Recently I watched a documentary called "Dive! Living Off America's Waste" on Netflix, it's about this guy and his friends that basically get all of their groceries from the dumpsters behind grocery stores. I've seen lots of documentaries and it may be my favorite way to ingest facts and ideas but this was not by any measure the greatest one I have ever seen. Still, I guess it was effective because it really got me thinking. The main claim that they made was that the government and businesses need to do more to get this perfectly good food that is going to be thrown away into the hands of people that need it. Hippy crap. Every word. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to say that helping to feed the hungry isn't a worthy goal. The problem is that they were blaming grocery stores for not making more of an effort to get this food out to the food banks. I don't recall them ever stating it explicitly but they implied that these companies just didn't care about people and that it wasn't important to them. I don't believe this is the case, companies are run by people and at least some of those people must be capable of empathy.
In 1996 Bill Clinton signed the Good Samaritan Act which greatly reduced potential liability for grocery stores that want to donate food that they are no longer able to sell. Even the hippies admitted that donations did increase after that but the truth is, not all food is obviously spoiled and a lot of things need to be looked at carefully by someone who knows what they are doing in order to insure that they don't accidentally give somebody food poisoning and do more harm than good. Asking the companies to take responsibility for sorting and delivering this food is unreasonable. After all, the end goal of these companies is to make a profit and as it stands the average grocery makes $0.03 on every dollar. Making sure the maximum amount of food reaches a food bank would mean more hours worked for employees and thus increased costs for the company.
With the recent recession donations have been down at food banks across the nation so the idea of getting this food to the people that need it has been intriguing me. The responsibility should rest on the various charitable organizations that are in need of the food. They should go out to the grocery stores and find what they need themselves, but I'm not entirely convinced that this isn't already being done so before I rush to some hasty conclusions I decided it would be prudent to write an email to the Utah Food Bank and see what's up. I'm not really sure where I'm going with all of this, if I get an positive answer back then I guess that will be the end of it but if it turns out that there is as big a problem as the documentary claimed then I have no idea what I would do about it. I certainly don't have the time or resources to sort through tons of food from local grocery stores and then take it to the food bank if they are not doing so already and I don't know how I would convince them to do it themselves because this idea isn't exactly new.
So until I hear back from the Utah Food Bank, what are your thoughts guys? Maybe you would like to watch the documentary too or do some digging of your own because I think the whole thing is fascinating and I'd be very interested to figure out how all this fits together. I haven't ruled out the possibility that I'm just being dumb and this is a non-issue of course but it's fun to think about non the less so if you have any ideas let me know on facebook or in the comments and I will let you know what happens with my email in the next post.
In 1996 Bill Clinton signed the Good Samaritan Act which greatly reduced potential liability for grocery stores that want to donate food that they are no longer able to sell. Even the hippies admitted that donations did increase after that but the truth is, not all food is obviously spoiled and a lot of things need to be looked at carefully by someone who knows what they are doing in order to insure that they don't accidentally give somebody food poisoning and do more harm than good. Asking the companies to take responsibility for sorting and delivering this food is unreasonable. After all, the end goal of these companies is to make a profit and as it stands the average grocery makes $0.03 on every dollar. Making sure the maximum amount of food reaches a food bank would mean more hours worked for employees and thus increased costs for the company.
With the recent recession donations have been down at food banks across the nation so the idea of getting this food to the people that need it has been intriguing me. The responsibility should rest on the various charitable organizations that are in need of the food. They should go out to the grocery stores and find what they need themselves, but I'm not entirely convinced that this isn't already being done so before I rush to some hasty conclusions I decided it would be prudent to write an email to the Utah Food Bank and see what's up. I'm not really sure where I'm going with all of this, if I get an positive answer back then I guess that will be the end of it but if it turns out that there is as big a problem as the documentary claimed then I have no idea what I would do about it. I certainly don't have the time or resources to sort through tons of food from local grocery stores and then take it to the food bank if they are not doing so already and I don't know how I would convince them to do it themselves because this idea isn't exactly new.
So until I hear back from the Utah Food Bank, what are your thoughts guys? Maybe you would like to watch the documentary too or do some digging of your own because I think the whole thing is fascinating and I'd be very interested to figure out how all this fits together. I haven't ruled out the possibility that I'm just being dumb and this is a non-issue of course but it's fun to think about non the less so if you have any ideas let me know on facebook or in the comments and I will let you know what happens with my email in the next post.
