First a litte about food waste.
Has anyone seen the movie "DIVE"
it was a documentary made a few years ago, centering on dumpster diving and the fact that we throw away 50-80% (depending on how you look at the figures and if you consider unharvested food um... food) of all food produced in our country, they would go to Trader Joes right at 10:00 PM and wait for the guy to throw out all the meats and stuff a couple of days BEFORE they went bad. The people making the documentary had been doing this for a year, the problem being... they couldent eat like 10 lbs of rib eye steaks every day (!!!) SERIOUSLY they were getting moving boxes of fresh meats and didnt have the room to freeze it, dry it, or eat it or even give it away to their friends.. that was on top of all the other stuff thrown out every day before their due dates, bread, milk, really expensive cheeses, juices, tons of fruits and vegitables, etc etc, mostly organic and really healty stuff...
want free food? best way is dumpster diving.
Another way to get free food (well besides becoming the man of 1000 faces and raiding the breakfast room of hotels for months at a time) are the various types of food banks.
How do Food Banks Work? How can you beat a food bank at its own game?
ok heres how food banks work, SOME local supermarkets and produce stores offer days where organizations and very low income individuals (though they prefer groups, churches, shelters, etc) can come before the store opens and pick up groceries a day or so before the expiration dates come due. This is the main way food banks get their food.
Most county social services offices keep a list of the participating supermarkets with contact numbers, you can call these numbers and arrange pick ups (you'll need to be on the supermarket's list of approved people on the day of the pick up) If your social services office does not keep a list... you can just start calling all the supermarkets google lists.
Food banks hate this, because essentially the food bank will limit who gets what and how much of what, if they have say filet minion they will only give you one steak for a family of four, but if you show up at the market, you are allowed to take as many as the food bank takes (IE you can take 10 and the food bank can take 10) now this might be causing you distress, thinking your stealing from the mouths of poverty stricken individuals... nothing could be further from the truth... let me explain...
Food banks rarely are able to deliver all the food they collect, when I was looking into starting one of these, I was told repeatedly that they would love for me to go out and get people to pick up the food they are already collecting...
Why? because if they cant deliver it in time, it must get destroyed, and in order to give it away you must fill out a form showing you earned less than 24,000 per year (few do) when I said "oh... I dont think I qualify and I dont know anyone who does" the director of a huge multimillion dollar food bank with about 10 cities it serves and many storage locations spread through out the county, told me "It dosent matter, its not like anybody is going to check, and if you dont take it... its only going to get destroyed anyway... take a stack of these forms and get all your friends and their families to fill them out, remember to have them say they earn less than 24,000 per year, and you can pick up the food for all of them and distribute it yourself if you want... thats the only way we get our federal funding."
so... in essence, its a scam. they say they are giving away food to poverty stricken individuals when in truth their getting paid some pretty hefty salaries based on how much food they give away, and their giving the food away to anybody willing to lie on a form (or a pile of them), and even encourageing people to lie on as many forms as they can have you fill out, and if you dont do it, they will just destroy the food anyway. sigh... what a horrible system... and your tax dollars are paying for this...
How do Fast Fresh services work?
Many supermarkets fear making people ill and will give away produce, bread, canned goods, pre-packaged and preserved meats etc, but will not give away meat itself from their butchers... instead they sell that meat (which is perfectly fine) to composters who turn it into fertilizer.
A new type of food bank has cropped up around this, they call them "fast fresh" services, essentially they have huge freezer trucks, they show up at around 11:00 at the supermarkets, throw the meat inside the truck then rush that to a flash freezer and have it frozen before midnight. Some supermarket chains in some areas have accepted these types of services (most are on the east coast) some havent.
Fast fresh services typically ally themselves with various homless shelters or church poverty programs, some operate their own "free" or "charity supported" markets in low income areas where people pay a small ammount (like 10-20.00) for as many bags of groceries as they can carry. (though the rest of the food banks consider charging for the food you collected a type of taboo) You can find listings of these on google, most are simply listed as food banks but when you check their info they will talk about their flash freezers, trucks, etc.
How does food recycling work?
