There's a pretty major problem with economics. If the food that is grown and is currently thrown away wasn't thrown away, then it would be effectively be available for a lower price than mainstream food. If this were taken to its logical conclusion, then allowing this food to be given to hungry people lowers the demand for the full-price food, leading to a reduction in price of that food, causing the people growing it to be unable to make ends meet. It is necessary for the production of food to continue to throw away the food that isn't bought, otherwise the people producing the food will go bankrupt and stop producing food.

The above sounds very harsh. Obviously there are some schemes that allow excess food to be used by poorer people, like food banks, quality tiers, common agricultural policy type schemes, or just ensuring everyone has sufficient income through tax breaks or benefit schemes. Food banks give food away for free, and they are very limited in scope, and therefore have a limited affect on food price. Quality tiers are things like a supermarket selling "wonky veg" next to full-price veg, but you'll tend to notice that the wonky veg isn't actually much lower in price than the full-price veg. The EU's old common agricultural policy scheme effectively solved the problem by getting the government to guarantee that a food grower could sell their food for a viable price, but it led to huge complaints about "butter mountains" and waste - I think the point was missed that this waste was a reasonable trade-off for ensuring that food continued to be produced in sufficient quantities even in a bad year, and the fact that the government bought the excess meant that they owned it and could if they wanted to feed the hungry with it. Tax breaks and benefit schemes solve the problem without lowering the price of the food because the food seller still gets paid full price for the food.

My point is that good intentions have generated schemes to get excess food to hungry people, but they necessarily have to be small in scale to avoid negatively affecting economics.

People who are hungry obviously can't afford the food, so giving them free food does not withdraw them from the food market, as they weren't on it already. Consequently, the overall demand for food does not fall.

> If the food that is grown and is currently thrown away wasn't thrown away, then it would be effectively be available for a lower price than mainstream food.

Putting entire political-social-economic discussions aside, this argument relies on "Wonky Veg" being cheap from farm to market, which isn't always the case, and therefore do not work at scale in real world.

Put simply, perfectly equal-sized and spherical tomatoes roll easier on conveyor belts, fit nicer and denser in cardboard boxes, slices evenly with machines, and therefore often cheaper to your table than odd shaped ones, at the same time being more lucrative to trade.

Of course it feels wrong to grow crops only to crush some, I wholeheartedly agree, but this needs a bit more thoughts than trying to "just" save them.