>>112329421For what it's worth, food mostly isn't destroyed to drive up value. Although, the EU has done that on multiple occasions for shoddy economic reasons (look up the Butter Mountains). Damaged and irregular food is resold and can often be found else, but not at supermarkets where presentation is part of the deal. Stuff that is barely past expiration gets tossed because of strict FDA regulations more than anything else. Most places aren't capable of, allowed to, or making enough money to donate all of their unsold food. Some places do manage to donate day old baked goods, but there's a lot of red tape and paperwork on that to.
At the end of the day, most of the reason that food is not being distributed as cheaply as possible comes down to government regulation and bureaucracy. It's trendy to just blame it on capitalism, but it is the bloated and inefficient government attempting to put a finger in every conceivable proverbial pie that is causing many of the problems that you blame on capitalism. I don't know if you think that socialism, marxism, etc are the proper solution, but it should be fairly obvious that increasing the government's power and control over things would make it even harder to grow produce, let alone distribute it to the needy.