I’ve been calling around various grocery stores this week, trying to get a hold of pork fat trimmings so that I can make my own lard for some recipes. One of the stores I called today said that they couldn’t give me the trimmings because they don’t have a code for it. I forget exactly what I said, but it was something to the effect of, “so you’re just going to throw it away instead?” “Yes.”
I understand that it does require some effort to separate from the rest of the waste, so I don’t mind paying a bit, but its upsetting that they have no way to pass scraps along to someone who will use them instead of just tossing them in the waste.
Edit for anyone invested: I called around to a few other stores after making this post. One or two mentioned that they don’t necessarily throw all of those bits away, but often use them for other products, such as sausages. I also found a store that will be putting aside their trimmings for me tomorrow, and they should have more than I need. It’s almost an hour away on the bus, but right next to another store that should have any other hard to find ingredients that I’ll need for the tamales.
Also interesting was that different locations of the same chains had different answers for me regarding even their ability to provide the scraps to me, so the suggestions that a manager might be able to make it happen are probably very accurate.
Did you talk to whoever picked up the phone or a manager? A manager should be able to deal with the code issue, while a cashier probably couldn’t. If it was someone that could fix it and just refused or didn’t care, that’s indeed infuriating
I specifically asked for the meat department, so it was whoever picked up the phone in the meat department, but they did put me on hold to ask someone else.
Yeah, that’s probably still not a manager, or someone that can make a decision outside of their normal procedure. Try again and talk to the Meat Manager or Store Director. Good Luck!
Reminds me of the time I created the Triple Whopper for all of Germany. The Burger King in the Cologne Main Station had a “Your Way” section where you could make them assemble a Whopper exactly how you want it Subway style.
One day I encountered an especially enthusiastic cook and asked her for three patties instead of the maximum of two they had on the menu. She obliged me and also put on a ton of salad and onions and lots of love. I’ve never had a better Whopper in my life.
Anyways, she didn’t know what to charge me so she just pulled a number out of her arse and let me pay that. A few months later the Triple Whopper appeared on the menu at a much higher price point than what I paid. I like to think that it’s my fault.
Wow, that’s crazy! I actually worked at a Subway for a while, and we definitely had an “extra meat” button, but as long as the manager wasn’t around, we could get away with lots of freebies. I think the only things that were actually inventoried, and therefore had to be paid for, were bread and drink cups.
This meant that we could go crazy with our shift sandwiches. As long as we rang in the “sandwich” part, the add ons didnt matter. We could have all the fountain soda we wanted in our own cups, but if we wanted a paper cup, we had to pay full price for the cup.
I also recall a story where someone’s friend came in with a loaf of bread (French loaf or something from the grocery store next door, basically a mini party sub) in the evening, and the employee made them a free (giant) sandwich.
Meanwhile in America, in 1996 McDonalds had a regional burger that was quarter pounder meat. Meaning each patty is 1/4th a pound of meat before cooking. They put 8 of these patties and 7 middle buns, and 10 slices of cheese. They called it the “Big Mac Daddy”. My mom called it “The Big Mac McHeart Attack”
Just to be clear, even in 1996, the Big Mac, while it was bigger than it is today, it was NEVER quarter pounder meat by default. It was always the same meat the standard cheeseburger would have, with 2 patties, and 1 middle bun. This thing was huge. The local news measured it. It was 7 inches tall. I was 13 at the time, but kinda dumb. I said “Imagine putting 7 inches of meat inside you…” and my sister, who’s 11 years older than me, would not stop laughing. I didn’t know why…now I know why, and I’m cringing all these years later. It’s just as bad as when I was 7, and wouldn’t eat my brocoli. When my mom asked why, I said I didn’t like the texture burning on my tongue. She said “Brocoli isn’t spicy.” And I said “No, not spicy. It’s more like a carpet burn on your tongue”. And my mom was confused. I said “It’s like when slide really really fast over the carpet, and your belly burns because you did it too fast…well licking brocoli is like licking carpet. You get carpet burn”
And my sister would not stop laughing. Again, I didn’t know why then, but now I’m cringing so hard. I’m sure my mom nor my sister would remember those things, but I remember it was maybe a week before thanksgiving 1993, and I also remember it was Saturday morning, because X-Men was playing on tv in the background, but it was on commercial. So this must have been between 11:00-11:30 on a Saturday in November.
