One bad apple spoils the whole bunch, right?
What do you think, does all this food look like trash to you?
Now I’m all for reclaiming free food, but there were multiple moldy strawberries in this 1 pound container of berries, and picking out the one or two good strawberries just wasn’t worth it to me. Mold on food is a bad thing, {unless we’re talking about cheese, which we’re not} and I certainly don’t want to get anyone in my family sick. So I decided to toss all the free strawberries this week on to the compost heap rather than picking through them.
But tossing one tomato to save 3 others, well, that seemed totally acceptable to me.
I’m not sure if there are rules within grocery stores prohibiting them from removing damaged produce from packaged items and reselling them by the pound, {rather than by the container} but I’m guessing there is.
I can totally understand how doing so would mess with inventory controls, but still, tossing out 3 good tomatoes just because one of them is bad, seems like such a waste.
And the bigger crime?
Tossing out perfectly good food that is one date past its so called “expiration date.”
Food waste in America totally stinks. So if you get the change to save just a little bit of it, go for it.
~Mavis
Would you like to see what else we have brought home over the past year?
Head on over HERE to read all the past stories and to see all the pictures.
If you have just stumbled upon this series and are wondering how I got all this food for free, you’ll want to read this story first.
Lisa says
You did great this week! Going to start getting reclaimed food again this week. It was too hard to get up at 5:30am in the summer, but now we’ll be getting up at that time for school.
carol says
Thanks for continuing to educate us on the travesty of food waste. It really is unbelievable. Wish everyone could read this!
Veronica says
I have gone to our local farmer’s market twice and one of the farmers gives me the bruised produce. He says he just throws it out or composts it when he gets home and would rather someone else feed it to chickens, or kids in my case. Last week I got enough produce to can 8 pints of diced tomatoes, 12 pints of sliced peaches, 4 eggplants for baba ganoush, a cucumber to eat the baba ganoush with, a pint of cherry tomatoes, about 20 plums I don’t know what to do with yet, 6 purple bell peppers, a couple pears, and a nectarine. It was about 4 bushels worth of food and I threw out about a quart of bruises once the produce was trimmed. So excited for my little family on a tight budget! Thanks for the inspiration!
Preppy Pink Crocodile says
I’ve yet to be brave enough to ask at the grocery store (plus…I don’t {yet} have chickens). But my grocery store (normal store- not local and fancy pants- just regular) usually has a little basket in the corner of the fancy cheese case. It’s there about 50% of the time I am in the store. And in it they have cheeses that are a day or two away from expiring. Cheese normally priced at $6-12 or more. And they are marked down to just $0.99! When I find types I like (which is nearly every type if I am being honest…I love cheese!), I will buy all that they have and freeze them. It’s so fun to get such a luxury item at just under a buck! It’s not free but it’s still pretty fun.
KK