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?
In any kitchen producing food at that scale, they are going to make huge amounts of food in bulk. Then the people they are feeding line up, and are handed plates of what they want to eat. At the end of the day, the pots or trays the food was served from are often still full of food. Partly because some people won’t like creamed corn or baked chicken or whatever. But mostly because at such a large scale, there is going to be a significant margin of error in how much food is produced and how much is consumed, and you always err on the side of making too much so that you don’t have any unhappy customers when you run out of something.
The manager of such a kitchen typically has the overall responsibility of ensuring everyone is fed, making hiring and firing descisions, and making purchasing descisions. They know the kitchen intentionally overproduces in order to have a safety buffer. And if this was all there was to it, they probably wouldn’t care if the kitchen staff ate what was left over in the serving trays after a meal.
The problem is that the kitchen staff get used to this benefit. They start expecting to be able to eat as much as they want of the best parts of every meal. They bring home huge trays of food that is left over, feeding themselves on their off-days as well, and possibly feeding their families. And this is still all fine from a food waste perspective - the problem is when kitchen staff start making 3 extra trays of chicken thighs “just in case”, to make sure there is enough left over for them to take home. Or when they grab the small serving spoon for the potato salad, so the people they are feeding get a smaller portion while the kitchen staff get a larger amount of leftovers. The manager’s incentive is to produce just enough food to feed all the customers with no leftovers (and accepts some leftovers as a buffer), while the kitchen staff’s incentive is to produce as much food as possible so they have as much leftovers as possible (while not becoming so excessive as to raise the manager’s suspicions).
Hence, management institutes some sort of rule about eating the food produced. What rule is implemented can vary. Some managers might decree that all kitchen staff can have one plate of food. Some might say it is fine to take home leftovers. And some might say (as in OP’s case) that eating any of the food is stealing.