Will Lynch Wasted Food

William Lynch
2009/10/26
Wasted Food

Food has always been a part of my life, a part of my culture. Food is the main reason my families have been coming together all these years. Whether it has been from our weekly Saturday lunches, or him passing on his “grill-meister” knowledge, my father and I have become very close because of food. I love how food can bring families and friends together, and most importantly I love the way it tastes. What I never really thought about however, is just how lucky I am that I’ve never had to worry about needing food. I just never really realized how great it is to “live to eat” instead of just “eating to live”. Having worked as a busboy for a summer, I got to see how the kitchen of a busy restaurant operates. I saw that to improve cooking and serving efficiency, large amounts of food is cooked ahead of time in hopes that it gets ordered by enough customers. It’s much better for a restaurant to have precooked food leftover than to not have enough. This often puts the restaurant into the habit of always making sure they prepare too much because it’s better than not having enough and making customers wait while they prepare things from scratch. Yes, as the customer we get our food much quicker and therefore we deem the restaurant’s service very good. However, the food that doesn’t get ordered on a given night can’t always be kept. At the end of a night, especially on the weekends, huge amounts of both cooked and uncooked food get thrown away. How can there be hungry people around when we are able to throw away so much perfectly good food? Restaurants aren’t the only ones; do grocery stores always sell all their products by their sell by dates? Or how bout on the small scale, how much food gets wasted within households? Watching so much perfectly edible food get thrown out every night at closing made me think about how much good this unwanted food could do.
I worked at a German restaurant as a bellboy/waiter this past summer. Working at this place gave me a glimpse of how the kitchen worked. Food was rarely prepared as it was ordered. Based on previous sales, this restaurant prepared sauces and dishes in large quantities with the assumption that enough people will order them. This increases the efficiency of a restaurant since many things don’t have to be cooked as it gets ordered; otherwise a restaurant is considered “slow” or the “food took too long to come”. This means that on a given night there will always be food that is wasted. Yes, plenty of things can be stored, but certain things just can’t be kept. For example: Sausages can be kept for use another night if they made too much, but if a roasted pork knuckle or sautéed fish isn’t eaten that night, then it’s going in the trash. Also once something is defrosted, it has a very small window of time before it must be eaten as you cannot refreeze foods. My conflict here is how much perfectly good food goes to waste. Not half eaten food scraps, but both uncooked and cooked food that is simply thrown away. Buying food in bulk at wholesale prices must not cost all that much in relation to rent and labor considering that they throw so much of it away. If other restaurants have as large of a surplus as the German restaurant I worked at this summer, I can’t help but be bothered how much good all this extra food can do at say, at a homeless shelter.
I’m sure a restaurant doesn’t want to openly admit how much of their inventory goes to waste, but maybe all it takes is a few restaurants to step up and be willing to admit that there is extra food that could benefit someone. Of course when you only see one side of the puzzle it seems pretty simple. Restaurants have extra food. There are homeless and hungry people. Restaurants are the bad guy.
Luckily, I had a perfectly good reason to stop working as a waiter before college- I got to get my wisdom teeth removed. After I recovered from this ordeal and before I left for college however, my family thought it would be a hoot to go eat at the same restaurant I worked at 6 days a week from 3pm until midnight over the summer. We ordered a pork knuckle. Normally the waiter brings the knuckle to the table. The customer doesn’t even know where to start with it. The waiter chimes in and offers to cut it up for you. When ours came however, we said “no thanks!” and I got to show off my newly learned pork knuckle cutting skills, which is no small feat I might add. The manager saw that we were having a slight celebration and came to speak with us (the reason why I got the job in the first place was because my uncle went to high school with the man that runs the place). Mr. Chow sat down and brought a round of drinks. He asked about my experience as a waiter/busboy and I told him how much hard work it was. Then we began to talk about why so much food gets thrown away during closing every night.
