In that case, they should be replaced frequently. I have seen that in Chinese restaurants. Normally it is hot mustard and sweet and sour sauce.
It’s illegal, but I’m sure that food recycling goes on behind closed kitchen doors, if human nature can produce acts such as this, then you can bet there are quite a few unscrupulous chefs out there saving money.
Ketchup refilling is all but universal, at least here in the US. If you go into diners late at night, you can see them doing it. It’s not something thats frowned upon, here, and giving each diner a brand-new bottle of Heinz would be stupid from an economic standpoint. I think we should draw a line between this and any sort of “food recycling”, which I would suspect is rare. Why bother with it? Complimentary bread is cheap, salad ingrediants are cheap, etc.
As for “I saw it on 20/20” or any other crap-journalism show…well, if you want to believe that they’re documenting what goes on “in every restaurant”, go right ahead. Sensationalism sells.
So are salt and pepper, but nobody rants about shakers being left on table as communal booger vaults.
Communal Booger Vaults – band name?
Here’s my incredibly foul food recycling story.
I used to work at a bakery/cafe in Durham, NC. My first day on the job, the guy training me encouraged me to try out a pastry. “Hmm…are the bear claws good?” I asked.
He got this weird look on his face, stammered for a moment, and finally said, “Here. Come with me.”
I followed him to the prep room, where he opened a cabinet. The top shelves of the cabinet were filled with plastic-wrapped trays of cookies ready to be put out. In the bottom of the cabinet, there was a five-gallon plastic bucket, labeled, “Bear Claw Bucket.”
There were broken cookies and a mishmash of other pastries inside there. He explained to me that when cookies or pastries got too old to sell, or fell on the floor en masse, or were broken in transit, or suffered any other mishap, we were to throw them in the bear claw bucket. Once it was full, it was taken down the street to the bakery building, where the bucket’s contents were ground up, mixed with cinnamon and cocoa and sugar, and used to fill the bear claws.
Naturally, I never tried a bear claw. But it gets better.
One of the women I worked with decided to transfer to the bakery facility – but after a week, she was back in the cafe part. She explained that one day she’d gone into a walk-in freezer and discovered nearly two dozen full bear claw buckets in there, growing fuzzy green mold. She’d thrown them all out; when the manager found out what she’d done, he’d nearly fired her.
The best part of the whole deal was a Family Circus cartoon somebody had taped to the front of the cash register, where customers could see it. Billy was sitting at the breakfast table, with an expression of utter disgust on his face. A pastry was in front of him, and he was saying, “Bear claws? Yuck!”
Our sentiments exactly.
Daniel
Bear claws, yuk – Indeed!
I know Wendy’s uses burned or unsold hamburgers for their chili, but that’s not really a big deal because that’s pretty much what you’d do at home. It’s not like they serve you the burger, then go out after you leave to see if there’s any left to use for chili, heh heh.
When I worked for various theater chains we’d bag up the leftover popcorn every night and put it back in the popper the next day with a couple fresh batches mixed in. You couldn’t tell much difference though, and the day old stuff actually tasted better because it wasn’t as oily tasting. (My personal opinion.) That was SOP at every theater chain I worked for. The Health Department said it was no problem as long as the corn was bagged and put away every night, you couldn’t leave it in the popper with all sorts of cooties falling on it.
Well I take everything 20-20/dateline/other news mags tongue in cheek, they tend to do a little sensationalizing, and like to prey on public fears & human interest for ratings. However, I do believe this happens, but from working in the restaraunt biz its rare. Usually those places are known to be bad (employees talk), and people know to stay away. Lots of these places you can just tell by their unproffesional ‘dirty’ nature. I worked at a touristy seafood place in VA. Beach (the locals know to avoid most touristy seafood places) and they had us recycling the free bread rolls. I also got paid under the table, got sick off their overly buttered food that they were gracious enough to give me… Even with that experience I worked at and know people who have worked at many other places that are much more clean.
I know for a fact that several Mexican restaurants in my area will recycle uneaten and unbroken Nacho chips back into nacho baskets for the next group of customers so long as the “recycled” chips are not too stale to be detected.
I worked in various restaurants for years, and I never worked at one where they recycled anything. This includes small town places, fast food, chain restaurants, all sorts of places. None of them ever did that. Never saw them use food that was bad, or anything else that would harm the food. I’m sure that is done some places, but its not as common as some people think.
My mother used to work for a charity called Island Harvest which picked up day old donuts and other uneaten food stuffs, and delivered them to homeless shelters and other charities. Of course, they didn’t give stuff that wasn’t safe or was/could spoil/ed.
