Berlin is a great place to observe policies with good intentions, yet negative second-order effects.
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..
> 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.
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?
The problem is not salting or not - the problem is that the house owners are liable for cleaning the sidewalk and they all outsourced it to the same companies. And the companies unsurprisingly all fail to deliver on their obligations because they take on way more customers they could possibly handle. The result is as expected - nothing gets done. A shovel and broom, maybe some grit would have been enough.
But there’s no shred of enforcement and instead of calling for enforcement, politicians now call for relaxing the rules on salting.
Or maybe don't make everyone responsible for the public roadway/sidewalk in front of their house and instead have the people that are responsible for all other things public roadway/sidewalk be responsible?
Works elsewhere, why not in Germany, where taxes should actually be even better able to cover it? [yes I know people in Germany, even specifically in Berlin and no this is not a Berlin specific thing]
Like where I live, the city also says not to use salt whenever you can and use alternatives and they themselves do not salt the roads in our town either, except for the major in and out ones. This is Canada btw. so we do get a load of snow and ice. They use grit and in spring the city sends through a grit cleaning crew (for reuse next winter). Except for the parts that make it onto lawns from snow plows pushing it onto your property. There it's your job i.e. some people put down mats in fall or they use brushes to get it out of the lawn and back onto the street where it can be picked up. Just yesterday, it was above freezing and the city snow plows went and used the warmer weather to scrape lots of ice off the road!
>Or maybe don't make everyone responsible for the public roadway/sidewalk in front of their house and instead have the people that are responsible for all other things public roadway/sidewalk be responsible?
Here in New York the problem is opposite. Every home and business owner is responsible for quickly clearing any walkways/sidewalks/driveways they own and are in front of their homes or businesses. New York is very litigious. As a consequence, unless someone is unable, way off the beaten path or doesn't care about getting sued for huge money, most everyone, especially businesses, made sure that their sidewalks and pathways are completely clear of snow and ice to avoid a ruinous lawsuit. On the flip side, properties owned by the county, city, town or other public entities are far more likely to be unmaintained and covered in snow and ice. In general I'm against living in an overly litigious society, but when it comes to snow and ice clearance it certainly has an impact here. This is all in spite of extremely high tax rates (property, income, sales and otherwise).
I believe enforcement would solve the problem for Berlin as well. Just hand out substantial fines to change the calculus for the home owner. At the moment, the risk/reward is favoring doing nothing, so that's what a lot of people do.
what is bieng nibbled at but not spoken is the fundamental conection between responsabilities and rights of citizens, and the long nasty never ending attempts to seperate and comidify them.
Funny that you would propose such a practical and simple solution. This has been proposed by the Green Party in Berlin and I’m surprised you didn’t hear the wailing choir of house owners across the Atlantic. “Too impractical”, “too costly”, “who would pay for that?”.
Thing is, the current system works well for all people except the ones that want to walk on the icy pavement. Politicians aren’t responsible. House owners shed the responsibility to a contractor. Many contractors regard this essentially as largely free money and just weigh the cost of a potential lawsuit against the accumulated income. It’s extremely good at diluting the responsibility so that no affected individual can effectively do anything about it. Why change a system that works so well for all of the people except the ones affected by the outcome?
Funny indeed. Now that you mention it, I can "hear" the complaining voices in my mind, yes :) So very German of them too!
Funny you mention cost. This year our town actually did not contract out the snow clearing of the roadways to a contractor like they've done for decades past, because it became too expensive (or rather the percentage increase I believe was the trigger). So instead the city is now doing the snow clearing themselves! I would call this very good stewardship of our property tax payments, which is what pays for that. Just now instead of going to greedy contractors (let's face it, most of that money isn't going to the people actually doing the snow clearing) and instead it will go towards paying the salaries of actual city employees (not sure how many temporary) and I guess equipment cost.
Most people here also get a local contractor or in our case it's usually one of the farms around the area, that offer snow clearing of your driveway. Both the actual driveway, which around here can be quite large, and for clearing the large amounts of snow and ice left across your driveway by the city plows clearing the roads. Essentially tractors with snow blower attachments on the back PTO. Like this: https://www.deere.ca/assets/images/region-4/products/attachm...
