In late February, the United States had gone through an extremely hard time as a winter snow storm barreled through the majority of the country. This storm his hard both in severity of the precipitation and temperatures, but also that it had hit areas not prepared or equipped for a snow storm of this magnitude. The storm left millions of people without power, creating a spiral of different problems from there. Although homes took a hard hit, the homeless and less fortunate people in the were hit hard during this time as well. I had been so fully distracted from my own homes loss of power that I did not even imagine what other people could have been going through. It was not until a conversation with a friend who works with an organization called Food Not Bombs. The summarized goal of this group is to support the homeless and those without direct and easy access to food. He had told me a story about Portland, that during the storm grocery stores had lost power and had to throw out fully packaged and untouched perishable foods due to health regulations. All of this food was placed into the dumpsters behind the store and those less fortunate had come to hopefully find food that was perhaps kept fresh from the cold and still available, however the city had sent police officers to stop anyone from attempting to take any of the food through threat of arrest.
The injustices that go only daily towards the homeless, jobless, and hungry are sickening. To station police officers during a time of so much chaos to stop the “theft” of food sitting in a dumpster is baffling. Along with that, my immediate response was to be angry at the grocery store for throwing out the food instead of being able to simply donate it to those effected by the storm, however I found that the health codes written would not allow them to do anything but trash it. Grocery stores are required to throw out any food that does not fulfill the health code requirements despite it often still being good for longer. Over 42 billions pounds of food are thrown out by grocery stores annually, and none of it is allowed to be given to the less fortunate due to injustices in the health code system in America. In America, it is easy to see those less fortunate or in a lower class as the “other” as described by Simone De Beauvoir, making it easy to put them outside not realizing the impact certain actions may have on them. Although the health code written was most likely not meant to hurt the hungry, the authors clearly took no time to think how slight changes could help those in need, and stop the waste of food in America. An interesting blog post that talks about the food wasted by grocery stores is linked to this sentence here.