My son has been known to lick the top of the ketchup bottle. Both times he did this I called the waiter over right away and apologized profusely and gave them the bottle with an explanation. I hope they got rid of it, but I can’t say for sure.
I worked at a Mexican restaurant in college. Yes, we did “marry” the ketchups (and mustards and A1s) but we would never have recycled any food items that had been taken out on the floor. This includes tortilla chips or anything else. I worked there for 4 years, it never even came up or was discussed as a possibility, just wouldn’t have happened.
The one I wonder about is the hot mustard at Chinese restaurants. It’s always sitting there next to the duck sauce, yet hardly anyone ever touches it. It would be so very easy to just reuse it – who would notice?
Around here, even the mustard comes in pour bottles. Those are only seen in restaurants, presumably so that discerning diners can’t stick their dirty knives into the bottles.
When I was a kid, I once asked my sister, “why don’t the ketchup bottles in restaurants have lids?” She said, “so they don’t get stolen.” My genius reply: “Who would steal ketchup lids?”
sigh
Bottom line–if refilled ketchup bothers you, don’t use it. I doubt most restaurants reuse much food. Saving unserved food (cookies for bearclaws, bread for breadcrumbs, etc) doesn’t bother me, and I would imagine most, if not all, restaurants do that. Today’s unsold roast chicken becomes tomorrow’s chicken salad, etc… But I wouldn’t think most restaurants recycle food from plates. The cost savings isn’t that great, and the fines would be fierce.
You get food poisoning often after big dinners out, Griffin?
Where I worked at, we poured the emptiest bottles into the fullest bottles, as this process would get you the most full bottles the fastest and let you throw the empty ones out. That would also mean that the oldest ketchup was at the top of the full bottle, so it got used first.
Not that I’d worry about ketchup – if you saw the number of them we through out each night, and the number of new bottles we opened every day, you’re pretty safe. From what I understand, it doesn’t putrify within two or three days.
We never reused anything else. I even threw out unopened plastic packages of crackers and coffee creamers just because they had been on a customer’s plate.
You really should worry more about the waiters stealing a fry off your plate (or the big bowl/bucket of fries) while waiting for the rest of the table’s food to come up. 
Ugh…threw, not through. I should restrict posting to when I’m awake.
This is the one. The one that happens most often I mean.
I have one brother who’s a chef and has worked in several different restaurants and another brother who’s worked around them in varying capacities for a couple of decades. Neither one of them has ever seen places that would reuse food previously on the customer’s plate. It was either thrown away or eaten by the kitchen staff. (Seems quite a few of them take maryjane breaks throughout the night. :)) Of course, food that didn’t sell one night was stored and reused in a different dish the next night, usually as a special, but never food that had gone out of the kitchen.
I actually work at a chinese restuarant, I will tell you right now that it would be practically impossible to recycle the hot mustard (aside from the fact that it would be nasty). First, it almost always gets soiled in someway or another. Most of the time sweet and sour sauce spills into it. Second, is more popular then you seem to believe. More often then not, the little dish of it will be empty by the end of the meal. We don’t give people enough to bother rescuing anyways. We always just throw it away. Same with sweet and sour sauce and plum sauce.
Mmmmm…strange spit. Yjm!@
I worked in my uncle’s restaurant all through high school. In there, every night we would combine the empty ketchup bottles to make new ones, then put out real new ones on all of the empty tables. We went through ketchup fast enough that I have a hard time seeing a problem with this. Any food left on tables was tossed out. If you ordered something then changed your mind, or we made the wrong thing, or for whatever reason we had something made that didn’t get sold, it would go onto a table in the back (out of sight) and when we got a quick break we would eat it. No used food of any kind was ever recycled.
I also worked at Mickey D’s (one of many crap jobs that paid for my college education). Whoever cleaned the tables tossed any food remaining out there. Any mistakes or food that sat too long that never made it to customers was carefully counted and thrown into a scrap bucket, and got tossed into the trash at the end of the night. The nice managers at closing might let you grab a big mac instead of just tossing it, provided you wolfed it down quickly so you didn’t slow down the night’s cleanup work. Again, while mistakes and leftovers might get eaten by employees, nothing was ever recycled. And, as you know, Mickey D’s uses those little ketchup packages so that wasn’t an issue. With any fast food place, the food is all pre-packaged so it’s not easy to recycle things into the food even if you wanted to.
My final experience in the food industry was in a pizza shop. It was the same deal. Mistakes might get eaten by the staff, but nothing was ever recycled.
There may be incidences like what others have posted, but I think they are by far the exception rather than the rule. If you want to stay in business for any length of time you better do things by the book or else the health inspector is going to catch up with you sooner or later.
One good thing about working in the food industry is that you really appreciate your good job once you get out of college. 