Writes Patricia Marx in "Spoiler Alert: Leftovers for Dinner/How to host a dinner party for nine using a pre-trash haul from Too Good to Go and other food-waste apps. Carb-averse guests, beware" (The New Yorker).
Marx's 9 guests arrived and dumped out the "surprise bags" they'd ordered from the app Too Good to Go (which packages food left over from 6,987 NYC stores and restaurants):
In the jumble were a teriyaki-salmon bowl, egg rolls, a package of Swiss cheese, plant-based carne asada, a Philly cheesesteak, a chicken-parmesan sub, three slices of pizza, fried rice nuggets, two chicken-and-vegetable curries, lentil soup, a carrot smoothie, sugar snap peas, potatoes, an assortment of such designer fruit as Cotton Candy grapes and Cara Cara oranges, bunches of cilantro and fenugreek, two cabbages, two miniature eggplants, two karela (bitter melon), a foot-long turai (ridged gourd), about twenty-five tindoras (gherkin-size gourds), and tubs of mango chicken salad, macaroni salad, couscous salad, and beet salad. There was also a ridiculous quantity of bread products, including a bag of fifteen bagels....
They didn't try to make that into something coherent. They just spread it all out buffet style, ate what they wanted. They over-ate — "Like all buffets, this one seemed to bring out the glutton in everyone." They especially liked all the pastries, and in the end they wrapped leftovers up into a new set of bags, which they took home, either to consume in a new, inferior buffet, or to let mellow into the stage where you have no other option than to deem it, at long last, waste.
By the way, I'm a fan of Cotton Candy grapes. They're reliably sweet, and with my weak sense of taste/smell I put money and effort into avoiding sour fruit. I didn't know they were considered "designer fruit." You know, there are some special needs people out there looking for things that suit us. We're not trying to flaunt elitism and look high class. We're trying to avoid pain.
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23 comments:
I guess there are no homeless or hungry people, no food banks, no lines of immigrants sent in by Joe Biden- to feed in New York. Just create an app and the young professionals will pay for it and eat it.
We apparently have way too much wealth and time in America. We're selling store and restaurant leftovers on an app that can be delivered to apartments full of hipsters, who, in their spare time mock America and its excesses.
I dunno. I ran restaurants years ago. Unless things have changed that much, I would not have shipped out our leftovers. IF...we could use them again, we did so the next day. After that, garbage. As for stores- no food banks around?
That is what you feed pigs and chickens.
Inflation has interesting effects.
Conceivably, I could enjoy the bread products, and perhaps the raw vegetables, but nothing that's been handled (i.e., the prepared foods) and can't be washed.
My wife is in a "buy nothing" Facebook group where people post useful things they want to get rid of, but I would have a tough time doing that with food.
These folks are taking food away from homeless dumpster divers. I hope they are pleased with themselves.
Cara Cara oranges resemble navel oranges on the outside, are salmon colored inside, and the flavor resembles orange sherbet. Not bad. Citrus isn't 'designer' food IMO, as all varieties are related and they mutate/hybridize easily.
A lot of food goes to waste, so I respect these buyers for trying. I'm not going to participate, as I once visited an day-old bread and pastry outlet that strongly smelled of mold. It was so bad that I immediately walked out, and it turned me off of that brand ever since.
I just cut out the restaurant part.
This is high end dumpster diving. Someone decided to take a homeless person's daily routine and monetize it.
And the buyers give themselves permission to overeat or eat without thinking of nutrition because they're doing a good deed by reducing waste.
It's a brilliant, disgusting scam.
When I worked nights in a NY City restaurant I would eat lasagna thrown out from the restaurant next door after they closed. Yep, right out of the garbage can on the loading dock. It was delicious.
I see nothing unethical about this; it's like any markdown sale. If it takes off, at some point the restaurants will start charging, which will erode some of the cost savings.
It seems unlikely to succeed, though. I think too many people will associate it with eating out of the garbage. Personally, I could never trust secondhand salmon.
Is it any Wonder, enigma!?!?
