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Friday, June 24, 2011
News Dumpster diver says Trader Joe's wastes too much food
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 8:00 AM
There is a lot to love about Trader Joe's: The grocery store offers lots of healthy, tasty food choices to people who care about those things, and for less money that you might expect. Then there's the fact that the company encourages people to bring their own grocery bags, the loud pop music and the seemingly blissful employees.
But, the company isn't perfect ... not by a long shot.
There's the tomato-slash-wage scandal, there's the reality that many of its products include entirely too much packaging (I about lost my mind over individual bags of organic green tea being plastic wrapped, for example), and, there's this, from Jeremy Siefert on Grist.org:
For many years now, I have fed my family food from the dumpster. It’s not because I can’t afford to shop at grocery stores like other, normal folks. It’s because supermarkets across the nation toss perfectly good meats, cheeses, eggs, and produce into the trash every single day.Some of the smaller stores, however, ditch perfectly edible food into dumpsters. The one I’m most familiar with is Trader Joe’s since it is, as the company’s motto says, my “friendly neighborhood store.” On many nights, my friends and I have filled cars with bags and bags of sprouted-wheat Ezekiel bread, fresh loaves of sourdough, packages of baby lettuce, cartons of eggs, whole chickens, and even a 12-pack of Irish Stout with only one broken bottle.
I enjoyed the fruits of my labor (literally), but think of how many hungry people could have benefited from that food if Trader Joe’s donated it instead of throwing it away. It’s why I started a campaign on Change.org asking Trader Joe’s to adopt a company-wide policy to end food waste at all of its 350+ stores. I hope you’ll join the more than 30,000 people who have already signed my petition.
Read the entire post to find out why this type of waste is such a bad thing for our community, our landfills and for the planet.
More from Grist.org: The indignity of industrial tomatoes
Jeremy's documentary on this topic, Dive!, drops July 19. Here's the trailer:
Editor's note: This issue actually makes me think about this skit from the TV show Portlandia:
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