Enjoyed the read overall but one line stuck out: "- I take one bite out of my cold Big Mac and eat one cold fries and throw it all out."
You have to be a special kind of asshole to throw away meat and food instead of just saying the food is cold.
You have to be a special kind of asshole to throw away meat and food instead of just saying the food is cold.
That said, we produce more food than we ever have. Is there a difference to starving people whether a grain of wheat went ungrown or was wasted?
What was the author meant to do, walk the hamburger and fries (with bites missing) to his closest homeless shelter?
I was pretty amazed the first time I went - for McDonalds specifically, the US's medium size for drinks and fries is bigger than our large size in Australia! And we have no super-size or drink refills. (Our Burger King equivalent is about the only fast food chain I can think of that does free refills. It's very rare for restaurants in general here).
I wonder how it is today, but at the time it was on the order of half a billion tons a year.
Spent the rest of my childhood trying to be hyper-conscientious about the waste I produced.
Got to high school, got a job at a local restaurant, eventually moved onto large-scale corporate catering, and then went to live and work on a farm.
As I moved up the scale of food production I only saw more and more waste. It was sickening but at the same time completely understandable when you realize that there are diminishing returns. The larger your business is, the more waste becomes "not worth our time".
I just can't feel bad about throwing away half a pizza here and there anymore.
After I left the farm I took one more job in food service before moving to tech, and that was at a small-scale startup that produces healthy, fresh, TV dinner style foodstuff, and distributes them at retail locations.
I was blown away at how efficient the whole process was. One of the chief philosophies of my boss was conservation. With a business model that revolved around maintaining a supply of each meal reflective of its demand, and making dishes that could be built upon common base ingredients, we were able to exactly calculate the amount of food we needed to make each day. If for some reason there was a piece or two of chicken left, or some rice, an employee would just take it home. I just wish every place could be that committed to not wasting food, by creating a business model that incentivizes such behavior with a better profit margin.
Part of the issue with scale is that this extra profit margin becomes more and more marginal. Supporting local farms, co-ops, and cooks is probably the best thing we can do to enable less food waste across the industry.
Food is a renewable yet spoilable resource. Easy to create, hard to store long term. Having more food then we need means the system has the capacity to absorb disruptions. If we consumed 100% of the food created, any disruption such as a cold spell in Florida would cause people to go hungry.
This perhaps relies on non-capitalist management of food production however.
tl;dr I don't agree with your conclusion.
That's because, when doing a big mac for example, it's almost as easy to make one or five on a tray. So better make 5 if you're in a rush, they will likely be fulfilled.
In cool periods we would only produce on command. So no waste. Fresh burgers.
Everyone used to say that Franchise didn't care too much about these rules (where they should), and the director didn't like getting employees from Franchise McDonalds because they had to re-learn all the hygiene standards. Since that day I avoid franchise restaurants and go only to the official ones.
Our stores were generally earning 4s in inspections, because Joan Kroc lived about 4 miles away from our best/highest volume store and frequently stopped in. Our worst store was probably closer to McOpCo stores, despite our efforts to improve it over time.
And what you say doesn't really make sense to me, of course my personal experience and what I was hearing at McDonalds is very subjective. But the official restaurants are here to show off what McDonalds is, they are supposed to hold the bar way higher than any other McDonalds restaurants.
McOpCo stores have to follow all the rules and policies that Oak Brook dictates to the franchisees, but they also have to be profitable. Oak Brook was often out of touch with how life was for franchisees, and would make requirements that just didn't jibe with making a buck. A franchisee would make the decision to either emphasize or de-emphasize a new policy/procedure, and deal with the consequences from their regional manager if it became an issue.
McOpCo stores weren't immune to business pressures either; having to follow (in theory) all the policies and regulations imposes a cost on their business. And one of the keys to a well run franchise was a stable management team and stable staff under that team. With McOpCo stores being a stepping stone for managers to climb the ranks, it was harder to develop the team cohesion that a good franchisee could.
The sandwich wrappers had the numbers 1 to 12 printed on them, and you were supposed to mark the pre-made sandwiches to show when to throw them away. For example, if you assembled the sandwich at 12:15, mark the 5 to show that it should be thrown away when the clock's big hand is on the 5. Literacy not really required.