First World problems…
>Ann Althouse said...
I'm a fan of Cotton Candy grapes. They're reliably sweet, and with my weak sense of taste/smell I put money and effort into avoiding sour fruit.<
Standard grapes generally have some "tartness," not "sourness." There is a difference in meaning.
"Sour" usually refers to a taste that is caused by acidic substances, typified by lemon juice or vinegar. It is generally more intense and puckering on the taste buds. "Tart", on the other hand, refers to a taste that is sharp, or slightly sweet and acidic. "Sour" tends to be more intense and "tart" tends to have a decidedly sweeter undertone.
You may not like either one of them, and that's fine, but they are two different things, "tart" generally being considered enjoyable and desirable, "sour" generally not so much.
I figured Cotton Candy grapes were some sort of new "designer" deal when I recently saw them in the store. And though I generally eschew such fads I was curious so bought a box of them and tasted a couple of them. I thought they were disappointingly bland and that what flavor they had was weird and unappealing. I gave the rest of them away.
There were no leftovers at Mom's house. Anything not consumed at the table (infrequent) was used in a subsequent meal. Usually it was called 'stew'.
I do the same.
When I worked in North Africa, I had to drive by the city landfill every morning. There were entire families living on it, quite a few of them. Everything they had, came from the landfill, including everything they wore, everything they ate. So, they were living on the landfill as well as living off of it. It was Dante's Inferno in real life and Technicolor. The depths of suffering for all ages. Lots of little kids.
I'll pass on the recycled food, I seek sustenance not virtue, but I don't see much wrong with it. It's still not anything close to living on the landfill, but they're taking some big chances, unaware.
An example: I made oatmeal two days ago. I make it by eye so sometimes I have too much.
Into the fridge and yesterday I used it in making a meatloaf (Mom's recipe used oatmeal to extend).
Yikes. Sounds horrible. I love leftovers from my household, not so much from grocers and restaurants. I've worked in food service enough to know that the food-handling care given to "excess" product is not up to the standards one should expect from restaurant food.
Not even close. Composting is a fine and noble end to well-intentioned foods gone awry.
I am very surprised the NY Board of Health allows this. I used to fish with a Vietnam War veteran, and when we caught fish (striped bass, yum) that someone didn't want, we would give it to the local veterans' shelter, and we had to do it on the sly because it was not actually permitted, and that was a fish fresh caught within 3 hours of donation.
The first person I ever knew of who "dumpster dove" was a hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail who supplemented his diet from the bearproof trash bins at larger campsites. He didn't finish the entire PCT as the hepatitis he contracted was pretty serious.
As to buying remaindered food, my mother shopped regularly at an outlet store called something like "Day Old Bread Store" back in the 1960s operated by Sunbeam, IIRC. We mostly used bread for breakfast toast and on sammiches for brownbag school lunches. There were 6 of us kids, so yeah, saving a bit on several loaves per week was a thing, even back then.
Back in the late seventies after I graduated from high school I stayed with my brother on the Kona Coast of Hawaii. His roommate was a deckhand for Captain Bean's glass bottom boat. They had a dinner cruise every night and the roommate would bring home a giant trash bags filled with leftovers. What a feast! Especially in response to Kona Gold induced munchies.
I make meatloaf with raw oats (also as an extender). I've never thought of using cooked oats. On the other hand, I never have left-over oatmeal! (Unless I were to run out of brown sugar)
Also included: herpes and hpv!
If any of this sort of person doesn't have them already. Soon it will be cool for hipster artists to go directly to food banks and literally take the food out of poor families' larders. Oh wait. It alreasy is: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/food-bank-influencer
Hepatitis. Now there's a surprise ingredient, mikee. So these food containment dumpsters are also like giant prophylactics protecting bears from human VD.
Life with Bidenomics
Even though the participating restaurants know that they must keep that food "safe" before it is picked up, the horrendous conditions and practices that I read about on the state's "health dept" inspections, which involve the food they serve to customers that day or week, doesn't give me much faith in that product.
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