The chefs and managers are constantly discussing how much of what needs to be prepared based on the day of the week and reservations that have been made. Chefs are constantly taking inventory and most of the preparation for the day is done during the restaurants “dead” time which is between 3pm -5pm. Based on what day it is and how many reservations have been made, chefs begin preparing most of what will be eaten that night. Certain things will be breaded, defrosted, or precooked. For example, pork knuckles need to be boiled before being thrown on the grill. It would take way too long for all that to be done once a customer orders it so a large amount of knuckles are just boiled in the afternoon and ready to be grilled once they are ordered. What inevitably seems to happen is that there are many fully cooked knuckles that never make it out of the kitchen. On Fridays and Saturdays, the restaurant fills up so much that they even throw knuckles and sausages on the grill and are able to keep serving them to people within minutes of being ordered since it is such a popular item on the menu. Mondays however, are typically very quiet. I have been present on a day when the restaurant was unusually crowded for the day of the week- more customers than precooked food. This throws the kitchen into slight chaos since chefs now have to do a slight bit of precooking when they normally would just be heating or putting the finishing touches on something that had mostly been cooked hours before.
Even with computer programs and the detailed upkeep of spreadsheets, daily precooking of foods is still guesswork and food is ultimately wasted. This seemed to make sense both from the manager’s standpoint and as a customer. If having extra food leftover at the end of a night meant all customers get what they ordered promptly, as a manager it would most definitely be a risk I’d be willing to take. Of course, as a customer getting what I ordered quickly doesn’t hurt either. But what about the economics behind wasted food? Don’t you lose money when you throw your products away? Well, yes and no. Yes, any food thrown away does not get ordered and therefore not paid for. The prices at which restaurants acquire their food however, ensure a minimal loss if some food gets thrown away. The main costs of running a restaurant are rent (especially in a city) and labor. The losses incurred from a “little extra” food each day are quite small compared to how much labor and rent costs a restaurant.
The benefit a restaurant’s leftover food can do for a food bank or homeless shelter should not be ignored. Why throw so much perfectly good food away when it could feed so many hungry people in our society? Well, because that would be another cost that a restaurant might not want to take on. Okay…well what if there was a way, an easy way to for the restaurant to get rid of this food?
I’m a lazy person, and I think that we all have the tendency and inclination to try and do things the easiest or quickest way possible. Imagine that it’s midnight and you’re closing my restaurant down. You’ve got plenty of leftover food too. Sure, its perfectly good food but what are you going to do with it? Take it across town to a homeless shelter? No way, after a long day at work all you probably want to do is close up, go home and wash the days work off yourself. No one would really blame you for getting rid of the food the easiest way you can- the dumpster around back. But wait. What if there was a service that would come to you and just take this unneeded food off your hands? It’d be as easy as throwing it out!
This sounds farfetched but it’s really not, especially in a large city. Think of a big city and you can definitely think of a certain area where there are a large number of restaurants within a relatively small area. Now, what if someone could pick up all these restaurants’ food that was going to be thrown away anyways at little to no cost to the restaurant? The service picking up all these leftovers wouldn’t have go very far to rack up quite the large amount of food and can take this food to a shelter. Sounds idealistic and over simplified? Maybe. But in a large city, this hypothetical service picking up food in certain districts is entirely possible.
There are lots of ways we can waste less food. According to “Discovery News” $75 billion dollars of food a year is wasted in the United States alone. It is also estimated that between 25% and 40% of food produced in the United States does not get eaten. The internet offers a multitude of resources on how households, stores, and restaurants alike can save money through wasting less food. Also freezing leftovers in split into smaller packages also allows for them to be reheated many more times. Instead of shopping in bulk, shopping only a few days ahead cuts down on purchasing items that you might not end up eating and throwing away. Also this allows you to pick the ripest produce since you are planning on eating it within the next couple days.
There are plenty of ways we can all waste less food; maybe more people need to see first hand how much perfectly good food goes unused at restaurants. It’s also very easy for me to return to my comfortable bubble of affluence and ignore how much good this wasted food could do. Hopefully I don’t, hopefully I do something with this insight.