Instead of the perfectly-fine “expired” food going to the dumpster, feed people. Help the community.
I know Grocers in NJ already donate items to food banks. I just looked up a food bank not too far from me and they claim 25% of their food is donated from local grocery stores.
Great! Donating to established food banks is excellent as well. I hope to see more following the example.
That would be unbusinesslike
It isn’t though. Some already donate non-perishables they don’t sell to community food banks for the tax write-off. Running it yourself would just be an extension of that and would be a huge PR plus. I think if we made food donations equivalent to being able to write it off as an inventory loss they would be more likely to do it.
Afaik the reason they refuse to give away food in power outages is precisely that. If they have to trash it then it is a total loss and they can write it off at cost, if they donate it then only a portion of the value is counted.
Weirdly, by coincidence, I stumbled across an old article about food waste today:
Actually I work at Walmart and the expired food that’s still reasonable to eat we donate
Still a shit ton of edibles food ends up trashed tho Everything that we can’t freeze p much
I’m happy to hear your store does some donating. This is what we’re aiming for as a first step :)
In the US the expired food goes to charity
In a perfect world maybe. We threw out a ton when I worked at 1 ~ 5 years ago.
I’m sure it depends on the store and region
I worked produce in a supermarket for a little while. Our expired food was sent out to be used as animal feed. Not as good as charity but still a fine use for expired food.
So it was resold?
Donated. Resold in the sense that eventually they sell the animals after butchering.
Per capita the US wastes more food than any other country… I just made that up but sounds about right.
Ok, I guess? I think golf resorts should stop filling their swimming pools with insulin. That sounds about right.
That’s an extreme claim. Not believable.
Second harvest is a charity that specializes in exactly this.
They pick up food from grocery stores and distribute it.
There are chapters of second harvest across north america
Maybe not the best name. Second harvest is also a term for eating shit!
Expired food? There might be laws against stuff like that.
I am not a lawyer, yadda yadda, but best before dates are only the manufacturer saying “this will taste like advertised up until this date”. It’s still perfectly fine to eat, usually for a good while. So I think you’d be fine if you just sufficiently made people aware that the best by date has passed, and that they should use common sense before consuming.
It’s probably a different story for things with an actual expiration date
Well its true here in Colorado at least. They get Tax breaks for donating to charity and it doesn’t need to be money
Really just depends on the store and where you are. Stores can get tax breaks for it.
The local Safeway offers it to charity, compost or livestock feed for the farms nearby. All you have to do is head inside and ask.
Counter thought: food banks shouldnt be necessary because society should protect its weakest from starvation in an orderly manner and not by volunteer work and donations.
The people I have helped with at food banks were not at risk of literal starving they were at risk of eating the same 3 things all the time. Most of us take it for granted having a mind that works like this. Go buy ingredients and follow a recipe, try new ones, some diversity in diet. Instead of just buying endless jars of peanutbutter and crackers.
My local one is working on more mealkit type solutions. Here is everything you need and a paper recipe.
Kinda makes me sad. More food stamp money is probably not going to fix that problem, not sure what can be done. Maybe social workers setting up basic cooking classes?
“[Solution] shouldn’t exist because we should just have a perfect world instead.”
Having proper social care is not part of a perfect world. it is also quite easily achievable. The US is deliberately starving its poor and adressinf this as the main issue is more effective than creating laws to regularize food banks.
Every grocery store running a food bank and distributing food to the hungry is equally unrealistic. If we’re throwing out absurd solutions to horrifying problems, it would be better to address the root cause rather than the symptoms.
I always wondered about this after an experiment we did in school many many years ago where we were asked how far back we had to go to be able to prevent society’s current problems, everything from poverty to class warfare to polarized politics. It always seemed to boil down to an overpopulation problem. Granted, it was just a school experiment, but basically Thanos was right since you can’t really double resources but you can have too many people.
People were poorer when they were less of us.
