A Crime in the Commercial Kitchen

I worked as a kitchen hand for some time. It was a terrible job that the economic crisis promptly put an end to. Now while it sucks being poor, it certainly not a job I will miss. Let you me let you in on a secret of the commercial kitchen business. Consider this partly outing them and partly a confession of my own.

I have been forced to throw away a lot of food. I’m talking several kilos a day and not always just scraps. I don’t mean throwing away a few leftovers a customer didn’t eat or a few slices of tomato that didn’t get used before they went bad. These are things that happen in homes and in business and while it’s more food being thrown out than ever should be, it does happen and mostly for health reasons and because it’s unintentional we can forgive it. But no matter how much that adds up over a day or a week or a month it is not the problem and it is not what makes me absolutely sick.

On numerous occasions through my employment I was instructed by my employer or my supervisor to discard large quantities of unused food. Entire buckets of sauce, full cakes that were just never served. Once I threw a hundred or so sausages into the bin. They had been cooked but because they never set a sausage dish on their menu they had gone to waste. They were not eaten by the staff, they were not fed to dogs or given to hungry people. I have seen enough food to feed twenty people get thrown out in one afternoon.

That’s not even the end of it. I’ve seen food, good food that has plenty of time before it expires be thrown out. Why? Because it wasn’t shaped properly or because it didn’t display well. No one was allowed to eat these rejected foods and they were thrown out without a care. It disgusts me and I hope I’m in a position to never see that amount of waste again. This is an industry that needs some reformation because it is wasting good food simply because…

Because of you. This is the society we live in where people are starving not just around the world but in our countries and in our backyards. We let them starve and enjoy fancy, five star dining where only the perfectly shape bananas are made into your sunday. This is a society where if our meal comes with one grain too many of salt we send it back and demand another. Do you know what happens to the one you send back? It’s thrown out. We’ve built this society and we’ve dressed it up with gold and glitter but scratch away the paint and you find that behind closed doors it is wasteful, selfish and disgusting. You think you’re entitled to the best but the truth is you’re just lucky to be eating.