My recollection--from Ohio, Colorado, Maryland, and Washington, DC--is that in the US the property owner is generally responsible for the sidewalk.
We are wary of salt, having damaged a stretch of sidewalk in a rowhouse development by heavily salting it one winter. Others, and the city of Washington, will put down salt at the least probability of snow.
The same liability issue exists in Belgium, with very similar results. Some people will clear the pavement in front of their homes, others won't. Some don't have the time, some don't have the ability. Some try but make it worse, by brushing aside the snow without salting a thin leftover layer can easily turn into black ice.
Our tax rate is insane. This is a responsibility/liability that should rest with the governments, but they'd never get it done.
My hot take is that the govt ought to facillitate the process, e.g. by providing salt/grit/shovels/salt spreaders, so that people at least have a realistic chance of getting it done.
The ban on salt isn’t silly, for a long time pebbles were good enough to prevent black ice, and perhaps even more effective than ice.
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.
Surely if you can consider the second order effects of giving away these extra potatoes for free, then you can also consider the second order effects of not giving them away? And maybe even thinking more about it, consider that they may be going to different markets/people/causes?
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.
> 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 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.
Is the concept of someone who usually doesn't eat potatoes getting a bag and spending the next week making some potato dishes really that inconceivable? I don't doubt that this will lead to some waste - I've thrown out more half empty potato bags than I would like to admit - but that's a very negative outlook.
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.
> how do you choose between negative second order effects?
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.)
Salting your ground water is also a second-order effect. The way you put that statement into quotes shows that you value human well being over everything else. Personally I don't. Life on earth is a co-op and we don't win by being the last ones standing, as we are desperately trying right now.
As someone who just went outside to buy groceries in Berlin and watched them salt the road on my way to Kaufland, I am confused. Is it just for sidewalks?
Hmm, I mean it was a lot of white stuff coming out. Again, on the street, so maybe it's different rules compared to sidewalks. Possibly sand, but I'm pretty sure it's salt.
Good point on the second order concern, but I'd get potatoes and keep non-perishable food for later. Assuming the exact same weight or available caloric intake will be wasted is too simplistic.
I mean it sounds sort of if you know what the second order effect of damage to plants and ground water will be if people salt their driveways? I would think you sort of need to run the test in production to see which way is more beneficial.
The neighbors snow response contractor had an electric brush on a broom handle, that looked pretty nifty and took like 15 minutes for the whole front to be spotless clean. Then they added a bit of grit, done. The contractor for our block didn’t even show up. Not sure allowing salt would have changed anything.
It's not about the snow, snow is easy. It's about black ice of which we seem to have more in the last few years. Gravel doesn't cut it here - I broke my wrist last year and this year I salted the paved path to the front gate, I don't want to repeat 8 hours waiting in the ER, 2 surgeries and 3 months more or less out of commission.
This happened 2025 Jan 15-17 and this year Jan 12-14 in the area I live in. Rain and fog meets icy ground and then rain turns to snow. When I was in the ER last year the 8 hours wait time were due to 26 other broken bones patients and the ER was busy until 1:30 in the morning. It used to be rare, but that changed over the last couple of years.
The gall to complain about "not having a grasp on reality" while writing hypersimplistic reactionary comments. The evidence for Dead Internet Theory grows by the day.
With properly graded streets and sidewalks, liquid water runs off. When the bulk of snow is cleared, the small bits that remain melt, flow off, and/or evaporate during melting days. I can't comment on the specific climate of Berlin, but it certainly doesn't seem poised to be an arctic encampment.
>How many trees have to be saved to make it worthwhile for more people breaking their bones?
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.
Distributing (trucking, rent and employees at grocery stores, etc) the potatoes costs more than growing them. Even if they are available for free at the farm, the market price in the city cannot go below the cost of distribution without grocery stores and shipping companies working for free, which they have no reason to do. These are already some of the lowest-margin businesses out there.
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?
This is an interesting example of what happens when the supply and demand curve goes into the extreme ends of the chart: The price of "selling" your product goes negative. It costs money to get rid of it.
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.
When I worked at a Coke bottler in Japan, we had similar issues with product.
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.
