I work with food, think about menus for 5k people three times a day. Most of the food is bad, but sometimes you get lucky and get decent food, like fish or chicken).
Not all clients eat their food, which means huge, and I really mean huge amounts of perfectly fine food get discarded, food the client didn’t even touch, which is simply stupid.
I was born in a country where getting rid of perfectly fine food is one of the stupidest things you can do. It is extremely moronic, only an asshole would do that.
Everyone at my workplace eats some of that food because that way you save money and don’t have to cook back home, and who cares? It’s going in the bin if nobody eats it.
My manager cares apparently, because he asked me if I eat some of that food. My answer was yes, I eat food that I know nobody is going to eat before it goes to the bin and that I’m not the only one, seems to be normalized there. His answer was a typical managerial answer: that’s stealing.
Don’t jump to demonize the manager yet, he was friendly about it. He asked me politely not to eat any food anymore.
But it’s going to be very, very difficult for me to control myself, seeing and smelling that sometimes good food knowing I cannot touch it. I was saving the cost of a full menu per day.
A question for cooks now: do you really eat nothing while cooking? Don’t drink anything?
Food is a funny thing. It feeds and nourishes us, but it can also harm us. If I prepared the food and set some aside for myself, I would eat it. If the food was plated for a banquet and never served to a customer, I would eat it. If that same food was served to a customer and looked like it had not been touched, I would not eat it. I would never eat anything that had been served no matter how much I thought it was still edible.
Food can harbor unseen pathogens. Once food has been served, it should be considered contaminated and unsafe for anyone to eat except for the person it was served to. Unless you personally watched that plate go untouched the whole time and you never looked away, that plate should be considered unsafe for you to eat it.