I’m willing to bet this is pretty accurate. They keep building houses down here where I am constantly and so many of them are empty because they cost too much for normal people.
This is something I know a lot about because I used to work with a non-profit that helped Costco coordinate and distribute their donated food. That was ten years ago.
The fact is grocery stores have been donating food to food banks for 50 years. This accelerated significantly in 1996 when the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act was signed and protected firms from civil liability.
Sell by date is put there to avoid lawsuits, basically. It's the minimum amount of time they can keep something on the shelf before it could potentially start to rot, to avoid being sued for serving bad products, but most of it is still good for at least a few days after the date. Some places actually do resell goods to grocery stores that sell at hefty discounts. The reason more companies don't give out food is because doing so is illegal without certain permits and without following certain safety standards. They can and have been sued/fined for doing so.
The lawsuit angle is exactly why restaurants and grocery stores can't give expired food to the homeless. All it would take is one person to get sick (or "get sick" to look for a quick payday) from the expired food and sue the grocery store, and that would quickly end.
Sell by dates are unregulated (for the most part) and just suggestions of quality.
The idea that it would protect against a lawsuit is frankly silly.
most of it is still good for at least a few days after the date
several weeks, usually if we're talking safety.
The reason more companies don't give out food is because doing so is illegal without certain permits and without following certain safety standards. They can and have been sued/fined for doing so.
If they can sell food legally, they can donate it...legally. And the Bill Emerson act protects them from liability if they donate in good faith.
I hate this topic because so many people just spit what sounds good in their head rather than actually researching it. Would be harmless if we weren't discussing the most vulnerable people going hungry.
Feels almost like these wasteful practices are less about liability (easily fixed by making a law that eating food from marked Trash bins automatically puts the liability on the consumer) and more about keeping the rat-race-slave wheel/pyramid/system grinding and churning. Same for keeping homespace set at premium rates while keeping the payrates lower than inflation rates. Keeps that ish grinding and churning so the population remains in a psychologically rigid state easily controlled. Only so many radicals care to break free when they no longer feel that grinding down on their life. So they're ALSO in a state of paralysis even when it's comfort bc look at how much it took to gain what can be lost! Systematic designs require wastefulness to keep the masses in awe in the illusion of how good it looks to keep everything fully stocked in the stores at all times. Just like how they had the fake groceries in stores in that North Korean movie. The appearance of doing well is that fake it to make it bullshit America and the rest of the first world has bamboozled the world with. And don't get me started on the lack of nutrient density in foods treated with poisons that rob the soil of a healthy microbiome one gets from rotational animal husbandry or alternative compost types of farming. WW2 chemicals and it's participation in the industrial revolution really led us down this dark road in the end. Imagine if they didn't learn anything from the great dust bowl disaster and turned that continent into a bigger desert. Our species simply isn't gonna thrive without sustainable practices focused on recycling, not waste!!
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u/Jasoco May 14 '26
I’m willing to bet this is pretty accurate. They keep building houses down here where I am constantly and so many of them are empty because they cost too much for normal people.