For me, this highlights issues that I think the IoT solutions paint over. The IoT solutions all require the same kinds of industry you're describing here, but for tech. So when those get deployed you have the food industry and the tech industry, but you still have the problem of the mouldy pepper, and the problem of food deserts, and a few other things.
I still think my "you can throw out the excess/mouldy food" and the "solve the problem by communal cooking" are better approaches than the IoT one. But I accept this is intuition and guesswork, and somewhat politically motivated. I'm sure about the politics here, but I accept I'm light on the data. I think the real problems are elsewhere than either the individual mouldy peppers and the IoT; somewhere around deeper, harder issues to do with supporting towns and cities the way we do.