The demands become ever more extreme, of course they do

No organisation ever goes quietly into that long dark night and most certainly no bureaucracy. So, even if the original problem is solved we end up with ever more demands. For little reason other than the prolongation of the life of the organisation making them.

So it is with food waste:

Less than 1% of edible surplus food produced by UK manufacturers and farms is being sent to charities to help feed the hungry, according to new figures.

Vegetables that are perfectly edible are being left to rot in the fields, and other foods not sold to retailers are put into anaerobic digestion or sent straight to landfill, the UK’s largest redistribution charity FareShare has warned.

While retailers and supermarkets have doubled the amount of surplus food sent to feed the needy in the last three years, a high volume of food that never makes it into the shops is being needlessly wasted elsewhere in the supply chain, it said.

We're entirely in favour of the change that has happened over the last decade or more. The growth of food banks fills us with nothing but joy. The little platoons have discovered a technology, for that's what such a system is, a technology, with which they and we can fill in one of the gaps of the State's incompetence. Why wouldn't we be happy about this? 

Similarly, people getting realistic about best by dates and the rest is just fine with us. But it's possible to take this much too far, as is being done here:

According to the government’s waste advisory body Wrap, food waste at a supermarket level – any edible food that remains unsold – stands at just 2%, whereas 17% of edible food surplus found in manufacturers and on farms is lost.

When dealing with something perishable like food we'd take 2% to be perfection. Even before considering things like the marginal cost of clearing up the last little bit as opposed to the marginal value of doing so. But now to the extreme:

Vegetables that are perfectly edible are being left to rot in the fields,

So why is this happening? Because they are not worth the cost of collecting them, that's why. Let alone the cost of then transporting them and distributing them. If they were worth it then people would be doing so, profit is a pretty good incentive.

So what is now being demanded is that someone must make a loss in collecting those vegetables from the fields and transporting them. And you know what? We think that insisting that someone else makes a loss is extreme, we really do.