this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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To make more food to stockpile and force people to buy or watch rot you silly billy!
Seriously though. Its one thing to want to sell the food, I get that people gotta get paid, but the fact that in a lot of places we just throw away the unsold food to rot in the rubbish is ridiculous??
Like seriously, we're just gonna throw away this food rather than even attempt to give it to those in need, and fire anybody who tries, cause it might slightly eat into profits?? That's just psychopathic levels of corporate apathy.
There are places where the trash bins of supermarkets are locked so homeless people can't take thrown away food from them
Most supermarkets have compactors.
Nutrition cubes
So, here's a problem: food logistics is a massive, complicated morass of infrastructure. Getting food from the area where it's produced to the area where there are people who want to eat it is difficult. A lot of individual steps have to go right for a bell pepper grown in Coahuila to show up in a grocery store in Tokyo, unspoilt and ready to eat.
The timing of when the pepper is picked, how fast it will ripen and how long until it spoils is built into the steps of the supply chain. The cost of the logistics system for distributing food, and the overhead for managing and containing the chaos, is probably substantially higher than the cost of actually producing the food.
The point being, when the bell pepper is at the store it is now ready for consumption. It will be there 2, maybe 3 days, and then if it is unsold it is at least halfway to rotten. Now at this point you want to try to redistribute it, which will require another supply chain, but there isn't time to figure out where to send an overripe bell pepper or who would want to eat it, or to pack it and ship it and then unpack it and hopefully use it before it's completely rotten.
Refrigeration is a wonderful technology that has brought massive reduction of food waste, but it has limits. You can't un-ripen a fruit. Trying to re-ship food at this point would not be worth the cost, and ultimately would create environmental harms that would outweigh any benefit.
Always buy local, as much as you can!
Okay, that's true for fresh produce with a minimal shelf life. But we also do that for shelf stable (like dried, canned, jarred) foods which can much more reasonably be donated after their display date.
And that's assuming some sort of centralised donation scheme, and not just mandating the stores donate to a local foodbank or such - which would make it a bit more feasible to donate some fresh produce.
Dumpster diving is fun and easy.
Isnt eating food from dumpsters unsafe?
Meat/eggs/dairy, definitely.
Vegetables, maybe, depending on what else they've touched.
Dry/canned goods, probably not unless they're wet (e.g if it's in a cardboard box or paper package and it's damp, it's not worth the risk - if we're talking about grocery store waste then for all you know that was water used to wash the butcher's work station or mop the floor).
Bacterial contamination is your primary concern, and after that mold. Salmonella could just end your life.
Caveat on canned goods: avoid bloated cans if they contain any meat. Bloated fruit cans contain alcohol.
Oh yeah, good point, avoid any cans that look bent, dented or expanded.
Are dented cans a concern? I thought it just meant someone dropped them
The problem is that the seal around the end of the can might be broken in a not-obvious way. If air can get in, bacteria can start to grow inside.
TIL good to know
dented can ruin the seal
Unsold food that is given away creates a liability if it causes problems. Food banks are the middle man in that respect, where they can toss things that aren't going to stay good and provide for people with the rest. So here's where government, regulation, and socialism comes into play. Companies should be encouraged with money to do something other than toss that food. Better systems should be in place to move that food to the food bank. Better regulation there to make sure that the food is being examined well enough. More places for all this to happen.
This ignores fixing the real problem, profit driven consumption, societies where people aren't able to provide for themselves, etc.
So by itself you aren't going to get unsold food to the needy, the risk and cost is too great for companies.
Actually, this is completely false for US based companies.
They limited liability in 96
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Emerson_Good_Samaritan_Act_of_1996
Correct to say that’s the law the lawyers you pay will have to cite to defend your company in a suit? Which a big corporation we would hope would treat as a cost of doing business, of course.
Imagine some businesses are ignorant of the law and some are super paranoid about even baseless litigation.
Idk how widespread it is but I've volunteered with organizations that get massive shipments of unsold food that's then repackaged by them and then given out or sold at a substantially lower cost, so this does happen. This is backed by federal laws limiting the liability of donors, and at least in my state there are also laws limiting food waste to incentivize participation in such programs.
Make it easy for the corpos. Criminalize destroyed food. The financial disincentive needs to be very punitive like some percentage revenue first offense. Then jail time for execs and boards. Those companies may need to hire community coordinators to deal with the near expiring foodstuffs to avoid the criminal liability. Capitalists might assume people would stop buying food and just wait for it all to be near expiring, but the reality is, those with means will take the convenience of a purchase over a long, uncertain wait, potentially queuing hours or even the night before the food banks would open. It might depress prices as they get desperate to trade some of the remaining margin before being required to give it away. Oh no, what will we do if the rich people are slightly less rich!