Resturants can give away food if it has not been cooked, food recyling programs generally operate in a similar fasion to fast fresh programs. They go to resturants and pick up produce and vegitibles that have been purchaced but that the resturant knows will not be used before going bad (the resturants over purchace constantly) they will also pick up, say pre-made salads that wont be used that evening, or occasionally meats that have been prepared (marinated, spiced/flavored or stuffed with stuffing etc) but will not be used that evening, and then freeze it or deliver it to shelters or other programs for use the next day, or will flash freeze it. There are some large food recycling programs on the east coast but again it has not really caught on on the west coast.
How does Agriculture Recycling or Crop Salvation work?
There are some other programs that go by a bunch of different names and descriptions, but basically they work the same. Some produce and vegitable farms cannot get a good market price for their harvest so they might harvest half a feild or farm and leave the other half to rot. Volunteers will go to these farms and pick or harvest the produce and distribute it to various other food programs. OR a farmer does not wish to farm half his property (again for fear of loosing money and getting paid more in farm substities from the goverment if its not farmed by them) and these organizations might plant and harvest crops on a donated farm (verry rare) I dont know too much else about these, but there are not many of them to my knowledge.
So thats how the various food bank programs work,
I want to stay neutral and completely non-political here... but I just cant. I personally feel the way food banks work is a pretty corrupt system, but the idea of just throwing away so much perfectly good food seems like a bigger sin. I cant believe how many hundreds of thousands of tons of food simply goes to waste every year in our country, estimated at 50% (but possibly as high as 80% counting un-harvested foods) it disgusts me.
Of course if you tried to propose a different sort of national food distribution program, say a mandatory program that is like some of collective harvesting the local organic farmers use (people pay a flat rate and get a portion of whatever was harvested at many local farms that week... I'm a member of one of these) you would likely get the full force of 1000 unions and comercial supermarket chains and the food packaging and trucking industries and god knows who else brought completely to bear on you. It would take some pretty extreme (read massive starvation) conditions to change any of this, its just too much money and power to try and fight right now.
So until it does change... I would suggest using whatever loophole you can get, lie however you need to, just to stop the waste from going on... I dont like it or feel good about it either but what else can you do? Again, sorry for the personal politics in this one, It wasnt the main focus and I wont debate if anybody has a counter view.
Has anyone seen the movie "DIVE"
it was a documentary made a few years ago, centering on dumpster diving and the fact that we throw away 50-80% (depending on how you look at the figures and if you consider unharvested food um... food) of all food produced in our country, they would go to Trader Joes right at 10:00 PM and wait for the guy to throw out all the meats and stuff a couple of days BEFORE they went bad. The people making the documentary had been doing this for a year, the problem being... they couldent eat like 10 lbs of rib eye steaks every day (!!!) SERIOUSLY they were getting moving boxes of fresh meats and didnt have the room to freeze it, dry it, or eat it or even give it away to their friends.. that was on top of all the other stuff thrown out every day before their due dates, bread, milk, really expensive cheeses, juices, tons of fruits and vegitables, etc etc, mostly organic and really healty stuff...
want free food? best way is dumpster diving.
Another way to get free food (well besides becoming the man of 1000 faces and raiding the breakfast room of hotels for months at a time) are the various types of food banks.
How do Food Banks Work? How can you beat a food bank at its own game?
ok heres how food banks work, SOME local supermarkets and produce stores offer days where organizations and very low income individuals (though they prefer groups, churches, shelters, etc) can come before the store opens and pick up groceries a day or so before the expiration dates come due. This is the main way food banks get their food.
Most county social services offices keep a list of the participating supermarkets with contact numbers, you can call these numbers and arrange pick ups (you'll need to be on the supermarket's list of approved people on the day of the pick up) If your social services office does not keep a list... you can just start calling all the supermarkets google lists.
Food banks hate this, because essentially the food bank will limit who gets what and how much of what, if they have say filet minion they will only give you one steak for a family of four, but if you show up at the market, you are allowed to take as many as the food bank takes (IE you can take 10 and the food bank can take 10) now this might be causing you distress, thinking your stealing from the mouths of poverty stricken individuals... nothing could be further from the truth... let me explain...
Food banks rarely are able to deliver all the food they collect, when I was looking into starting one of these, I was told repeatedly that they would love for me to go out and get people to pick up the food they are already collecting...
