Today I was at the grocery store doing my shopping. I needed the basics—eggs, milk, produce, toilet paper! It was an extensive shopping and I needed to just get it done and get home; I had a lot on my plate this morning.
When I was getting my eggs, I saw the dairy manager going through the large display case filled with eggs. He was checking dates and looking in cartons. If he saw a cracked egg, he chucked the entire thing. There must have been 10 cartons of eggs in the throw away box. I asked him what he was going to do with all those eggs. He said he was going to throw them away. I asked him why; aren’t they perfectly fine? He said yes and then added that the store’s policy was to not mark them down when they had a cracked egg in them. I said that was a tragic waste—there are people who go hungry, even here, in Charlotte, NC! He said (get this), “You could live off what we throw away; especially the produce. We throw so much away, it’s terrible.”
This is ONE store in my neighborhood. Multiply that by thousands of stores all over the USA and Canada all doing the same thing. In the meantime, there are people not getting enough food and certainly not getting such healthy things like eggs and vegetables. This is just wrong!
What if we could fix that? I want your suggestions on how we can stop this tragedy of waste. Could we write a bill and send it to congress to help alleviate the wastefulness, help get healthy food into the hands of those who can’t afford it and at the same time, give the donators tax relief for doing so as well as immunity from lawsuits? That’s one big fluid thought; a mouthful for sure, but is it feasible?
What do you think? Greed is gross and so is waste and they go hand in hand. We have all seen how both greed and waste has impacted our fiscal bottom line in this country; we must stop this despicable behavior!
Help me, will you? Every night, 1 million American children go to bed hungry. No one should have to go hungry–ever!
Send me your suggestions, your people, contacts—anyone who can help make this problem END. I’m upset by this; I hope you are too. Write me (without the spaces), [email protected]
For more help putting dinner on your table, check out Leanne’s website, www.SavingDinner.com, or her Saving Dinner book series (Ballantine) and her New York Times bestselling book Body Clutter (Fireside). Copyright 2008 Leanne Ely. Used by permission in this publication.
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