I always am wary of a solution to every problem or a cause behind all effects because I don’t see it ever being the case. Civilization is emergent not intentional, it would be shocking if it didn’t she problems.
Walmart does this as long as it’s still generally safe. There are so many laws about refrigeration, tho, that is why so much gets thrown out. A refrigerated product has been out of the fridge for 30+ minutes? It’s not safe to sell or consume, according to the government. According to my stomach, it’s just fine as long as it hasn’t been days out of the refrigerator.
Understood about food safety. Refridgeration is only a problem if there are no fridges, so get fridges for the food bank. Fixed!
This is why I feel good churches need to be supported as they are normally the ones bankrolling this kind of thing, anything that human being requires to survive should be provided free of charge in my opinion. The fact that we still want to make a buck off of human suffering is a failure of humanity as a species
It’s important to know that food insecurity is not a money problem. It’s a political one.
We have the funds, logistics, technology to solve food insecurity for everyone on the planet today. The reason we don’t is politics.
I keep trying to tell people that a post scarcity Society is not this ridiculous utopian fiction, it could be the reality today, no exaggeration, if billionaires not apply the logic that their power means nothing if they can’t abuse people
I’m a member of a church that runs a large food pantry. Even with lots of donations, grants, and steeply discounted food, it still takes a lot of money, resources, and manpower (volunteers) to make it happen. Our client count is at an all time high and steadily growing. A food pantry is not a “business” you really want to see grow but I’m glad it’s there for people who need it.
That’s basically what I’m saying, we should not need food banks, but it is good that they are there for those who need them.
On the contrary; that’s part of the problem. Receiving charity should not be conditioned upon – or even perceived to be conditioned upon – allowing oneself to be exposed to religious proselytizing. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Government shirking its responsibility to provide for the general welfare and thus encouraging religious institutions to take up that slack should be seen as a violation of the separation between church and state.
Actually if you took a look at how many of them are set up, the vast majority of them do not require you to attend church services. And are held at completely separate times service, typically only requireing some form of identification.
It’s still generally provided in a building festooned with religious iconography, and if you are inclined to be grateful for the help then your gratitude is directed towards a religious institution.
In other words, at the very least it makes the recipients more favorably inclined towards that religion than they would have otherwise been, had the charity been performed by an ideologically-neutral entity.
I feel like you’re just trying to come up with a reason why it’s bad because of religious institution is involved, instead of looking at what the institution is providing and judging it based on the quality of the service and how essential it is to impoverished communities.
So what if I am? The reason we have a separation between church and state in the first place is that it is entirely fair to assume that religion is an inherently corrupting influence.
It is not entirely fair to assume that, and in doing so we alienate our allies
Churches in concept are amazing. They are a place for people to gather and learn about morals and ethics and such, to bond with the community. And then there is(maybe) free food after service where you can eat and chat with other people.
And the other services they can provide, like food banking, homeless help, counseling, community space, being a safe space, a refuge with resources. I’m glad there are some institutions doing it. I hope they are the snowball that triggers the avalanche, but so many churches are money vacuums draining their communities :(
I would love to see more churches climb to the top and better their commuities. I choose to be hopeful. One step at a time :)
I think you failed to understand what churches do…
True Mega Churches tend to be nothing but griffs, but you should try the old school brick and mortar, pews made of wood, kind.
In fact religious groups in general typically are the ones getting the most done on charity work.
Edit: Wait, no you understood, I’m just weird
What did I fail to understand? I said some churches are doing the work of charity and that I hope the many churches that don’t (the griffs) will follow the example.
My bad, maybe I failed to understand something… Sorry.
Quite late, but I personally like it when my apology is recognized, so I’m here to say no worries at all. We communicated and sorted it out 🤘
Expired food is not perfectly fine, only a demented fool would consider giving it to already weakened people or somebody who could not deal with the consequences of food intoxication
The printed expiration date is not quite an exact time when the food is actually expired. I’m sure most people have the sense to tell if a free gallon of milk is good or not a week after the printed expiration date.