Back on topic, my mom refused to let me buy the Big Mac Daddy. She said “YOU’RE NOT EATING THAT MUCH FAST FOOD AT ONCE! IT’S NOT HEALTHY!!!” And, while she wasn’t wrong per se, she WAS still taking us to McDonalds…and when is that EVER healthy? So, she was right, but also…was she really the one to stand on that point?
I remember a friend of mine once ordering a Double Triple Whopper and being annoyed that Burger King’s definition of “double” is “with one extra patty”. So he had to order a Double Double Double Triple Whopper to get the desired result.
They delivered the thing to our table together with a knife and fork. I guess ordering an unholy totem pole of meat like that gets you table service at a BK.
The other thing that was notable about it was that the three "Double"s only added three patties to the burger and nothing else. As a result this caricature of a burger was now 80% overcooked ground beef and extremely dry.
He ate half of it. We took the other half home, put it in the microwave and drowned it in ketchup, which greatly increased it’s edibility. It still sucked, though.
They don’t actually dump em in the trash. They have a bone barrel where they toss scraps they gets sent off to a facility for processing.
But yeah, if you’re talking to an employee who doesn’t wanna go through the effort of figuring it out, they won’t help you.
I hope you’re right, but I’m in the US, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s only true elsewhere.
I’ve been asking around for a while in order to plan for my holiday cookiing, and got a small amount from another store this morning, but when I asked about getting more another day, they basically said they were doing me a favor and wouldn’t be able to provide more. The reasoning they gave me was that most of the pork they receive now is pretrimmed, but they did say that they could provide lots of beef fat trimmings, if that’s what I wanted. I’m sure that would be close enough (for central American tamales), but I’m already modifying the family recipe a decent amount to work with what I can get locally, so I’m hesitant to make more modifications when I do still have some less convenient options available to acquire the proper ingredients.
If you have one, a local butcher might be a better solution.
Here is the anti-story to the above:
Back when I was in school I needed a handful of 35mm film canisters for some damn fool project or another. I don’t remember exactly what I was planning to use them for. So I went to the local camera store and asked the clerk there if I could just buy like 20 or 30 empty film canisters figuring they’d have a fair few lying around. This was, of course, in the days when 35mm film was still the predominant photography standard, and consumer grade digital cameras that could even achieve one real world megapixel were very new, very exciting, and very expensive.
Apparently I was right, because they guy said, “Good god, please take some” and gave me an entire shopping bag full of the damn things. For free. Apparently just to be rid of them.
I was using film canisters to store everything and anything for years after that.
That’s awesome!
I did get a small bit of pork lard from another store today, but they basically told me it was a one time thing. I was definitely hoping it would be free since it’s otherwise garbage, but I also wasn’t surprised that they charged a small fee for it. But then again, it’s a national chain, not some small, local shop. The “no code = trash” store is also a national chain, so I’m a little surprised by the differences.
Another factor to add is that major retailers use anything they throw away as a tax write-off “loss” and they are therefore extremely cagey about giving any of it away for any reason, even to employees, I guess because if this is found out it could have some kind of implications, I dunno.
My nephew works for Target and apparently they do this. He tells me a manager will stand there and watch them crushing perfectly good floor model TV’s and other electronics in the trash compactor so he can sign off that they did it and none of those items were used for any beneficial purpose whatsoever, because weaseling out of $0.02 in taxes is apparently more worthwhile to corporate than giving a dedicated employee a new but slightly scuffed TV they were going to throw away anyway.
It’s positively infuriating. I’m sure the perishable goods/food sector is even worse.
Giving these items to employees could be considered part of their compensation package, like gift cards. Those have to be appropriately recorded and taxed.
FWIW, a lot of these places now send damaged/surplus/whatever items to a salvage company, who then pays the original retailer “fire sale” prices. These items are usually auctioned off locally for a fraction of MSRP.
Same for many returned items, BTW. There’s a local auction site that runs like eBay, but it’s overwhelmingly Amazon returns.
