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.