It’s not like food products immediately expire on midnight of a printed date. Free food is free food yo. Some can last way longer than the printed date if stored properly.
And even if a loaf of bread is marginally starting to go stale doesn’t mean much of shit, as long as it ain’t gone outright moldy people will gladly eat it.
And BTW, that tends to be the nature of the food that donation centers give away anyways, food that’s just past the expiration date.
Expiration and best before are two completely different things.
You’re talking about best before dates, not expiration dates.
Man, we have a local gas station that’ll throw away 30 or more fresh cooked bacon/sausage egg and cheese biscuits at 10:10am, just because breakfast ended at 10am.
They refuse to sell them after exactly 10am, they refuse to give them away, and they throw them all out into a locked dumpster.
As if the food somehow rotted away at exactly 10am, hell it was still hot! Wasted food my dude, because of laws and an arbitrary set time.
Here’s a great podcast from NPR about the expiration dates, and what means what in the world of best by labels.
Link: Best by sell by use byhttps://www.npr.org/2022/07/15/1111850221/best-by-sell-by-use-by
Expiration dates are arbitrary estimates of the goodness of food.
If it smells bad or looks bad, don’t eat it. It’s that simple.
I’m with you as far as “humans deserve food that won’t make ‘em sick, regardless of circumstances” but expired food can often still be fine - you just are outside of the manufacturer’s guarantee that it should still be good.
When I gotta choose between “expired food” and “nothing”, I choose to give expired food the visual + sniff + small taste test before consuming.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. Those best by dates are a lie. They only are there to encourage throwing out good food and buying more. It’s a planned obsolescence.
There’s expiry dates and best before dates, people need to stop conflating them.
I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen an expiration date.
Meal/nutritions supplements and infant milk/formula are the ones I can recall off the top of my head.
You also need to think about the kind of food qe’re talking about. Milk has a date after which the product my start to turn and curdle. Dried pasta has a date after which… the quality might suffer a little? Fruit goes mushy and baked goods mold. The dates put on these items are designed to limit liability of the company(s) providing them. You don’t put 4 weeks on a bottle of milk thinking it will turn at 4 weeks and 1 day, you put 3 weeks on it knowing that it gives you leeway, not only for time, but also quality of storage. If you buy a bottle of milk but it takes a couple hours to get it back into refrigeration, of course it will affect the life span. And no one is talking about giving away bloated canned goods. Dented cans are most often sent back to the warehouse, especially if the dent is on a rim or seal.
I’m sure they meant best before, not expired.
This is the law in France. They have to donate unsold food to foodbanks.
I don’t know how effective it is, but it’s much more civilized than throwing bleach on food.
Why would I buy food if it’s free?
They already do that, dude.
What do you think they do with all that stuff? They don’t toss it out, that’s stupid. You know how expensive it is to pay for a garbage truck to come pick up the trash compactor dumpsters they have and replace it with another? Why pay to throw stuff out when they can get tax credit for donating that stuff.
In my area, that is not the case.
I’m happy that your community is flowing well. Fantastic! Let’s encourage more to follow that lead.
Food should be a human right and be free
I agree. Necessities should be free.
In the UK some stores have pre packaged food at the entrance ready to be picked up for free. This is the food bank alternative.
It’s good food, not crap either.
This would be a good thing, though I think it’s trickier than it appears:
- How arbitrary are “best before” and “expires on” labels and how do they differ from food to food?
- How do the labels themselves differ from each other and how to do they differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction?
- Could acknowledging that “expired” food is still good cause expiry dates to just be extended? How far could they be extended before food actually is dangerous past the label?
- How does liability work when someone gets sick from “expired” food? Does it change when it’s part of a structured donation system?
