Remember, it is the liberals that won’t let the grocery stores and restaurants give out free food. It has to go through the dumpster first.......................
PeterPrinciple: Remember, it is the liberals that won’t let the grocery stores and restaurants give out free food. It has to go through the dumpster first.
The Emerson Act of 1996 was signed in under federal law and allows stores and restaurants to give away free food to food banks, shelters etc and protected from legal liability as long as they are not knowingly negligent such as dumping rotten meat.
Stores and restaurants claim the logistics of setting up the food giveways, transportation, storage until pickup and paperwork is costlier and take the tax write off instead so it ends up in the dumpster.
I wouldn’t say it’s a blanket liberal problem on the food giveaways. It’s red tape in general, and is reasonably non-partisan in nature.
Where I work, it took us forever to get our corporate people to even think about giving away outdated food, due to potential liability if the recipient got food poisoning or some such thing.
Once they finally let us do it, our store manager worked a deal with a local food bank to pick up our spoiled food products on a weekly basis. I speak from experience since the task of weeding out the spoiled food and preparing it for the food bank has been one of my many tasks for the past month or so. A little frustrating since a lot of the produce that is “past its prime” is still in good shape.