA shitheels, I expect the problem to worsen.
The farmer got their money (it was purchased in advance). The company purchasing it didn't pick it up tho, because demand is not there, and they'd likely lose more money on transport and distribution. Which is where the two companies doing this campaign come in - they pay for distribution costs, so the farmer doesn't throw them away.
(1): Kinda a bit like local farmer markets, but also very different.
the problem isn't the giving away stuff for free part
but the scale of it
I mean giving free stuff to people in need is always grate, irrelevant of scale.
Giving it to people which can easily afford it on small scale is just fine too.
Giving it to people which can easily afford it on gigantic scale and it's only slightly hurting the bottom line of some huge cooperation, then who cares.
But giving away a product people might have bought from smaller local businesses in very larger amounts (more then what such small 1-2 person businesses sell in multiple month), that is where your "charitable" action might cost people their job and you might do far more harm then good.
now Germans are picky about their potato and the chance that 4k Tons of free potato are the kind of potato you find in "local traditional markets" is pretty slim. So this might all just be very hypothetical.
From the original pages FAQ:
> Wie viele Kartoffeln bekomme ich?
> Jede Abnahmestelle erhält ca. 1 Tonne (1.000 kg) Kartoffeln.