primitives discuss waste of food

[franksolich]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1349694

Oh my.

marmar  (1000+ posts)        Thu Jun-23-11 10:40 AM
Original message
 
Dumpster diver says: Trader Joe’s must stop wasting food 

For many years now, I have fed my family food from the dumpster. It’s not because I can’t afford to shop at grocery stores like other, normal folks. It’s because supermarkets across the nation toss perfectly good meats, cheeses, eggs, and produce into the trash every single day.

So I dumpster dive, which is exactly like it sounds: I jump into dumpsters, pull out not-yet-expired food, and bring it home to my family. Yes, you could say we eat trash—but it’s delicious! It used to be that nearly every meal we ate contained some “trash” in it, like a head of broccoli, fresh ahi tuna, or strawberries. With three kids and a busy life, it’s been harder to keep up the practice, but the food is there, waiting to be salvaged before being carted off to the landfill. Dumpster diving is the subject of a new documentary I made, Dive!, which will be released on July 19.

Grocery stores dumping their goods provide me with a free lunch, and the film was certainly a fun project. But the documentary showcases a huge problem—food waste. Every year in the United States, we throw away 96 billion pounds of food. That’s 263 million pounds a day, 11 million pounds an hour, 3,000 pounds per second!

All in all, Americans throw out a whopping one-half of the food we produce and import. This wastefulness coexists with a devastating recession and record numbers of Americans dependent on food stamps—one in eight of us, to be exact. Our propensity to waste has now reached beyond our means to do so, and yet we keep up the bad habit even while our neighbors go hungry. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/food/2011-06-21-dumpster-diver-tel...

It's a big campfire, too much to bring over here.

It's well worth reading in its original blazing glory at the link above, though.

[Bodadh]

I refuse to actually give DU any traffic, but they might have stumbled across a small point.

I used to work a large nationwide store in the 90s. And the amount of still perfectly good food they tossed made me sick. But there was no dumpster diving, everything went into a HUGE compactor. One night there we a black out that lasted a couple of hours. Maybe 2 full hours, maybe. They had us toss out ALL the meat. The steaks, the hamburger, the chicken, everything. Even the lunch meat. It all went into the compactor.

It was heart breaking.

I know they are going by safety guild lines and trying to head off a BS lawsuit but my God.

[franksolich]

I refuse to actually give DU any traffic, but they might have stumbled across a small point.

I used to work a large nationwide store in the 90s. And the amount of still perfectly good food they tossed made me sick. But there was no dumpster diving, everything went into a HUGE compactor. One night there we a black out that lasted a couple of hours. Maybe 2 full hours, maybe. They had us toss out ALL the meat. The steaks, the hamburger, the chicken, everything. Even the lunch meat. It all went into the compactor.

It was heart breaking.

I know they are going by safety guild lines and trying to head off a BS lawsuit but my God.

Well, as one primitive did point out, due to [Democrat] regulation of businesses, it's usually illegal to sell certain things after a certain date, even if they're still fit for human consumption.

It's a waste, but there's a reason it happens.

[GOBUCKS]

Well, as one primitive did point out, due to [Democrat] regulation of businesses, it's usually illegal to sell certain things after a certain date, even if they're still fit for human consumption.

It's a waste, but there's a reason it happens.

The reason good food is sent to the landfill, and the reason the DUmmies dive into DUmpsters, is the constant threat from swarms of democrat trial lawyers.

Every DUmmy who chows down from the garbage is hoping for an affliction that will translate into an enormous liability settlement from the store that negligently left it accessible to unsuspecting consumers in an unlocked dumpster. They won't dumpster dive behind a mom-and-pop store. It will always be a big chain store with deep pockets.

Stores are crazy to donate food to the outfits that feed bums, unless it's perfectly good merchandise straight off the shelf.

[Skul]

Primatives are pretty much just a waste of perfectly good oxygen.