"Eat your peas, there are starving children in Africa" only makes sense if there's a ready means to get your peas to the starving children. If the choices are eating food you don't want or throwing it away, it's wasted either way. Eating it isn't the superior moral option; it doesn't accomplish anything but making you fat.
2. Much food is never harvested. A large portion of it is also never taken to market due to blemishes. http://californiawatch.org/health-and-welfare/food-waste-rem...
3. Supermarkets discard about 1/3 of their food due to spoilage, blemishes, and overripeness. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/25/351495274/sup...
Is that really true? Whoa if so.
Oddly enough, it kind of makes me feel better about food security.
Spoiler: I eat meat
The hacker looks at your parent and says woah -- grocers throw away 30% of food? There's a startup opportunity. And when they succeed they accomplish more than all the hand wringing in the world about someone else not doing their part.
1. Whether or not I eat the food is irrelevant to the poor.
2. The amount of food I order is completely up to me. I usually order, and eat, more than I need to survive (because I'm stoned). I revel in the decadence and my ability to buy and eat so much food I'm disgustingly full. I could argue that I do this to "flaunt" my wealth and privilege.
(really, I do it because I grew up dirt poor and hungry, so I gain inordinate pleasure from excess. Probably unhealthy, but it's my birthday and I'll cry if I want to)
There might be people starving in Africa, but I still want my lunch.
It's like throwing your pants away because you spilled ketchup on them, or throwing your car away because it ran out of gas--trivial issue, easily remedied.
Besides that, McDonald's corporate considers the service temperature of their food to be deadly serious. Complaining to the management with cold food and receipt in hand would almost certainly generate an overly obsequious response sufficient to satisfy even the grumpiest of customers. If not, going to management above the restaurant would probably get everyone at the restaurant re-trained right quick.
Leaving aside the rest of the discussion, and not even addressing if throwing it out was good/fine, this line stood out to me.
I often feel that temperature changes the taste. More obvious in ranges > 5 degrees, but still noticeable at that range. Given how subjective taste is, it's hard to prove, though I'm sure some neurologist has hooked a pig or chimp up to try and measure the "taste" reaction. My two questions for you are:
* Do you feel temperature has no real (direct) effect on taste, or only in larger swings than 5 degrees
* Do you have any reason for your above statement than your own experiences? (not a criticism, curiousity)
But, I think his comment was changing the temperature is easy, and having food get cold does not change the taste after reheating. However, there is a large food safety issue with how long food stays between 40f and 140f, which is probably the root cause of this policy.
Also, maybe I'm the only one, but I think (some) food tastes entirely different after a trip through the microwave.
Off-topic: How can HuffPo not know the difference between effect and affect?
In my mouth, flavor is the dominant component. Temperature only matters if the food has fats or volatiles with a phase transition temperature between 25 and 40 degC. If food is too hot, I taste burning heat instead of flavor, and when it's too cold, the ice crystals numb my taste buds. But in between, my perception of the flavor is more affected by chemical composition than temperature. Room-temperature french fries are fine. You can chew them up without burning your mouth. Refrigerated fries aren't quite as good, because the fats solidify and the flavoring volatiles don't vaporize as readily. So pop them in the microwave, and they're good again.
This is as untrue as saying temperature doesn't affect flavor; cooling/reheating cycles affect flavor and texture of food.
You ever eaten a microwaved hamburger? :)
Plus, see other remarks here about how 40% of food goes to waste for various reasons.
Also, the quicker you eat it, the less you have to think about it; and most of McD's food items do not bear much thinking about.
Personally, in my local McDonald's I can put an order without talking to a human, pick it up and buy some weed on the way out.
Is that representative of every McD? No.
On a similar note, I hate the "exploit" of "Ask for fries with no salt to get them to make you a fresh batch of fries" when you can just ask them to make you a fresh batch of fries. Potatoes are about $6 per hundred pounds; they could not care less about making you a fresh batch if it means chucking the old fries out.
The reality is most of the food McDonald's serves nowadays is served cold. It's an unfortunate side effect of moving away from actually grilling meat to just warming it in trays.