Redirect unsold food

There needs to be a systemic way to recover unsold food from businesses (food they would otherwise waste, but is perfectly safe to eat) and feed people with it.

What can be recovered

From grocery stores

Broken packages

• Perfectly safe: Bags of potatoes, cases of cans of soda (discard the broken cans tho)
• Semi-safe: Damaged cartons of eggs (discard the broken eggs tho) 💬 discussion is it techincally a risk because a bit of raw egg could go onto the intact egg? i guess. So people who use the eggs should understand: Wash your hands after touching the eggs, even if you didn't crack them
• Semi-safe: Boxes of cookies, bags of chips, nuts, or other dry snacks. The food is exposed to the elements, but as long as nothing nasty gets on it it should be fine. Might lose some of its crunchiness due to humidity, but it's still fine to eat.
• Unsafe?: Broken cartons of milk? Broken packages of meat? 💬 discussion TO DO: do more research about this
• Extremely unsafe: Broken cans of food. Botulism risk. This includes dented cans (especially if the dent is near the seam) because there might be a tiny crack in the can. (...)( This risk can be overcome if you boil the canned food thoroughly to destroy the toxin - but we probably shouldn't recommend this to the general public because someone will probably do it wrong and still get botulism and die (or suffer paralysis for months - it's a terrible toxin) )

Foods past the date

• Safe: Breads that are NOT moldy, just hardened. Same goes for other baked goods (muffins, cakes, pies, donuts, cookies, etc)
• Safe: Raw fruits and vegetables. You can cut out any moldy parts and use the rest (unlike baked goods)
• Safe: Products that are past the "best before" date but are not past the true expiry date(...)( and in some places such as Canada, they only list the best before date (shortened to "BB/MA") and not the true expiry date )
• Unsafe: Moldy baked goods (you can't just cut off the mold)
• Unsafe: Meats, dairy and other perishables, if they're past the true expiry date 💬 discussion except maybe yogurt could be safe long after because it's already fermented? idk, discussion needed
• Unsafe: Rancid oils, or foods where the oils have gone rancid. For chips and peanut butter, this usually happens about a year after the expiry date. 💬 discussion Maybe turn this whole section into a table, what safe & unsafe look like for each food?

How it can work

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Next steps✊🏻✊🏽✊🏿

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FAQ

"Should it be reserved for poor people only?"

No, in most cases. There's currently so much food going to waste, that it could feed almost half the local population! Also it's not worth trying to "screen" people and make them "prove" that they're poor enough.

But of course, it's a good idea to start in poor neighborhoods first(...)( perhaps using food redirected from businesses in richer neighborhoods ). As the movement gets bigger, it can branch out more. There's no shortage of unsold food to redirect. 💬 discussion TODO: maybe i should also add somewhere on this page: talk about supply and demand: Redirection will reduce total food demand, lowering the cost of food overall, and allowing more abundance to be exported^{[context needed]}, and takes the pressure off deforestation, etc. Basically the opposite of the status-quo problems I described on other pages.

See also

• Make it illegal for businesses to waste food