I have this app called Too Good To Go and it lets you buy shit from grocery stores that they would otherwise throw away for a cheap price (think like 15 euro worth of stuff for 3-4 euro). Today I went for it and got sort of disappointed, as a got like two cheeses, plant based butter, a box of eclairs, 15 little desserts and a steak. Sort of decent catch, not very nutritious. We gave the steak away as meat is not eaten in our house.
The app is a hit or miss. You can sometimes end up with a big box of veggies you can eat for a whole week. Just not today.
Anyway, it always makes me think how fucking much food is thrown away. Like, the app is so full in just my City. According to the app, 124kg of food is throw out every SECOND in this country. How anyone has to get hungry because they can't contribute to the profit is just insane. I hope we can one day look back at this time in disgust.
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.
According to the app, 124kg of food is throw out every SECOND in this country
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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 🤷♂️
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.
We used to subsidize a large portion of our food from dumpsters but recently there has been hella crackdowns and we just can't find anything good and unprotected anymore. We had one year where we dumpster dived like $600 worth of some fancy granola and snacked on it the whole year round and that was great. Now we just struggle.
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.
Tangential, but there are refillable versions of those vapes that cut down on waste almost entirely (and cost less). You buy the device once, and then a bottle of nicotine salts, and the refillable cartridge. The only waste you're producing is the cartridge every once in a while when you replace it (no extra cardboard, plastic, etc) and the plastic nicotine salt bottle when it's empty. You aren't throwing away a battery, electronics, or the bulky device. And I mean the same form factor as what you're probably buying too, I'm not talking about the old fashion cloud-blowing box vapes.
Oh yea I’m well familiar, I used to use one like that but have in the past year tried to eliminate my nicotine habit so stopped for a good while but sadly have gotten into lately picking up some of these disposables, usually just when I’m going out for the weekend or whatever.
But I do see a lot of people who buy only the disposable vapes very often, and even in general their existence upsets me lol
I understand that. I don't use any of it anymore but when I did I used the refillable ones.
It's just insanity to me that every single one of those has: a PCB, with chips (they have usb charging, and timing chips to auto-turn off, and a draw sensor), and a battery. Then the metal casing it's all in. And that all gets thrown out. A reasonable sized battery and all its lithium[1], thrown out. Fully functional chips, thrown out. A PCB with a nonzero amount of gold, thrown out. And people go through them at a rate that's just absurd.
Each vape battery has somewhere between 0.25 and 0.5 grams of metallic lithium. ↩︎
You’re 100% right, its ridiculous and you have articulated what I was thinking far better than I could. I work for a second job at a place that sells these disposable vapes and like I’m guilty of indulging too ofc but it blows my mind how many of these we sell. And it all ends up in the trash. Some people are buying one every other day, they should probably be banned honestly. Its an opulent level of waste
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
