If you can, send me a photo of the bread end castoffs–that’s an interesting waste angle that, as you say, is quite common.

Why then, the trash for the fries?

I am the baker at a small bakery/ retail outlet. Daily, I bring home the egg shells, and the ‘ends’ of the loaves. (Seems that no one wants a sandwich made of crusts, have you discussed that? I’m sure this is true of any restaurant/sandwich shop using bread. So when sliced, all the crusts were removed and were tossed. I feed them to my chickens. I don’t eat the bread because, though organic flour, they are made with sugar and margarine–this is not my operation.)

I also save my apple cores, banana peels, squash skins, etc from my lunch as well as the coffee grounds from the employee coffee machine. I bring them all home and put them in my compost pile. Even on days when I ride my motorcycle into work. It’s just not that big a deal.

If your place is too urban for a compost pile, do vermicomposting. Anyone can do that.

And thanks for passing along that saying. With the 2008 Election rolling along and a business-as-usual Farm Bill likely to pass, here’s my message to politicians: Talk is Cheap as Chips.

Much of the re-design seems to have been done to help reduce food waste. Many items that were once self-service (the deli bar, fruit, etc) are now served to you by an employee. Also, there are now several smaller food stations to help reduce lines to make smaller portions and getting up for seconds more appealing. Color me impressed!

So was this “Grill” station not manned by a human? I’m wondering how it worked before the redesign and how common this automatic fry dumping might be. Anyone else have this problem at their school?

For years, our “Grill” station, which contains cheeseburgers, grilled cheese, hot dogs, etc automatically would dump a handful of fries in the basket with the main item. So, if you wanted a second hot dog, you automatically got a second order of fries. And many times you didn’t want fries anyway, which sent lots of them to the dumpster.

Now, the grill specials come out on their own and the fries are in a seperate serving container with tongs, so you may take as many or as few as you would like. And, it is truly amazing how many people (including myself) are taking none! All those saved fries!