landfill.

Liability is too high in giving it away. If someone takes an item out of a freezer or refrigerator in a store and leaves it in the shop without buying, it cannot be sold.

If they gave the food away they would likely get sued by someone with a tummy ache.

Not only does it go into the dumpster, they then lock the dumpster. And when I try to get it out anyway, they call the cops on me 😒

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

The quote’s from The Grapes of Wrath. I haven’t read the book, but I had read the quote and it has stuck with me.

I did play Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee as a child. That stuck too. It’s a bleak satire of corporate America. The director–Lorne Lanning–saw firsthand the waste in the production and sale of food on a mass scale. I recall a video-interview where he stated that a large amount of good produce was dumped into a river, turning its water orange(?). The details escape me, but food waste is a ‘cost of business’.

Capital has its own logic and it’s inhumane. I don’t know or care about this particular incident, but if the food had rotted before it was noticed it couldn’t be consumed–freely, at profit or not.

Wasn’t part of the issue that they reversed from cooling to heating? I remember reports that the fridges were turned up to 50 C for hours. Most of that stuff must have been bona fide disgusting…

Arby’s happens

It’d have probably gone straight to the landfill like most of the food stores can’t sell does every day, but the fact the freezers were set to +50C for possibly hours means that very little could be salvageable anyway.

Dumpsters with a lock on them, you know, for capitalism

Sadly, most of it was probably just thrown away. Here is a video from Stockholm where all the food goes straight to the garbage truck https://www.svt.se/nyheter/video/a7dc205d587dcb36-frysmat-far-slangas-efter-hackerattack/64sbs0

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/nov/02/europe-supermarket-fridges-freezers-who-hacking-why

Also curious. My bet: bio gas. More profitable than giveaway.