I travel a bit, and when traveling, go out to eat at restaurants.
Restaurants have enormous portions, and although we try to order to minimize food waste, it happens.
If I was at home, I’d take it home and it eat the next day for lunch, but when traveling, it never gets eaten.
Years ago, I was carrying a doggy bag back to the hotel, and was hit up for money by some homeless guy. I didn’t give him any money, but I did give him my leftovers.
I’ve done it multiple times since, and have never had a negative response.
To me it seems like a logical win, win.
But, sometimes I am oblivious to subtleties. Is it insulting? Is it obnoxious? Is there some reason I shouldn’t do it?
I do it. People seem glad to get the food, so I don’t really care if someone else thinks it’s obnoxious.
Throwing away food others may want is obnoxious.
I always make sure to get plasticware and napkins in case the person doesn’t have any.
While 9 out of 10 Yakuza approve of suffocation by plastic bag*, I protest it as an inhumane treatment of the homeless condition.
-reads OP-
Oh, that’s different.
Ok, leftovers as a gift. Q: What if they are allergic to something in your leftovers. By giving it to them, wouldn’t that make you responsible?
There may be a liability issue there that only a lawyer licensed in the state where this is to happen is qualified to answer.
Anecdote: You know those hot baked chickens that most supermarkets seem to sell these days? I walked into a market on the eve before Thanksgiving a few years ago, just before closing time, and saw a clerk putting all the leftover hot chickens into a shopping cart – but taking that carboard carriers off, folding them, and putting those into a separate stack.
I asked her what she was doing. She said, saving the carriers to re-use the next day. What about the chickens, I asked? (There were about a dozen of them.) Oh, we dump those. WTF?
She explained that stores used to give all those leftover chickens to some organizations to distribute to the homeless. But one day, someone got salmonella or sumptin’ and sued. So now, no supermarkets want to give their leftover chickens to the homeless any more. And the clerk told me, it’s too much trouble to refrigerate them to sell cold the next day. And charity organizations that might otherwise collect leftover chickens aren’t doing it because they don’t have proper refrigerator trucks to drive around.
I think throwing away all those chickens, while people are starving in the parks and alleys, is a crime against humanity.
I’ve seen people digging food out of trash cans, of course.
Here’s a fun example: For several years (1981-1984) I lived in a shack (sort of) adjacent to a very large public beach-side park in Honolulu just a couple miles from Waikiki. There were lots of concession stands that sold hot plate lunches. (Paper plates, of course.) Tourists bought these, and typically ate half, and threw the rest away. (I suspect it was the Hawaiian-style noodles, which were very good and had some kind of brownish sauce on them, but looked like a pile of maggots. It was quite a long time before I dared tasting them.)
So there were a few not-exactly-homeless vagrants who lived around the outskirts of that park. I call them “not-exactly-homeless” because that park, and some surrounding areas, was their home. In Hawaii, you can live outdoors quite comfortably all year round.
These guys ate (at least on nice days), and I think they ate very very well, by digging out all the freshly half-eaten plate lunches that the tourists threw away. (I suspect the pickens were slimmer on rainy days, when fewer tourists were around.) One day, I saw two of them (one of whom, at least, was a well known and crazy regular in the area, known as “Bonzai”) eating lunch together. They were sitting in a nearby parking lot, eating off of “plates” that were actually hubcaps they found somewhere. They were having quite a handsome banquet, too, from all the tourists’ left-overs.
Come to think of it, what are the liability laws surrounding this circumstance in other countries? If someone gets sick or dies from food donated this way, is it tough luck? I know other countries have universal health care, but still.
When food donations are made to non-profits then there is limited liability under the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act. That doesn’t exactly help with liability in donating a half eaten lunch to a homeless person but should cover the supermarket in giving unsold roasted chickens to a homeless shelter.
The donating party is still liable for gross negligence, but that is a standard that should be easy for restaurants and grocers to meet since they regularly prepare and store foods in accordance with health and safety laws.
What the store clerk told me seemed to imply that the feed-the-homeless organizations, who might be the obvious candidates to receive such donations, couldn’t get involved because they don’t have the necessary facilities, like refrigerator trucks to transport the chickens, or refrigerator storehouses to keep them.
One might think that each night’s donations could be distributed immediately to local homeless people that night, before the chickens even get cold. I guess it all takes longer than that.
Stores tend to close late in the evening anyway. So maybe donations couldn’t get distributed until the following day. And the store clerk told me they couldn’t keep the chickens overnight in their stores because they don’t have the refrigerator space for them. (Huh? We’re only talking about a dozen chickens or so.)
Sounded to me like, just nobody wants to deal with it.
Coincidentally, when I was out to lunch this past weekend with a formerly homeless friend of mine, we were talking about this a bit. He commented that you get to know the schedule for your local grocery stores, so you know when to hit the dumpster in the back.