> It was popular, even though we were usually talking about weird flavours that no one liked (stuff akin to Apple Ginger ale)
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.
I remember liking it too; it was actually a Schweppes product but as my boss said, it was straight to flush out. The Japan market just doesn't like sweet drinks. The top drink was green tea, which probably caused consternation as it was so expensive to manufacture.
In retrospect I miss the teas from Japan more than any of the weird flavours we had. Thankfully one can make them oneself but there is something special about going to a corner store and having relatively healthy options instead of a hundred flavours of sugar water.
Oil briefly went negative a couple years ago too which was shocking. I thought about “buying” some, but then realized I’d have to set up for the oil to be picked up (or try to sell the contract before it expired).
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.
Barrels are over $50 each even in bulk. The oil is often less than the barrel, "1 barrel" of oil is a unit of volume equal to 42 US gallons. The price/barrel is the price of bulk oil, not oil literally transported in barrels.
I've recently seen potatoes for 26ct a kilo in a supermarket and wondered how people made money on that, farming, transportation, supermarket margin, &c.
> The price of "selling" your product goes negative. It costs money to get rid of it.
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.)
Unless there’s some funny unit issue going on (I know there are short and long tons…), it looks like Germany consumed around 5000KT of potatoes in 2022.
> 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.
A ton is a big bag (yes, they get delivered in bags and that’s the name for them), which is pretty exactly a cubic meter. 4000 tons is hence a 2x2meter tower, 1km high. Or 20mx20m, 10m high.not sure how high you can stack TV towers or Asian elephants. The conversion is left as an exercise to the reader.
That would be if we were talking about water (and at 4ºC if we want to be "exact"), but potatoes have a different density and cannot fill the space entirely due to their irregular shapes. Are you saying that those two things cancel themselves out and the result is that 1 cubic meter of potatoes is "exactly" 1 tone?
> Wie werden die Kartoffeln geliefert?
Die Kartoffeln werden per LKW direkt an Ihre angegebene Adresse geliefert. Die Lieferung erfolgt in einem Big Bag, in das ca. 1000 Kilogramm Kartoffeln passen.
TIL there are two units of measurement that are both called ton but confusingly are not the same as a ton. One is a tiny bit more than a ton (1.016 tons) and one is a bit less (0.907 tons). Apparently people use the prefixes long and short to differentiate them, at least that part is intuitive.
Potatoes have low caloric density (80 kcal/100 g), so the ideal would be to dry them and store them in a sustainable form like ready-to-use mash.
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 !
Thinking about wattage is more useful. We'd get about 2MW so you could run 20k-ish homes (1kW average across a day) for a short time until the potato energy is depleted.
There is some elasticity of demand. Some people will eat more potatoes and less bread or rice. Other people will fill up their cupboards; just because the farmer doesn't want to store these for later doesn't mean that individual consumers won't.
A lot of people will have a few more potato-heavy meals if they happen to have more potatoes. This means they'll (presumably) buy a little less of other ingredients for a spell, and maybe we'll end up with more of those going to waste, but it's definitely possible for that not to happen. Seems like a ripple of delayed food purchases of dry goods can be absorbed by reduced production far, far down the line.
Joke’s on you, got an air fryer for Christmas and I’m roasting potatoes every day, never bought so many potatoes in my life. They’re absolutely delicious.
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).
That’s fun! The distribution points are too far from me, and getting the free potatoes would be completely impractical, but I am sure some people will benefit.
Ultimately this may just move the wastage somehwere else: people may get those for free instead of buying them, leading to waste in supermarkets/shops. Or they might take more than they need because it's free and end up throwing them away.
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...
To be honest it sounds like you (and some other commenters) are just rationalizing because the concept of giving stuff away for free is too much at odds with your world view. Maybe some is going to waste but surely less than would go to waste if they destroyed all of these.
It might be a lossy savings, but I would think at least some percentage of people who take the free potatoes weren't going to buy them and will eat some of them. So maybe you get 5-10 percent less total waste for the labor time, pessimistically? And hopefully more.
In the site says “FACT -
100% of Counties -
Hunger exists in everywhere – no community is untouched”
What I pretty much suspected. But that in USA 20% of children don’t get enough? That is a big TIL for my ignorance. A sister comment states some child eat only at school. Boy I thought (in 2 figure percentage) was only 3rd world.
