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?
i hereby jump to demonize your manager. he lied to you when he said it’s stealing and there’s no good reason for him to have done that
Also, since it was destined for the garbage, he’s “stealing” garbage? It’s already paid for, who fucking cares.
Your boss is an asshole for telling you that putting something that’s going in the bin into your mouth instead. Even if it’s a policy, he’s choosing to enforce it and doesn’t need to.
Don’t snitch on your coworkers and tell your boss your coworkers are doing something as a way of getting out of trouble for something.
There’s a fine line between over producing food and having waste and having enough food.
A wise manager ensures that there is a family meal and manages production so that waste is minimized. A stupid manager accuses kitchen staff of stealing when they’re eating food in the restaurant.
Eating off of other people’s plates is a disease vector, don’t do that.
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.
Their description is vague, but it kinda sounds like they may be working in a nursing home. That almost makes your last statement even more grim.
It can be ok if you reheat it properly.
But the managers should be providing actual meals to their employees, I always ate at restaurants I worked at, and never paid even when it was policy to pay.
I think its more about sick people coughing on the plate than reheating
Sounds like your manager values garbage more than his employees
If you cook, you taste. If you don’t taste, you’re probably not a very good cook. You have to be able to balance the flavour.
I wouldn’t eat someone else’s table scraps though. That’s more hygiene than anything.
You should be able to take leftovers home, though. What you cook but no one orders. What’s left in the pan. That should go without saying. People who make the food should be entitled to eat some of it. That isn’t stealing, that’s guaranteeing the food is good, the people who made it are willing to eat it. One of my first “real” jobs was Taco Bell, and for years I was willing to eat it after I left. Following policy, they don’t really do anything wrong. The meat comes cooked and frozen, and they boil it in a deep fryer with water to heat it up. The beans come dehydrated in a bag, they pour them into a metal bin and fill with boiling water, stir, and let set. All fine. I just don’t have the taste for their brand of “Tex-Mex” anymore. I still think the bean burrito and soft taco are good. Keep it simple. The fajita wraps were good, but they haven’t had those in 30 years. And the gordita — the flatbread taco. That’s been gone a while, too. IIRC it was never profitable, the flatbread cost too much. It was good stuff though. Probably the best bread in fast food back then.
You eat it until you don’t feel like eating more. Wtf is this, just eat
To be clear, I’ve worked in a kitchen. One of the benefits is that you get to eat free food or get to make food for yourself (for free obviously).
Your manager may be nice but he’s just an asshole with manners imo. It’s totally normal and encouraged to divert food waste
Look them in the eye as you bite down and say you’ll deposit it in the sewers after a quick detour.
When I worked in food. I found it more hard to not yell at shitty customers, lol. Now, we had to throw away food that was about to expire. If we took it, we would get fired. It was very strict. I wasn’t a cook though. I say some cooks still eat and drink. You might just have an asshole of a manager.
I would’ve understood and agreed with the manager if they were concerned about your health. You could contract herpes or something, and then sue them, if eating the food was officially allowed.
This is also a way hepatitis spreads.
We are immunized against all the heps I think, except C. Or we were idk what you all have been up to lately. I seem to recall changing the childhood vaccines to leave out one of the hep vaccines until later if at all despite infants getting it sometimes.
Should still be reheated if you are going to eat from another’s plate that you don’t know.
Hepatitis A vaccine was licensed in 1995, available in the US in 1996, and recommended for all US children in 2006. Hep A is the one you’re most likely to catch from sharing food.
So if children all got recommended vaccines (which sadly we know is getting less common), then ~21% of the US population should be vaccinated, plus anyone who got it before it was recommended for all.
Hepatitis B became standard for all newborns in 1991.
I’m showing my age, but I realize—even though I received all standard vaccines—it might be time to find out if I’m vaccinated against either of those.
I got a Hep A vaccine well before 1995. I think all of the hep variants except for C, in the 1980s.
Maybe that’s a new version of the vaccine you are talking about. I will have to double check that though you have me questioning my memory here.
What we didn’t get was chickenpox vaccine, our parents and schools let us get infected, not a big deal, until maybe you get old or weak and the latent virus in your nerves wakes up. No hpv vaccine either obviously.
I’m citing the CDC with the years I gave, so if you got it in the US before 1995, it would have either been a trial or unlicensed version. It was approved for use in the EU in 1991 though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“Hepatitis A (HepA) vaccines were first licensed for use in the United States in 1995.”
Interestingly, 1995 was the same year the chickenpox vaccine was licensed. I grew up in the “everyone gets chickenpox” days too; in fact, I caught it at only 3 weeks old from my older sister, who caught it at daycare.
The idea of such boss probably is “they are probably making to much good, in the hopes it comes back and they can eat it themselves”. I do not agree with this idea, and there much better ways to control it if they wanted to.
Nobody should cook for a trashbin. ‘reuse repurpose recycle’ it should get a better end imo.
The only food I’ve really worked with directly was working at the Fresh department at Walmart and doing gobacks. A lot of the time the shit being thrown out was just out of the fridge for 45 minutes to an hour. A lunchable or whatever ain’t spoiled in that time, so I’d usually eat some of it around the dumpster I was supposed to throw it out was, since the only camera out in the back yard couldn’t see over there.
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.
They’re may be something you don’t know. Manager may have discovered that food is getting prepared so that it will come back to the kitchen and go in the bin, so that everyone can eat it. That’s definitely stealing.
And manager knows it’s not you, but still has to tell you anyway.
I used to work in a hotel with a restaurant that shared the kitchen with the catering side. It was a Holiday Inn with a Bennigans. After service was finished, all the food was free game and everyone took a whole box of food home with them.
As far as keeping yourself from eating, that’s just self discipline. They said don’t so don’t. Eat before you get there so you’re not hungry.