I mean, to the last bullet, we have good Samaritan laws. We could totally pass a law that says “grocery stores can and should provide reasonably safe, leftover food to poor people and will not be punished if those reasonable actions result in bad things happening”. You are allowed to just wail on an unconscious dudes chest for minutes until paramedics arrive and then not be sued for the three cracked ribs.
But cmon. We all know that grocery stores know that once people realize expired food is generally safe a) people will buy less food and b) people will show up to get free expired food and buy less food.
Scarcity is a necessity under capitalism. Movie theaters aren’t going to release blooper reels for free. They add them to the credits or put them in the editors cut release. A luxury clothing brand isn’t going to sell seconds, they will destroy or rework material that isn’t sellable.
Capitalism is cancer :(
Capitalism, which provides such an excess of food that we’re throwing it out, is the problem? True, when the shelves are bare and no-one has food this won’t be a problem anymore.
But it’s not exactly a step forward is it?
You are completly right. It’s not capitalism’s fault that companies would rather destroy essentials to save a few bucks rather than give it to those who need them. No, obviously the poor people just need to stop being poor. That’ll solve global hunger without cutting into the profits of those poor CEOs.
I don’t understand your meaning of your comment. Not having capitalism means bare shelves in the future? How?
I work in retail. Stuff already goes to food banks. The dates on those products are usually the sell by date, and quite arbitrary. They’re mostly for quality sake, rather than “not safe to consume” sake. Like a loaf of bread may not be as moist and soft as it was when it was fresh, but it’s perfectly fine to eat. Companies want you to be able to buy a product and expect consistent quality. But if you’re hungry and in need, stale Oreos are better than no cookies at all.
Agree 100%
Not that it is expected to be content with stale oreos, but yea. Some is better than none :)
Perfection of quality expectations ruins so many things way too fast.
A note: stores throw out unexpired goods all the time.
As for food safety, yup, that’s important. Some goods could be too risky, like raw meat. But so so many goods are processed and stay good long past the expiry.
Expiry does take into account oxygen. Once you open a bag, air gets in and then it could get stale, mold, etc. If it has been sealed in its package the whole time, there was never any (*a lot of) air to start those food-ruining things.
It also ignores the big issue of distribution.
A Kroger is not equipped to handle distribution of food to those in need. And I will 100% guarantee you that if they just leave the dumpsters unlocked, it will mostly be upper middle class college kids “dumpster diving” who grab the food… until one of them gets stabbed and the entire program is shut down forever.
I would like to see more effort to work with local charities and food banks to donate food but… a surprising number of supermarkets already do that. The issue is that there just aren’t enough food banks because NIMBYs kill them out of fear it will lead to “too many homeless people. and poors”. Which gets back to the issue of trying to get food to centralized locations which increase costs, cause issues with food that is fine if it is kept refrigerated, etc.
Like, for as massively fucked as it is to see an entire aisle of cereal get thrown into a bin and the latch locked, that is not “the problem”. The problem is that we as a society do everything we can to make life inhospitable for the less well off in the hopes that they die and go away.
Also, distribution problem? The food is literally already there. Open something akin to the pharmacy counter area and a few staff could handle it.
Just for clarity, when you say staff you mean like government employees? Or charity workers?
Staff from the store itself. I see no barrier for a large business with m/billions in profit to add additional staff to run the food bank area.
To add a capitalist view: the food bank brings in people who might buy more. Yes, they are there to get food for survival, but the money saved might be spent on other goods like clothes or supplies in the store. (Stuff they need but wouldn’t be able to buy for food budget reasons).
So you’re not suggesting some sort of legal requirement? You want a company to voluntarily add labor cost, storage costs, any liability, equipment costs, etc on the chance people coming in for food assistance might buy stuff that not all grocery stores even carry?
