Inspired By The Flylady

I am a part of the Flylady group. I received a message today called "Food For Thought - No More Hunger" and she was talking about how much food is wasted by grocery stores and I thought I would respond and tell her my story. And then I realized what a great blog entry it would be . . .


Talking about wasted food. I used to work at a major national grocery store for 8 years when I was in university. I was also volunteering at an inner-city youth drop in centre. I used to be one of the ones to sift throw the dairy shelves and throw out “old” dairy items and at the end of the day clear out the leftover bakery items . The drop in I volunteered at served snacks to the children and it didn’t take very long before it started to make me sick to have to throw away good food because of a date. It was also this stores policy not to mark down items. They figured that then people would wait and only by the markdowns. They were so bent on throwing things away they got locked garbage bins so that street people couldn’t take the food out of the trash.


I bugged my manager for about 2 years. There were meetings with me and with the directors of the drop in. She wanted to make sure I wasn’t (or that the drop in wasn’t) reselling the food for profit. I tried to talk her into donating directly to the food bank. I knew from inquiring hypothetically that they would gladly make regular pickups at the store. I had big dreams of all the stores in city eventually donating food to their local non-profit organization. My managers answer to that was an emphatic no! She was worried about liability of someone eating something and perhaps getting sick and suing the store. So in order to make this deal happen, no one could know where the food came from. When she said that, I knew I was starting to soften her up.


Anyhow after constant hounding, she finally wore down. She tried to make the rules as inconvenient for me personally. Only I could pick up the food and only at 10:45 pm at night. Even if the shelves were broke down in the morning, it would sit (sometimes) in the cooler until night. Some of it went bad but the other employees that silently backed what I was trying to do would squeeze as much in the cooler as they could without getting in the way of stuff that had to be moved.


After about 6 months, I guess she realized these strict rules were actually hindering the way things worked at the store. I guess she figured that I would give up but I didn’t. Sometimes I took more stuff than we could use and in those instances we just gave it away. We also got food from a food bank so no one ever knew it was this store. The best part was we didn’t get a lot of dairy from the food bank. We were able to make sure that the kids had yogurts in their lunch and milk for their families. And we even started to make pizzas because we had cheese – it was to expensive to buy! So she ended up actually giving me a letter on company letterhead and the directors could do the pickups as long as they had the letter. After about 4 years she transferred to another store. I am sure the then ragged letter would have still been sufficient but by that time, I was working full time at the drop-in and wasn’t familiar with the new manager. I didn’t want to fight with the new guy and I had proved my point and helped feed an entire neighbourhood. (After a while, the stock boys would save anything that was damaged and headed for the garbage so we got pans and measuring cups and all sorts of stuff).


So in the spirit of Flylady. In North America over a million children go to bed hungry every night. Pressure your stores and try to force them to do the right thing. In this time of greenness and social responsibility, there shouldn't even be a question.