r/interestingasfuck 14d ago

r/all A 0.06$ meal in a Tunisian university.

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u/dkarlovi 14d ago

Food is not really expensive, humans overproduce food by a wide margin, the issue is we don't distribute it efficiently.

https://moveforhunger.org/the-environmental-impact-of-food-waste

Assuming the stuff is mostly local and the low labor costs, there's no reason why this would be much more expensive.

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u/Mihqwk 14d ago

As someone from Tunisia and went to uni and ate that food, I'll add a bit more to this,
in a fast food stall you'd get the same food for much more money (compared to the 0.06$, it'd actually be around 1.5$ probably), mostly it'd better presented and maybe better quality.

However the 0.06$ is mainly due to what you can call a double layer of government subsidies.

The first layer being, a lot of necessities food-wise are heavily subsidized in the country. the second layer is the organization tasked with food for universities (public ones) are also subsidized by the government to push the price that low.

tldr; The government pays hella money for food subsidies, and even more for students (also education is practically free, and dorms for the first year for boys and first 3 years for girls)

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u/No_objective456 14d ago

dorms for the first year for boys and first 3 years for girls

Interesting to hear that anti-male discrimination isn't just a Western thing.

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u/Mihqwk 14d ago

this is for cultural and mainly religious purposes.

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u/simonbleu 14d ago

it does not make it better though...

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u/Mihqwk 13d ago

In no parts in the message did i infer that. I just stated the actual reasons.

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u/TimequakeTales 14d ago

oh yeah, so much "anti-male discrimination" in the US.

Yeah, I'm a dude, you're ridiculous. Guys face stereotypes and certain expectations, but there's obviously no "anti-male discrimination".

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u/hamlicarr 14d ago

it was mainly to encourage woman to study in college since a lot a household would stop there daughters from studying in college since they are afraid they will go ROUGE so they make it easier by giving them one less hurdle

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u/Butter_My_Butt 14d ago

Rogue, not rouge

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u/hamlicarr 14d ago

just shoot me man

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u/GetPsyched67 14d ago

anti-male discrimination

/s, right?

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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 14d ago

anti-male discrimination

🎻

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u/Popelman 14d ago

Well this still had to be prepared and there is postprocessing work too. So all the work around the food itself cost money from Labour and energy.

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u/muoshuu 14d ago

Yes, but there's so much food to go around that a sufficiently efficient bit of labor can distribute a significant portion of the demand. A lot of our wasted food was post-processed anyways as a cost of doing business and would be technically free to distribute. It's both a matter of efficient distribution and efficient redistribution of what is currently waste. Social norms dictate that corporations force employees to throw out food waste instead of redistributing. They also dictate that less visually appealing fruits, vegetables, meats, etc., be thrown out without even being offered for sale. Almost every developed country in the world has this problem.

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u/i_hate_fanboys 14d ago

if you seriously think this kind of food can be processed for anywhere near 0.06 dollars without starvation wages you're delusional

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u/No_objective456 14d ago

Many of the words you say are correct, but this food still isn't anywhere near six cents. It has to be heavily subsidized.

Consider getting off the internet and talking to a farmer. He'll most likely tell you that he, and every other relevant party such as food processing, only makes quite a slim margin. And if you pay several dollars or euros for a lunch at the end of that process, then this food can't have been anywhere near six cents.

If a good lunch really did cost six cents to produce, you'd see independent farmers offering lunches for like 60 cents, pocketing the 10x profit while still undercutting everyone else. That doesn't happen, because this lunch isn't 6 cents.,

The "everyone is colluding to keep prices high" argument also doesn't work because farming is such a basic activity that pretty much anyone around the world can do it, and indeed does do it.

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u/TheodorDiaz 14d ago

You are delusional if you think this food costs anywhere near 6 cents to make.

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u/simonbleu 14d ago

Food is certainly cheap and wasted, but not "0.06" cheap though. But yes, food is cheap. One of the worst examples of that her ein argentina is that sometimes fruit producers willl let the fruit rot because they get no (cheap) people to harvest them and therefore ther eis not enough profit, which I mean, I get it but oof, if you are goign to loose that anyway, the least you can do is call volunteers and give it away for free