American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom

Author:Jonathan Bloom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2010-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

Judging a Food by Its Cover

Packaging also causes problems with hard (or “dry”) groceries. Damage to a box or container often means goods are thrown away, even though the contents are fine. There are plenty of pitfalls: The shelf stocker may have sliced into a box or two of Grape Nuts while opening the case of twelve. Maybe the entire pallet-load was dinged in-transit or at the store while being unloaded. Or customers could have dropped the item, leaving a dent. The packaging on some of these groceries isn’t “hard” enough. But fortunately, there are many groups willing to look past these superficialities to the untouched product within. When I visited the Senior Gleaners, a food recovery operation in Sacramento, California, I saw an entire warehouse-sized “salvage” room with pallets full of damaged boxes of crackers, granola bars, and cereal, all stacked and shrink-wrapped together.

There’s a growing secondary market for goods with slightly damaged containers and out-of-date promotions. These are the limited-edition boxes that aren’t quite limited enough in quantity, like the Olympic Wheaties a few weeks after the Games. Dented cans, too, are sent out, often to discount retailers such as Big Lots or Dollar General. For regular supermarkets, these may no longer be sellable items, but, as the secondary markets show, they’re far from garbage.

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