"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.

And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed.

And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

I would be fine subsidizing this stuff going to people in need honestly. The waste is a failure of our greed and society.

Also economically less work has to be put into making whatever you're throwing away. Less work means less overhead means lower prices

Increased demand doesn’t always raise price, due to economies of scale, and the fact that the supply can be elastic and adjusted based on demand.

Think about it, if most people who ate tomatoes now stopped eating tomatoes, would the prices of tomatoes go up or down in the long run?

Sure, in the short term there would be a glut, and the price would go down. But then the supply itself would shrink. Tomatoes would become a ‘niche’ vegetable, like an exotic fruit, and the lack of scale would mean that they would be more expensive on the whole.

It’s the same reason why increased demand for novel consumer products like computers or smart phones pushes the price down in the long run. The increased demand results in the production of greater supply, and due to economies of scale, that item becomes cheaper on the whole.

All this is to say, if we all bought half as much food, production would shrink, and the price would effectively stay the same for us at the consumer level.

Except it doesn't work that way. If I sell something to a customer and give it to them I have to order more food regardless. It doesn't matter if the customer eats it or has a 50 hooker gangbang with cheeseburger pasties. From the business's point of view we sold product, we have to order more inventory, wait for it to come, restock said inventory. Whether the paying customer wastes the food or not after paying is irrelevant.

Your argument would make sense if the waste occurred before the customer paid for it. But after the transaction is complete it really is irrelevant.