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..
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 flows off. When the bulk of snow is cleared, the small bits that remain melt, run 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: Seems that some roads are allowed to be salted! It's a pretty main thoroughfare, so likely the case. https://www.bsr.de/bsr-winterdienst-gut-geruestet-fuer-die-k...
That has a specific answer, like "twenty". But calculating it would be a hopeless task.
Sometimes I'm really astonished with some people not having a grasp on reality
Wyoming here. We don't generally salt our roads. Instead, a combination of ploughs (to clear it) and gravel (to increase traction) are used.
More broadly: if you're "astonished with some people not having a grasp," consider that astonishment signals encountering something new.
With properly graded streets and sidewalks, liquid water flows off. When the bulk of snow is cleared, the small bits that remain melt, run 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.
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.
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.
It is exactly four million kilograms. (Germany uses the SI metric ton)
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...
https://langleyadvancetimes.com/2025/08/09/record-breaking-u...
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.
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.
(which is a pretty big ask, of course, and maybe free labor to pick it up up and move it into the truck...(
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.
According to google a 200g potato give off about half a volt (0.5v) and 0.2mah
current would stay the same at 0.2mahI am not an electrical engineer, what could we do with this?
You'll also need to buy the metal electrodes.
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).
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.
And nowadays, Belgians eat way more of them per capita than they do!
But other potatoes likely will be.
It's not like people are suddenly going to want more potatoes.
https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america
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.
>"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).
---
[0] https://www.fao.org/4/x0172e/x0172e01.htm
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=1136...
Given the direction of public school funding, and the sentiment of MAGA shitheels, I expect the problem to worsen.
Occam's razor says that it's actually one of our noble and enlightened European journalists who made that sloppy remark without realising it.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_bank#Germany
https://www.wfp.org/countries/ukraine