Food Waste
I'm strongly in favor of paying for fast food by its weight, like you can do at some salad bars (but hardly anywhere else). Being able to order only the amount you actually want should be a more widely available option, as well as the option to order half-portions or share a plate. If more food places operated on this template, we could each pay only for the amount of food we can reasonably eat, and significantly less food would be wasted in a hungry world.
This morning I was out on a work errand in Downtown Crossing, and I stopped into the food court to get some Indian food for lunch. The takeout box contained more food than I could have eaten in two sittings. By the time I was a quarter-way through I was full, and by half-way through I had chicken tikka masala jetting out my ears. But because I had more errands and the rest of the workday at the office, it wasn't practical to schlep the gloppy box through all of that and then home.
I just sat there poking in the leftover food -- a full meal, really -- and thinking about the waste of this perfectly good food that would fill the belly of a hungry person. And of all the other people all over America who can't finish the oversized meal they had to buy because it's one-ginormous-size-fits-all in this country.
I dine-out more often than I dine-in, and bringing home doggie bags is very seldom practical, especially since I don't have a car and am usually not heading directly home after a meal. When I think, over the course of my life, how much food was left on my thousands of plates because the portion was insanely too large for me, and when I imagine it all together and fresh and edible, it could keep a village feasting for weeks. If I think of all the money I would have saved if I'd been allowed to order half-portions, I could afford to travel to that village and deliver the food myself.
Worse are memories of when I was a young person working in restaurants, and the mortifying food waste that regularly happens there. Like at Friendly's (which is anything but) which does *not* donate day-old or surplus food to homeless shelters, for "liability" reasons. I was heartsick when I was forced to dump two gallons of perfectly good chowder down the sink, particularly when I was critically impoverished and nearly homeless myself. At Wendy's, I was glad when it was my turn to take whole bags of burgers that had been sitting more than 30 minutes to the dumpster. That way I'd know where in the dumpster they were when I got off my shift.
So, I left my still half-full container of Indian food on top of the food court trash bin, for homeless or freegans or whoever to take if they wanted. If I'd been able to order half as much, I'd have more money and less food would end up in the garbage, which this box probably did.
This morning I was out on a work errand in Downtown Crossing, and I stopped into the food court to get some Indian food for lunch. The takeout box contained more food than I could have eaten in two sittings. By the time I was a quarter-way through I was full, and by half-way through I had chicken tikka masala jetting out my ears. But because I had more errands and the rest of the workday at the office, it wasn't practical to schlep the gloppy box through all of that and then home.
I just sat there poking in the leftover food -- a full meal, really -- and thinking about the waste of this perfectly good food that would fill the belly of a hungry person. And of all the other people all over America who can't finish the oversized meal they had to buy because it's one-ginormous-size-fits-all in this country.
I dine-out more often than I dine-in, and bringing home doggie bags is very seldom practical, especially since I don't have a car and am usually not heading directly home after a meal. When I think, over the course of my life, how much food was left on my thousands of plates because the portion was insanely too large for me, and when I imagine it all together and fresh and edible, it could keep a village feasting for weeks. If I think of all the money I would have saved if I'd been allowed to order half-portions, I could afford to travel to that village and deliver the food myself.
Worse are memories of when I was a young person working in restaurants, and the mortifying food waste that regularly happens there. Like at Friendly's (which is anything but) which does *not* donate day-old or surplus food to homeless shelters, for "liability" reasons. I was heartsick when I was forced to dump two gallons of perfectly good chowder down the sink, particularly when I was critically impoverished and nearly homeless myself. At Wendy's, I was glad when it was my turn to take whole bags of burgers that had been sitting more than 30 minutes to the dumpster. That way I'd know where in the dumpster they were when I got off my shift.
So, I left my still half-full container of Indian food on top of the food court trash bin, for homeless or freegans or whoever to take if they wanted. If I'd been able to order half as much, I'd have more money and less food would end up in the garbage, which this box probably did.