thats not a retarded situation at all. paying a subsidy for a guaranteed never-ending surplus of food is something the government is supposed to do. the last thing a society needs is markets rigging the supply of food to generate profits via artificial scarcity. sure you end up with waste but its better to throw out half the food than it is to never have quite enough. i dont really see what the problem with massive food waste is, other than people getting butthurt over it which comes from an instinctual hunter-gatherer reflex that tells your brain if we ever throw food out well regret not eating it when the lean times come around and were all starving. due to that stone age mentality people delude themselves into thinking that squeezing efficiency out of food production and spending money on reducing waste would make people less hungry. the opposite is true, spending the money that would go towards reducing waste on even more subsidies instead, for an even bigger food surplus and even more food waste, would actually mean that more people will ultimately end up with more food on their table that gets consumed. its not like it even costs a crippling amount of money compared to other government expenditures like the military, since growing lots of food for cheap is something humanity figured out how to do a long fucking time ago. if anything the government should be subsidizing food even more so that the prices go down further.
United States