“The reuse of partially consumed food by restaurants is generally not permitted due to health code regulations.”
COLORADO SPRINGS — One posh buffet chain in this city, with bars of sumptuous food for diners daily, throws away the unconsumed food after closing hours at the end of each weekday or during weekends — a familiar scene in restaurants throughout the United States.
Official sources say restaurants in the United States throw away between 25,000 and 75,000 pounds of food per year on average, which they say is equivalent to a single restaurant producing enough food waste to fill 94 percent of a semi-truck.
This is far below the figures provided by the National Restaurant Association, which says restaurants generate an estimated 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste annually in the United States.
There is a reason for this: Restaurants must follow strict health regulations to ensure food is safe for customers. This includes throwing away food that has been returned by customers, or food that has been left out for too long.
These rules, our sources say, are aimed at ensuring that food served to customers is safe and free from potential contaminants that could lead to food-borne illnesses.
Restaurants, we are told, are legally required to throw away any food left uneaten by paying customers, which ensures there is no risk of contamination or health hazards — but this also means perfectly good ingredients and meals end up in the garbage boxes.
We understand some restaurants which cooked food with fresh ingredients but were not consumed during the day sell the same to some restaurants for a cut price or give them to their employees to take home to ensure the food is not wasted.
Restaurants are also required to follow strict food safety protocols, which typically preclude them from reusing leftovers from customers’ plates.
There are also stores which throw away good food. Profit margins on perishable foods are so high stores would rather overstock so they would not miss even one sale.
The end result of these: tons of food going uneaten before it spoils and perfectly good food getting thrown out.
Sources say there are other reasons why there is so much food waste in the United States, which include misunderstanding date labels, with consumers throwing away food before it is spoiled because they don’t understand the difference between “sell-by,” “use-by,” and “best-buy” dates.
Sources say food wasted usually ends up in a landfill, where it creates a greenhouse gas called methane, which is 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.
This is particularly concerning since, according to experts, food is the largest component of landfills which makes up 24 percent of waste.
At the retail level, equipment malfunction, like faulty cold storage, over-ordering and culling of blemished produce can result in food loss.
Consumers also contribute to food loss when they buy or cook more than they need and choose to throw out the extras.
Instance, since as far back as March 2020, one popular food chain here and in the Philippines — McDonald’s — has provided 79 tons of surplus product to FairShare, equating to 188,099 meals, according to official sources.
In 2017, the USDA sent a memo to several food relief programs stating “to ensure optimum quality, donated foods that have passed (best-by, best-if-used-by, or sell-by) dates should not be distributed to program recipients” although this is not a law and does not regulate the distribution of items in food banks.
A food bank is a warehouse that collects and stores food from food donations and food drives and a food pantry, which gets its food from food banks, is where people, including homeless, can get free food.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has counted 653,104 homeless Americans in its annual point-in-time report, which measures homelessness across the United States on a single night each winter.
That is 12.1 percent increase from the same report in 2022.
The Food Bank and its partners — which dot every state in the US — work together, according to official sources, to break down the stigma pof asking for food and nutrition insecurity, as hunger is indiscriminate and can impact anyone regardless of their background, socioeconomic status or education level.
A great bulk of the distributed food items in food banks are canned soup, canned fruit, canned vegetables, canned stew, canned fish, canned beans, pasta and rice (most prefer brown rice).
Interestingly, many who line up in food banks are working Filipinos — the outlets only ask for names and don’t require identification cards and how many are in the household — who hoard goods and send the same to their families back home in the Philippines.
Food banks solicit and rely on large donations from local and national businesses and nonprofit organizations — their donations to be included for their tax exemptions.
These are often in the form of surpluses from food manufacturers, retailers and growers which include unsold bread and produce as well as manufacturing overruns.