The figures are a bit misleading. First you've got to understand what food security is:
>"at the household level, food security is defined as access to food that is adequate in terms of quality, quantity, safety and cultural acceptability for all household members." (Gillespie, and Mason, 1991).[0]
These potatoes being given away might not meet all the criteria for food security either. Eg they might not have all the things that are considered a nutritious meal (but I'm unsure).
Second, the website might say "1 in 7 people face daily challenges", but it's probably based on this stat:
>An estimated 86.3 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2024, with access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (13.7 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year.
Ie for the vast majority of these people it's not a daily thing, but something that happens sometimes (but even sometimes is too much imo).
And from the report summary:
>Children are usually shielded from the conditions that characterize very low food security. However, in 2024, children, along with adults, experienced instances of very low food security in 0.9 percent of households with children, statistically similar to the 1.0 percent in both 2023 and 2022. These 318,000 households with very low food security among children reported that, at times in 2024, children were hungry, skipped a meal, or did not eat for a whole day because there was not enough money for food.
I'm not saying food insecurity isn't a thing, but these headlines often paint a different picture than what's really happening.
That said, perhaps the reason why food insecurity is relatively low is because these advocacies say what they say. Food security is a bit like server up-time - it's relatively easy to get 99% uptime, but getting to 99.999% uptime is very hard. With food security the numbers are lower though - relatively easy to get 80-90% food security in a developed country but the last 10% are very hard (or at least that's what it seems to me).
Thank you. I have to admit I did not take time to real all. I was just shocked by the 1 in 5. I kinda suspected is not the same definition of poverty and malnutrition in the 1st and 3rd world (I lived in both and know there are big differences) but is still was shocking high. But as you point out, is little more nuanced, and I will not keep the 20% figure in my head.
Yeah, not great... I often skip meals on days that I don't work, to save on food and money, though I don't save much, since I mostly just eat rice and tuna, but I get by.
yes, it very much is. plenty of school age children go hungry, and the school district I used to work for had a major program to make sure poor kids and "Children in transition" (i.e. homeless) were fed at least a good breakfast and lunch.
Given the direction of public school funding, and the sentiment of MAGA shitheels, I expect the problem to worsen.
Some farmer probably lost a lot of money over this. Our farmers feed us, and generally have thin margins. I see headlines like this and I generally see it as reason for concern as the market not working like it should, and could be a signal of a larger problem down the road.
> Some farmer probably lost a lot of money over this.
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.
No, the farmer got paid when the commodities trader bought their harvest on the futures market months ago. The trader lost it all though and ended up giving the potatoes away to the newspaper for free.
As an American, I'm going to need this as a volume, either in terms of Olympic-sized swimming pools or the height of a pile in an [American] football stadium. Maybe I'd accept weight as a quantity of Ford F-150s, but you'd be pushing it.
I also like to take potshots at Americans, but come on. It's unlikely that a newspaper called "the berliner" in a article about Berlin included this line specifically thinking about citizens of a far-away foreign country who don't use metric units that often.
Occam's razor says that it's actually one of our noble and enlightened European journalists who made that sloppy remark without realising it.
this might cause major financial damage to "traditional local markets"(1) and similar in Berlin and Brandenburg close to it (depending on what kind of potatoes this are, like quality, taste, how the cook (hard, soft), etc.)
(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.
They are giving this away in portions of 1t, which isn't practical for normal consumers (unless they manage to pool somehow), so this won't have much of an effect on the normal consumer market. It's mostly directed at aid organizations, social stuff etc.
From the original pages FAQ:
> Wie viele Kartoffeln bekomme ich?
> Jede Abnahmestelle erhält ca. 1 Tonne (1.000 kg) Kartoffeln.
That FAQ is directed at organizations willing to act as a _distribution point_. So mostly charities who think they can spare the time and effort. I guess a better written FAQ would put it "Wie viele Kartoffeln bekommen _wir_?", making it more visible that it's directed at organizations. I just sampled a few of the distribution points already acknowledged and those do look like they will be passing them on to individual consumers.
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...