Companies aren’t going to do that voluntarily, that’s not a realistic expectation. The ROI on your suggestion doesn’t make sense, the only way something like that gets staffed is if you convince states to pass some sort of requirement that companies do this…
This is an idea to flesh out. There are so many barriers. When you discover a problem, try to also find a solution instead of tossing it in the trash.
(Loss leaders are a thing too)
You may want to take your own advice, coming up with unrealistic solutions to every realistic problem posed to you isnt helpful either.
Loss leaders is a sales strategy that does not require additional overhead like permanent staffing, storage, and additional liability. Suggesting that they are makes it seem like you don’t understand sales, Operations, or logistics. I’m really trying to grasp how you think your “solutions” are helpful. Would you be comfortable providing insight into what industry you have the most experience in so that I can try to see it through the lens your looking at the problem through? (i.e. finance, customer service, procurement, etc).
Yet! A Kroger isn not equipped to handle it yet. Work needs to be put into the idea, a plan will form, and then it can be executed.
I feel like too many people read idealistic future plans and assume it will be inmediate and therefore dismiss the idea entirely. Have hope :)
Retrofitting so many buildings and hiring out the staff, and training them, is just not viable. Or even a good idea. You might as well want all of them to have helicopter pads and hotels attached.
Food banks exist. There should be more of them. But they are a very different kind of building than a supermarket and you need a VERY different kind of staff to be able to actually help those who need it rather than wander off because you are getting paid minimum wage and its your smoke break.
That is a big leap to helicopter pads.
Rather than defeat the idea, why not try to think of ways it could work. Ideas need time to grow and flourish with revisions. Nothing is made perfectly the first time. What changes to the idea would you make in good faith?
Just because an idea won’t happen doesn’t mean we can’t explore the ‘what if’ :)
There isn’t much to retrofit. It could be like adding another pharmacy department counter.
There is no way this “could work” because it is a fundamentally bad idea.
A food bank is not just a cart full of loaves of bread. It involves people who know how to engage with various government programs and how to tell people how to engage with it. And, the good ones, involve people who know how to help the people who need to use said food bank.
Like I said above: the issue is not the food. It is the counties. It is getting people to allow a food bank to even exist in their county. And you can 100% bet that if it is such a struggle to allow one to be opened that they will not be cool with The Poors “shopping” in the same supermarket they do.
The issue is that you are approaching this from a REALLY shitty direction. Because the vast majority of the people losing their god damned minds over supermarkets dumping excess food? it isn’t the needy. It is college kids who decided they want to dumpster dive because that will let them save money on food to spend on weed. Because yes, supermarkets waste a LOT of food. But if you actually look into this at all from a “helping the needy” perspective, the issue isn’t the amount of food wasted (which generally isn’t actually THAT much because supermarkets would rather sell food than dump it) and more the distribution to the needy and actually having a food bank/shelter/soup kitchen in a given county/area. And distribution to the needy is almost universally stopped by NIMBYs
I hear your criticisms, but I also think you are not on the same page of understanding my idea as I am. It’s a shower thought anyways.
This is how our local food bank does it. When you give money to them, you’re not actually buying groceries. You’re paying for trucks, gasoline and drivers who go to the various grocery’s’ warehouses, who take what is nearing “throw out” and make it available for people.
This is why I laugh whenever a local grocery store has a “hunger food drive“ - there, you are literally just buying groceries for other people. Whereas our food bank prides itself on being able to feed people for $.20 a meal - it’s a huge force multiplier.
Give to your local area food bank.
I do exactly this for a job. Some stores give lots of good stuff, some treat us like a garbage company.
Mine wants food but they want food on their list. Yes I have volunteered and donated to them. And yes I am aware that they are the exception not the norm.
I’m not sure you understand how capitalism works. Anywho, wanna be an anarcho-syndicalist with me?
Oh I understand capitalism. I want to break it down. This can be one of the steps. I will totally discuss your views of you want. The government can eat a rock.
I think we got our wires crossed. Have a great day, Comrade!
Gotcha. Enjoy!
