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That would be great, here they use trash compactors to destroy the food to prevent hungry people from going through the trash and filling their bellies.
EDIT: Whole Foods in particular does this, and I think I've seen Walmart doing it as well. Also, I worked at a grocery store where I was instructed to destroy the food when I threw it into the dumpsters to prevent people from being able to eat it, though they were too cheap to actually buy and operate a trash compactor.
Where is “here”?
The southeastern U.S.
I hadn’t heard of that. I do know the US passed a law allowing restaurants to donate unused food at the end of the day without fear of lawsuits.
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/08/13/good-samaritan-act-provides-liability-protection-food-donations
Also there’s a new app where restaurants can sell food at the end of the day at a discount rather than throwing it away called “too good to go”.
I’m lucky to live in a southern city where we have citywide composting as well. I wish more places would do that. It’s a waste to simply landfill food scraps when you could funnel it all to the farming industry as fertilizer.
That's great (re the citywide composting)! Companies cite fear of a lawsuit as an excuse not to donate food. Of course the reality is that they're just protecting profits, no one has ever been sued from donating food as far as I know, and as you mention there is a law specifically prohibiting doing so.
I've heard of many places where it's illegal to give food out to people.
Where I live there is no composting, the city barely recycles even.
Years ago, I worked sales at an Apple Store (like 2005) and we were instructed to destroy marketing materials when they were retired. I would mark them up with a large black marker. I didn’t consider that problematic, but I don’t like the idea of food being destroyed.
yeah, destroying marketing materials seems reasonable; destroying food because you know hungry people will eat it is evil.
Well for me it’s simple, I’ve worked places where we had to destroy food and I just didn’t. I’m lucky enough that it’s always been pretty easy to find another food service job, and I’ve told any managers that I think food waste is the only true sin, and I’m willing to lose my job over it. I know not everyone can afford to walk away from a job, but all of my managers(in two countries) have thus far found a way to look the other way. Your middle manager almost certainly doesn’t want food to be wasted either, so if you tell them it’s a moral issue, that gives them plausible deniability for not destroying it.