Then there was prepared food both restaurants and retail. Food sent back, trashed. Past it's prepared time, trashed. Burger prepared wrong, trashed and so on.
I used to hate to see those rotisserie chickens get trashed. We employees would have ate them. Bakery items out of date, but still good, trashed.
These are but a few examples. You could feed a hungry community with the food we trashed on a daily and weekly basis. But then, if someone got sick, real or not, we would have been sued for untold amounts of money. Wasn't worth the risk.
True story. Sams club donated rotisserie chickens to a homeless shelter. Someone claimed they got sick (ambulance chaser behind this). No more chicken. Trash it.
Check out the journal this was printed in.
FWIW, I’d consider the source.
A lot of food gets discarded by the industry itself, all the way from farmer to customer. Myself, I still have stuff in the fridge I haven’t touched in 6 months :)
They definitely need buyer-beware type statutes for free food. Maybe to get around it, they can put stuff out on tables as a “pre-throwaway” stage.
Not likely to happen as gov wants to be the sole charity.
I also wonder how this compares to how much food is wasted thanks to the ethanol requirement.
Totally agree and second your statement on ambulance chasers. The second part of that would be the person who wrote this article would probably be one of those picketing a place like Sams Club if someone got sick from donated food.
Although the author talks about “holistic” food handling and preparation, every time I see one of these I know that what the author really wants is to force people to eat less or to force us to eat what they think people should be eating. Little fascists.
Nature is wasteful. How many seeds falling from trees produce nothing?
The truth is that there is no such thing as waste in a closed system, save what we receive from the sun and stars.
“Wasted” food becomes food for those other than for whom it was intended, be it rats, insects or as fertilizer for the next crop of “wasted” food.
That’s probably biggest.
I don’t know whether restaurants/institutional dining or our own refrigerators come next.
What a great country, that we have more food than we can eat.
No child is starving because Walmart tosses out-dated and damaged food products.
If they’re hungry, they’re hungry because of bad parents making bad life decisions.
I don’t know if I buy the numbers but we do waste food.
I have a friend who works for Tasty-Kake. I saw him in the grocery store and he was pulling boxes off the shelves.
He explained that the expiration dates on them would expire before they came back next so he was gonna throw them out.
I got a trunk full from him. Nothing wrong with any of it. The whole “Best If Used By” date is bogus.
Food is a renewable resource - don’t see this as a problem.
I would bet you that this is not true in NORTH KOREA or VENEZUELA
Looking at this in a positive way we are a rich nation. We are (still) free to buy and eat what we want and toss what we don’t want.
The only way this is going to change is if the government gets involved in the free market. Then I can gurantee you that no food will go to waste because there will not be enough for anyone (other than the elite).
The weight of 1 1/2 aircraft carriers.
Consequence of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Impossible to prevent without wasting more energy.
That’s a shame about them not even being able to give rotisserie chickens to employees, which would help a family’s food budget.
Unfortunately, there are those who would game the system by holding back chickens for sale, and if anybody gets sick within the foreseeable future, create a liability issue that the chicken caused it.
And that’s why we can’t have nice things.
So what. We can do it. If the $h!thole countries want it, they can come and get it.
Obama forced taxpayers to pay for free lunches at schools, but the students threw it away.
Trump Administration Rolls Back Michelle Obama’s Healthy School Lunch Push
May 1, 20176:54 PM ET
“This announcement is the result of years of feedback from students, schools, and food service experts about the challenges they are facing in meeting the final regulations for school meals,” Perdue said in a statement. “If kids aren’t eating the food, and it’s ending up in the trash, they aren’t getting any nutrition — thus undermining the intent of the program.”
Check the hygiene laws within the USA. My husband worked in the restaurant industry for 22 years and he once was forced to throw out two cooked Thanksgiving turkeys because they were on a table for 5 minutes prior to a health department unannounced visit. The chef burst into tears. Check out idiot Bloomberg goosing up the nutty hygiene laws - in which even soup kitchens couldn’t hand out leftovers to the homeless.
I Fedex all my food waste to a starving kid in India. Never hear back from him.
150k tons divided by 330 million Americans equals 14.5 oz per person per day.
When you consider spoiled food, spoiled consumers, and spoiled tort lawyers, that is not a lot of per capita waste.