Why? because if they cant deliver it in time, it must get destroyed, and in order to give it away you must fill out a form showing you earned less than 24,000 per year (few do) when I said "oh... I dont think I qualify and I dont know anyone who does" the director of a huge multimillion dollar food bank with about 10 cities it serves and many storage locations spread through out the county, told me "It dosent matter, its not like anybody is going to check, and if you dont take it... its only going to get destroyed anyway... take a stack of these forms and get all your friends and their families to fill them out, remember to have them say they earn less than 24,000 per year, and you can pick up the food for all of them and distribute it yourself if you want... thats the only way we get our federal funding."
so... in essence, its a scam. they say they are giving away food to poverty stricken individuals when in truth their getting paid some pretty hefty salaries based on how much food they give away, and their giving the food away to anybody willing to lie on a form (or a pile of them), and even encourageing people to lie on as many forms as they can have you fill out, and if you dont do it, they will just destroy the food anyway. sigh... what a horrible system... and your tax dollars are paying for this...
How do Fast Fresh services work?
Many supermarkets fear making people ill and will give away produce, bread, canned goods, pre-packaged and preserved meats etc, but will not give away meat itself from their butchers... instead they sell that meat (which is perfectly fine) to composters who turn it into fertilizer.
A new type of food bank has cropped up around this, they call them "fast fresh" services, essentially they have huge freezer trucks, they show up at around 11:00 at the supermarkets, throw the meat inside the truck then rush that to a flash freezer and have it frozen before midnight. Some supermarket chains in some areas have accepted these types of services (most are on the east coast) some havent.
Fast fresh services typically ally themselves with various homless shelters or church poverty programs, some operate their own "free" or "charity supported" markets in low income areas where people pay a small ammount (like 10-20.00) for as many bags of groceries as they can carry. (though the rest of the food banks consider charging for the food you collected a type of taboo) You can find listings of these on google, most are simply listed as food banks but when you check their info they will talk about their flash freezers, trucks, etc.
How does food recycling work?
Resturants can give away food if it has not been cooked, food recyling programs generally operate in a similar fasion to fast fresh programs. They go to resturants and pick up produce and vegitibles that have been purchaced but that the resturant knows will not be used before going bad (the resturants over purchace constantly) they will also pick up, say pre-made salads that wont be used that evening, or occasionally meats that have been prepared (marinated, spiced/flavored or stuffed with stuffing etc) but will not be used that evening, and then freeze it or deliver it to shelters or other programs for use the next day, or will flash freeze it. There are some large food recycling programs on the east coast but again it has not really caught on on the west coast.
How does Agriculture Recycling or Crop Salvation work?
There are some other programs that go by a bunch of different names and descriptions, but basically they work the same. Some produce and vegitable farms cannot get a good market price for their harvest so they might harvest half a feild or farm and leave the other half to rot. Volunteers will go to these farms and pick or harvest the produce and distribute it to various other food programs. OR a farmer does not wish to farm half his property (again for fear of loosing money and getting paid more in farm substities from the goverment if its not farmed by them) and these organizations might plant and harvest crops on a donated farm (verry rare) I dont know too much else about these, but there are not many of them to my knowledge.
So thats how the various food bank programs work,
I want to stay neutral and completely non-political here... but I just cant. I personally feel the way food banks work is a pretty corrupt system, but the idea of just throwing away so much perfectly good food seems like a bigger sin. I cant believe how many hundreds of thousands of tons of food simply goes to waste every year in our country, estimated at 50% (but possibly as high as 80% counting un-harvested foods) it disgusts me.
Of course if you tried to propose a different sort of national food distribution program, say a mandatory program that is like some of collective harvesting the local organic farmers use (people pay a flat rate and get a portion of whatever was harvested at many local farms that week... I'm a member of one of these) you would likely get the full force of 1000 unions and comercial supermarket chains and the food packaging and trucking industries and god knows who else brought completely to bear on you. It would take some pretty extreme (read massive starvation) conditions to change any of this, its just too much money and power to try and fight right now.
So until it does change... I would suggest using whatever loophole you can get, lie however you need to, just to stop the waste from going on... I dont like it or feel good about it either but what else can you do? Again, sorry for the personal politics in this one, It wasnt the main focus and I wont debate if anybody has a counter view.
