Food Waste

                I’ve always know that food was wasted in America, but I had never really understood to what extent that was until I started working in the food industry.  For about three months, I worked in the food service section in a higher-end supermarket.  There, we prepared cold and hot food, including smoked, steamed, and fried food.  We made a large variety of foods: rotisserie chickens, French fries, mashed potatoes, corn, carrots, ribs, fried chicken, pot pies, pizzas, and wings.  And that was only a fraction of the hot stuff!  As a customer who shopped there long before I started working there, I loved the variety and accessibility of it all.  It wasn’t until I started working there that I really started to become concerned.

                I have no horror stories of unclean or dangerous practices from the kitchen – it was actually fairly sanitary and none of the cooking or storage practices actually surprised me.  What did shock me was the amount of food we wasted.  As I mentioned in class today, we had to throw out the majority of all food every three hours due to safety regulations.  None of this food could be donated or preserved for homeless shelters or donations because people “might sue the company if they got sick from the bad food.”  I can tell you from firsthand eating a majority of the food before it got thrown out at the three-hour mark, the only noticeable difference is that the food’s not as hot as when it comes out of the fryer. 

                At that three-hour mark, we would have to throw out trays of food and refry everything again.  Sometimes, not a single item would have sold from the tray, but that didn’t matter.  Out it went.  At the end of the day, too, everything was to be thrown out.  Employees weren’t allowed to eat anything on shift and had to purchase the food off shift if they wanted to eat.  No food was allowed to be taken home at the end of the day, either, because it was considered “stealing from the company.”  This all is such an insane concept to me now.  With the amount of food that we threw away, we could have fed entire communities.  I really wish that companies like the supermarket I worked at would try to look into alternatives to these massive amounts of waste.  I’m not entirely sure what the proper solution should be, but I know that filling up trash bags of perfectly good and edible food is just plain wrong.