Donating leftovers to the homeless and the poor is one obvious way. Although dangerous since it’s a given they’d slip in actually spoiled or contaminated food.
Actually, does giving the food to animals count as “waste”? Because that would be a nearly unlimited sink for food, with logistics being the main problem.
I guess I should have limited my topic to urban/suburban areas==obviously rural areas are efficient consumers, either by feeding scraps to animals or composting,
yes, but you know even dedicated community meal providers or groups that want to serve the homeless have to go through hoops just to do that, from health department, police, neighborhood objections, and they are equipped for it, whereas restaurants are not, especially with health department rules and fear of legal liability
People in urban and suburban areas compost as well.
As for the grocery store butcher section, in my experience, stuff gets discounted as it approaches the sell by date.
I’d like to see some real data about restaurants. They serve a lot of meals and the amount of food wasted per meal is what matters.
From this paper:
Researchers observed that 4% to 10% of food purchased by restaurant leaders never gets to the customer totaling approximately $1000 of the company’s revenue per 3.3 lb of food waste. Approximately 31% to 40% of the food served to customers never gets consumed.
(cites listed in paper, I removed them to improve readability)
Of course, it’s a lot easier to suggest that restaurants save or donate unused food (however feasible it is) than to insist that all restaurant customers clean their plates.
Also, meat keeps for a lot longer than one day. So yes, some of what’s taken in in the evening will just be put out again the next morning.
That being said, the places i buy meat are often sparse in the evening, as the stuff they cut for today sells out. I’ve even talked with the butchers about what days they get deliveries so i can buy some items that disappear fast.
Yes, at least in the five or six countries I am familiar with. Mandatory reporting on food waste for large companies is being phased in. And legislation may follow.
Generally there seems to be less waste the poorer the country is, even though refrigeration may be less ubiquitous in poorer countries. The higher the ratio between food cost and income, the less fussy people are about the visual aspects of food and the less variety they demand, particularly food that must be imported or transported across long distances.
That doesn’t preclude discounting the meat if the sell-by or best-by date is tomorrow or the next day.
Of course not, and i see discounted “must use soon” meat for sale somewhat frequently. (“Manager’s special!”) But it’s not as if everything left on the shelf at the end of the day is unfit to sell at regular prices tomorrow. A lot of it will be completely fine.
I’ll often look at the “use by” dates and pick something fresher if I’m buying to use in a few days, and just take what’s on top if I’m going to go home and cook it right away.
This is really the answer from what I can tell. If restaurants and home cooks had to pay 4x the amount for food than they do currently, they’d use every bit of it, and people would happily pay a little less for ugly/blemished produce and tougher cuts of meat, etc.
I think the mistake or logical flaw is looking at hunger/food insecurity in the community, and then looking at food waste, and somehow tying the two together. That assumes that wasting food at restaurants is somehow taking it away from those who need it, which as best as I can tell is not the case. There’s not that sort of tightness in our food supply. There’s enough to go around even with the waste, and it’s really cheap compared to just about everything else.
Rather what’s happening is that food is being distributed to where the producers and distributors and retailers can all make the most money from it- even if a restaurant wastes 20% of what it buys, if they still make a profit, everyone down the supply chain does too. In fact, the more they waste, the more down-chain entities make.
Hunger/food insecurity on the other hand, isn’t really a function of absolute food availability. It’s more a matter of distribution (grocery store owners don’t want to open stores in the ghetto where theft and crime are high and profits are low) and/or they’re functions of income- food is available, but people can’t afford to pay for it. Which again, isn’t an issue with the cost in today’s United States, but rather a situation where the jobs avaialble to those people don’t pay enough for them to buy the food. Or it’s possible that some of them spend poorly and can’t afford food and other stuff at the same time.
That doesn’t address food wasted by people at home. What people eat at home may be preceded by waste at the grocery store and prepared food processing while restaurants buy their food more in unfinished wholesale conditions and quantities. In addition foods (and grocery stores also) contribute heavily to food banks which is impractical for most individual households.
Well, that wasn’t what was asked 
I saw an article elsewhere that pegged restaurant waste at about 40% of the total and home waste around 43%. Of course, there’s a lot more homes than restaurants. The remainder was waste during farming, industrial processing and distribution (which I assume includes grocery sales).
I knew a guy who had a pig farm and they had a side business picking up (nearly?) expired milk products from grocery stores to feed to the pigs.
In formal reporting of food waste (retailer’s perspective) there are levels:
1 Ends up in landfill
2 Composted
3 Fed to animals
4 Donated to food bank/pantry/kitchen (from which you may have 1, 2 & 3)
5 Sold to consumer in “short coded” state (more likely to end up in 1 & 2)
6 Sold to consumer in full code (less likely to end up in 1 & 2)
This is an oversimplification.
Right, I wasn’t specific. I asked about restaurants following some posts about the large amount of food restaurants waste. I don’t think restaurants are waste much unused food coming directly from food suppliers compared to homemade meals that combine grocery store waste with consumer waste.
Getting back to the OP, I agree with the conclusion and because waste is everywhere, not just focused on individuals or particular industries, there isn’t much that can be done about it.
Well, we do need to get more food to those who don’t have enough. I’m not sure reducing our household or even restaurant waste will help accomplish that though.
If not for the excess production called ‘waste’ it would be much more difficult to provide food for those who don’t have enough.
Reducing household waste potentially saves money, which could be donated to hunger charities. It’s not especially likely but it could be a thing.