Comradeship // Freechat

According to the app, 124kg of food is throw out every SECOND in this country

AFAIR some shops don't use the app as intended, just peddling some shit, counting on the surprise factor. But still, this and the posts about dumpster diving kinda make me scared about the world we're living in.

Oh man, you would hate working in an American restaurant, especially one like mine where the workers are incompetent and apathetic and regularly pre-cook things I can already tell is not going to be sold before it sits under a heat lamp/steam table for 4 hours and turns into trash, which someone like me would still eat if they didn't toss it all without asking.

Which, of course, doesn't compare to my grocery job, although to be fair they do donate a majority portion to a soup kitchen. However, anything damaged/"damaged" or related to fish gets thrown out, I steal some sometimes but it's ridiculous employees can't just get free reign to take from the trash.

And neither compare to my brief stint at a junk collector's job. It is absolutely insane what rich people and commercial businesses throw away here. Luxury goods. My first day we picked up a brand new set of bar furniture made out mahogany and stone, several palettes of unopened bougie soda, an original painting (beautiful), a crystal glass case full of fine china...I took what I could but what I could was not a lot.

Don't even get me started what I see normal, everyday people throw away casually. I've taken food from acquantinces and even strangers plates more times than I can count. I'd rather be seen as gross than pay for food 🤷‍♂️

It's pretty bad in my country (Japan) too. Everything gets thrown out the second it hits "expired", and in many cases the store won't sell it to you even if you tell them it's fine. When they ring it up the system will give them an alert and they will throw it out and look for a new one for you. If there isn't one, you still can't buy it. I have tried to buy things expired five minutes before and they refuse. From my research, some stores like employees take the expired foodstuffs, others just dump it. In many cases these are things like riceballs with enough preservatives to probably be good for a month after expiration.

Fruit is probably the worst offender. Every piece of fruit at the grocery store is beyond perfect, you basically never have to check any fruit you buy because nothing gets stocked that isn't the perfect ripeness, shape, colour, etc. Anything less than that standard tends to get thrown out. This results in stupidly high fruit prices. I bought some grapes the other day, like one bunch of grapes were like $5. I see apples and peaches up to $4/ea, and melons range anywhere from $10 for a normal melon to hundreds for the "designer" luxury melons. I hardly ever eat fruit anymore except bananas. I miss fruit.

The company I work for explicitly sources the "reject" produce directly from farmers, to our credit. (Honestly we probably do it because it saves money, but at least the end result is good).

EDIT: We also peel and throw away the skin of every fruit, which is bizarre to me. Peeling an orange, sure. Peeling grapes or peaches is crazy to me. The skin is my favourite part of most fruit, when it is edible.

I’ve had 2 brothers and the majority of my friends work in the food business in different aspects, sometimes it was a restaurant, some do food prep for buffets, etc. they all overwhelmingly say that the companies spend way too much on food, quantity over quality, it’s shit food that will give you colon cancer after a decade or 2 and they buy a lot, and inevitably they waste a lot too. It never came into these people’s minds to do employee surveys about serving sizes or food preferences, it would realistically save them money and make people happier, if there’s an explanation for why they don’t I’d be happy to hear it, it sounds extremely short-sighted

That company is quite annoying, in the modern corporate true-believer wide-eyed frozen yoghurt shop staff cult kind of way. I like that they're normalising diverting food waste though.

We have a similar app where I live, though I’ve never actually tried it I should.

Extremely tangentially related but I have been in a bad habit lately of buying disposable nicotine vaporizers and every time I get one I feel great shame. The amount of waste they generate is absurd, with cardboard and plastic packaging as well as tossing out a whole ass battery and such. This shit is not sustainable.

There is a reason the west produces magnitudes more garbage than the rest of the world, I always threw out so much less trash and especially food when I was in China and had easy access to a fresh wet market.

Cheese and steak are very nutritious. Lol