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?
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.