4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin

[olieidel]

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..

[1] https://www.berlin.de/umwelt/themen/natur-pflanzen-artenschu...

[palmotea]

> 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?

Basically is seems easier said than done.

[port11]

The ban on salt isn’t silly, for a long time pebbles were good enough to prevent black ice, and perhaps even more effective than ice.

Donating potatoes that were about to go to waste might cause waste elsewhere, but what you propose is that we never give food away unless we can be absolutely sure it won’t cause waste in another sub-system. That’s a tall order. These potatoes were going to be waste anyway.

[yunohn]

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.

[BeetleB]

> 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.

[bigbluesax]

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.

[Voultapher]

Salting your ground water is also a second-order effect. The way you put that statement into quotes shows that you value human well being over everything else. Personally I don't. Life on earth is a co-op and we don't win by being the last ones standing, as we are desperately trying right now.

[card_zero]

> How many trees have to be saved to make it worthwhile for more people breaking their bones?

That has a specific answer, like "twenty". But calculating it would be a hopeless task.

[marc_g]

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?

[dietr1ch]

Good point on the second order concern, but I'd get potatoes and keep non-perishable food for later. Assuming the exact same weight or available caloric intake will be wasted is too simplistic.

[bryanrasmussen]

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.

[literalAardvark]

You could always just clean the snow instead of salting it. It's not rocket science.

[blell]

>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.

[woah]

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?

[wiether]

The story from Morgenpost:

https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article410886475/gruene-woc...

[atarian]

Hopefully it’s real this time: https://www.vice.com/en/article/viral-free-potatoes-post-cos...

[Aurornis]

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.

[jbm]

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.

[strongpigeon]

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).

[lm28469]

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.

[zahlman]

> 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.)

[bee_rider]

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.

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.

[Glawen]

I'm having hard time to visualize it, can you convert them in adult elephants and TV Tower height? Bear in mind I only saw asian elephants in zoo.

[meindnoch]

>4,000 tons is almost four million kilograms

It is exactly four million kilograms. (Germany uses the SI metric ton)

[Aaronmacaron]

TIL there are two units of measurement that are both called ton but confusingly are not the same as a ton. One is a tiny bit more than a ton (1.016 tons) and one is a bit less (0.907 tons). Apparently people use the prefixes long and short to differentiate them, at least that part is intuitive.

[foofoo55]

A farm on the western side of Canada has been doing something similar for years:

https://langleyadvancetimes.com/2025/08/09/record-breaking-u...

[jandhdhshhh]

Good on them for going through the trouble to make sure they’re not wasted

[seec]

Potatoes have low caloric density (80 kcal/100 g), so the ideal would be to dry them and store them in a sustainable form like ready-to-use mash.

At 2000 kcal/day average caloric expenditure, you could feed 1.6 million people for a day. Or 3.2 if it was only half the diet. That's a lot of food indeed!

The problem is most of the volume/weight is water; that's not very convenient. In comparison, an equivalent volume of cereals would feed 7 million people and are much easier to store long term, they are very efficient !

[tomaytotomato]

That could be a big potato battery bank?

According to google a 200g potato give off about half a volt (0.5v) and 0.2mah

    4000 tonnes = 4,000,000 kg = 4,000,000,000 g

    num potatoes = 4,000,000,000 / 200 = 20,000,000 potatoes

    volts = 20,000,000 x 0.5v = 10,000,000 volts (10megavolts)

current would stay the same at 0.2mah

I am not an electrical engineer, what could we do with this?

[barbegal]

The energy comes from the metal electrodes not the potato. Potato is just an electrolyte carrying current between the cathode and anode.

[agilob]

I think it might better to produce alcohols from it and then burn the liquids and gasses.

[Evidlo]

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.

You'll also need to buy the metal electrodes.

[dvh]

3 days ago I paid €0.79/kg in Slovakia.

[lm28469]

I've seen 26ct in a lidl in Kosice. For reference an empty potatoe mesh bag costs like 15ct each if you buy them as a private person in a store

[wasmainiac]

When life give you potatoes, make vodka… or?

[tenpies]

Boil them, mash them, stick'em in a stew.

[darth_avocado]

Make fries and freeze them.

[cpursley]

Vodka is generally made from grains.

[pelagicAustral]

Akvavit

[madduci]

Fries

[buckle8017]

These particular potatoes won't be wasted.

But other potatoes likely will be.

It's not like people are suddenly going to want more potatoes.

[cperciva]

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.

[lkbm]

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.

[fwip]

Lots of people are price-sensitive to groceries, and will eat more potatoes if some of them are free.

[mrzool]

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.

[rpozarickij]

> 4,000 tons

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).

[t-3]

Or ~1600k small sacks of potatoes. About one sack per two people in Berlin, which is probably around roughly one per household.

[nicbou]

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.

[luxuryballs]

They should take them to France so they can become… you know the rest, but now I wonder how much weight the oil would add to 4k tons of potatoes.

[wiether]

I know some people call them "French fries", but history is arguing between France and Belgium for their origin.

And nowadays, Belgians eat way more of them per capita than they do!

[mytailorisrich]

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...

[bondarchuk]

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.

[nemomarx]

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.

[CalRobert]

I prefer to think of it as 4 kilotons.

[meatmanek]

4 gigagrams

[ArtDev]

In America, we just let people go hungry while grinding the excess crop back into fertilizer.

[jtbayly]

We let people go hungry? This is really not a problem today.

[jmpman]

I’ve wondered if something like this would drive down inflation in the US food supply.

[fuzzfactor]

I would want at least a ton of ketchup with that.

[whiterook6]

Oh, wow--what if Big Ketchup is behind this? Huge, if true.

[nicbou]

This is Germany. We might also need mayo, depending on preference.

[admissionsguy]

Is this what life in Europe has come to?

[amai]

4000 tons or 4096 tons of potatoes?

[SpudEater]

This is great news to me.

[honeycrispy]

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.

[waldarbeiter]

"4,000 tons is almost four million kilograms"

[mathieuh]

Maybe targeted at Americans and using US customary short tons (which is 907 kg)

[ihaveajob]

I guess you're quoting it because it is EXACTLY four million kilograms?

[nayuki]

"4k tons" is 4 gigagrams (Gg).

[Perz1val]

LLMs couldn't've written that!

[leoc]

sigh Why am I never where the excitement is?

[darth_avocado]

Sam..? Is that you?

[gigatexal]

this is awesome, potatoes are so good for you

[dathinab]

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.

[elcapitan]

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.

[politelemon]

Ich bin ein Berliner

[axel479343]

This is so sad. I'm sure there is some way to turn them into biofuel. Instead they are just a snack to people that will not even appreciate it

[bell-cot]

While this give-away sounds cool...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_bank#Germany

https://www.wfp.org/countries/ukraine