Terrific blog! I’ve been happily reading and following links, and scribbling the names of all the websites your posts have been introducing me to.

As a former employee of Whole Foods, I wanted to add my 2 cents’ worth to this particular post. When I first started working for the company, many years ago, a thoughtful ‘25 cent per pound’ program allowed employees to take home imperfect or blemished produce. Not only did this program help provide healthy fruits and vegetables to employees, but it helped Whole Foods to ‘walk its talk’. As the years passed, however, this program, as well as the policy of allowing employees to take home day old bakery products at the end of the night, was disbanded. Now, not even leftover food from the hot bar is allowed to leave the store. One of the reasons I left Whole Foods was because of this fundamental disconnect between its loudly espoused environmentalism, and the blatant and disgusting waste I saw daily. Each morning, bakery employees would take cartloads of leftover bread, pastries, and cakes, and toss them into the dumpster. I was reprimanded for taking the time to remove the packaging and at least composting the edible parts. I watched produce employees regularly dump cartloads of cut fruit and vegetables into the dumpster–too lazy or too busy to even roll their carts down the hall to the compost bin. Complaining, bringing the behavior to the attention of managers, attempting to educate employees–got me nowhere. Just thinking about it now makes me fume. To me, the hypocrisy is fundamentally worse than the waste–after all, ignorance can be alleviated with education, but what can you do in the face of laziness and an intractable addiction to the bottom line?