Dumpster divers like me are happy to eat most produce after a good bath/scrub in soapy water and a dry. This method also breaks down the fatty membrane surrounding the virus so I’d be game to eat some leftovers.
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A few weeks from now, behave like this and the police will just put you up against the wall outside the store and shoot you.
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“Welcome to the future of law enforcement! The Porta-Gallows! Enforces the law and provides a visual deterrent to others.”
People be bugging big time.
According to multiple health and safety organizations worldwide, including [the CDC], the USDA, and [the European Food safety Authority], there is currently **
no evidence that COVID-19 has spread through food or food packaging.
** Previous coronavirus epidemics likewise showed no evidence of having been spread through food or packaging.
They don’t need a pasteurizer to sanitize/disinfect the outside of a packaged product. I only mentioned several methods of disinfection to give people an idea that there is more than one approach. Heck, they don’t even need to do anything more than open a packaged product, discard the box and keep the sealed product on the inside. Or just wait 72 hours, as that is what is thought to be the maximum survivable time of the virus on metal and plastic surfaces, on cardboard and paperboard it is suspected to be 24 hours, but hey, doing nothing but waiting 72 is easy to do and just as effective.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/organizations/cleaning-disinfection.html
I would contend that the vast majority of products in the store are pre-packaged and easily salvageable and edible. For the fresh fruit and vegetables, nearly all could be recovered and being disinfected with a 10% bleach solution or soap and water rinse for 20 seconds, you know, just like washing your hands.
Nearly all of the edible products sold can be disinfected as most are pre-packaged, and the fresh fruit and vegetables already go through a disinfection process before they’re put on the shelves and they’re fine to eat. Literally wash, rinse, repeat. Here’s how it can be done cheaply without the need for commercial machinery, just a bucket of your preferred disinfectant (10% bleach, soap and water, other) and a clean water rinse to follow.
For a grocery store owner I’d rather spend a few hundred dollars on bleach and soap than losing $35K in product.
As for lettuce, it is a pain to disinfect, but do you really think the store store threw away $35K in lettuce? Nope, they did not. Lettuce is a poor food anyway, low in nutrition and calories, and not going do much good for anyone, so just compost it and not worry about it.
It’s not like the person licked ice cream and put it back, or opened hundreds of gallons of milk and sipped them and then put the lid back on. And if in doubt, discard those items.
Because if I know I can feed the hungry through proven sanitization means and discount the stupidity and ignorance of those whose emotions of fear, doubt, and uncertainty get in the way of what constitutes food safety, then I’m going to feed the hungry.
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If you’re black. If you’re not, they’ll still arrest you and say you had a mental health issue.
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I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you aren’t a grocery store owner. Neither am I, but I do sell products to grocery stores.
So let’s walk through the logic of what you’re proposing. You want the grocery store management to
discard the packaging that contains all of the identifying information on the product, including the SKU and the legally-mandated information like nutritional labeling and allergen warnings.
Do I really need to explain just how legally fraught such a notion is? Forget actual or rumoured risk of viral infection, it will be a race to see which happens first – the store getting sued by someone claiming they had an allergic reaction, or it getting shut down by the state inspector because legally mandated labels are absent. And that’s before we even get to the unavoidable costs involved in cashiers trying to check out customers, with neither one having the foggiest idea whether the pack of bacon they’re buying is $2.99 Oscar Meyer turkey bacon or $6.99 Applegate Hormone-Free premium bacon. Good luck telling them apart by sight. The store will have lines wrapping around the building – or would, except most customers who have any degree of choice will not actually buy product that’s flawed even in some minute way, never mind missing its entire outer packaging.
You’re also proposing that the store implement a multi-faceted sanitizing/disinfection protocol with zero notice, no corporate or regulatory approval of the process, and no time to bring in external expertise. The managers would have to do the research, purchase or free up the necessary equipment, free up staff to be trained on the proper sanitizing procedure, establish QA protocols to ensure that the primary packaging wasn’t breached, and train the rest of the staff on how to respond to customer inquiries about the safety measures taken.
I can’t estimate the cost of such an undertaking – too many variables – but I guarantee you it won’t be “a few hundred dollars.” But it’s a moot point because no sane regulator is going to permit an ad-hoc sanitation campaign of food products, no sane corporate executive is going to sign off on one without a proper risk assessment, and no sane store manager is going to risk their continued employment over a loss that is likely already winding its way through the insurance claim process.
Yes. They go through a thoroughly vetted, regulated, and monitored process using specialized equipment that only makes sense at large scale. No one is going to lend their trained operators or equipment to a grocery store on a day’s notice.
You’re doing that naive thing people do when they don’t have much exposure to food manufacturing and food safety. Just because something is fine for your household does not automatically make it fine for the food distribution system. You might allow your cat to jump up on the kitchen counter. Would you eat at a restaurant that permitted the same in their kitchen?
There are three major considerations when assessing risk in a food production/distribution setting: Severity – how bad the threat to health is
Probability – how likely someone is to suffer ill effects from consuming the product
Magnitude – how many people might be impacted.
Advice given to someone who, at most, risks a half-dozen people in their home isn’t going to fly for a grocery store serving a thousand people per day. If you fuck up the ratios and use a 20% bleach solution, you and your family might be fine. If a store shift supervisor does that and an elderly shopper ends up with chemical burns of the GI tract? And if the grocery store in question doesn’t have the necessary records to show the mixture was properly checked and was in compliance with their HACCP processes?
Food banks where you live come with an educational prerequisite and a skill-testing question?
Incidentally, feeding the hungry is great and all, and food waste is bad, but food banks prefer cash, not sudden donations of massive amounts of food they might not have the facilities to store properly and are likely going to end up throwing away.
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It seems to me that you’re more concerned with the litigiousness of this country than actual food safety.
If I was hungry (I guess you’ve never needed for from a food bank, but I could be wrong) and I had the choice of no food or food that someone coughed or sneezed on at some point during its transit time to me (which currently could be any package) I’d take the food and not think twice.
But to each their own. I’d grill a rat on a license plate over a burning tire to feed me and my family if needed.
I would disagree. But yes, I am concerned with the legal ramifications of what you were proposing. They’re one facet of the practicalities of operating a food manufacturing or distribution business in North America today.
To me, your examples keep underscoring our differences in the scale on which we’re focusing. On an individual – or individual family – scale, what you’re suggesting makes all sort of sense. For a business with a very geographically spread out supplier network, dozens of variously-knowledgeable staff, and a long-term reputation to worry about, the same suggestions scale very poorly.
Though I hope you recognize that we’re very far away from needing to grill rats on license plates.
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