Dear Ms. Harris,

I could never be a customer of an establishment that wouldn't grant me the opportunity to assist them in lowering costs.

With utmost regards,

Allen
GardenWeb Soil Forum Participant

Yes and bring up that Starbucks has an "earth friendly" policy of giving their coffee grounds away to be composted. Then ask them if they are not "earth friendly". Use big scary words and situations that could possibly trap them into saying something bad or something that they would not want to let the media get their hands on...lol

Who the heck is Harris Teeter anyways?

Apparently it's a grocery store, and this is quite common with grocery stores. What I've been able to gather is that they don't want people possibly eating any of that stuff and blaming them for getting sick. It's a liability thing, otherwise I can't imagine why it would be so universal among grocery stores.

The volume must be prodigious when you think about the amount of produce that goes through the average store.

If a person was really serious about it, they might be able to negotiate a contract to haul the stuff away, with liability provisions included. I think there are compost operations as well as hog farms that do that. But you'd have to be ready for the volume, it's not for the suburban gardener.

The stores all are about the same, but some processing plant owned by Grocery chains are green. That is how I got many tons of coffee waste. They GIVE the waste eatables to a hog farm that pays for shipping. Their goal is zero waste in year 2013, everything being recycled.
But if I get food & give it to you & your family get sick, even if the store is cleared of wrong doing they could fold.
Food cat(not real name)was in the news & all kinds of wild stories went around, I knew someone who worked there & said half of the stories could not be true.
It is a bad thing. A ladder cost is three times what it should be because of lawsuits.

Yeah true. Its a shame how much money some lawsuits generate.

When I was on the streets for a couple years. I never went hungry as I always had a pocket full of some cash. But at time I would meet some interesting people who would show me little "homeless tricks". Alot of the store around Orange County will put out their hot food that they dont sell. They will put it right next to the dumpsters, still in its packaging and piping hot! Plus any expired baked goods.

When I was a kid I worked at Little Caesars pizza and every half hour we would have to throw out the "hot plate" food. It made me sick the amount of wasted food at the end of the day. Lets just say I took home ALOT of food and never went hungry:-) Pus I wouldnt throw out the food every half hour..shhhh

I do know all the wasted food from the Las Vegas all you can eats goes to hogs. I was remarking to my Grandmother last night how our slaughter animals eat better than some entire countries do.

Keep in mind that much of that not allowing "dumpster diving" could be part of the health code these people must deal with. The 1980 Swine Health Protection Act requires that food waste to be fed to swine, pigs, be heated to 212F and held there for a minimum of 30 minutes, and that may well be enough of a problem that few of the swine CAFOs would want to bother with that. You cannot just take a lot of food waste and dump it out for swine to eat.

Sounds like you have more knowledge on those details than me. I can see how that would not work too well at the average CAFO. I was thinking smaller family farms. I know there was one here that was taking tons of stuff from a juice bar/organic restaurant and feeding it to pigs. I don't know if they were heating it first or not, it sounds like it should have been, unless there is some kind of exemption for smaller farms.

Good point on the health codes too. A lot of edible food gets wasted when it's caught up in the practical aspects of health regulations.

I was approached by a waste management company to take grocery store materials. Apparently if one enters into a contract, the store is more confident the material will in fact be composted and not used in a food chain.

I had to turn down the offer as I am not set up for that kind of material or volumes of food waste.

Lloyd