The staff are allowed to take it home on the QT, but it's actually illegal to do so because of the Food Safety Act 1990.
Because taking the food is illegal, if there are any consequences, like illness, permanent disability, or death, the person who took the food can't sue, as long as the boss denies having given permission. It would be the equivalent of stealing out of someone's rubbish bin and then complaining the goods aren't of high enough quality.
And, it's not quite as strict as the food having to be thrown away if the van temperature goes down below a certain temperature.
I'm better at hot and refrigerated storage than frozen, so I'll give you an example. A fridge containing sandwiches should be between 1-4C ideally. If the fridge temp goes above 8C, all the sandwiches have to be labelled and sold within 4 hours. I think that's why sometimes in Marks and Spencer you can pick stuff up for pennies. If it's just going out of date, the reductions aren't that good.
If you had an efficient scheme in place, you could maybe try to sell as much as you could in 2/3 hours and then pass the sandwiches on for free for the last hour.
Likewise with frozen stuff. If the temperatures are recorded regularly, or if there was an alarm to indicate if the temp went above minus 15C and you could get that food to a place where it could be cooked within the time limits of the regulations, it needn't be thrown away.
It would take planning, organisation and a lot of dedicated people who are prepared to work on call, but I believe it can be done. The reason why the homeless shelters couldn't take the food is because they won't have had the staff, or facilities to treat the food within the time limits.
And the Food Safety Act isn't stupid. It takes 3 E.coli organisms to cause illness, which can lead to permanent disability (from organ failure) and can lead to death. A food item contaminated with one E.coli organism may contain enough to kill someone if stored incorrectly for 10-20 minutes.
The death of a child is a high price to pay and personally, having experienced extreme and prolonged hunger, I'd sooner be hungry than lose a child.
It's not the food safety laws that are stupid, the problem is in the way we manage the food safety laws.
I saw your name on my homepage as the latest poster on this thread and the first thing that popped into my head was, "Yes, we're all very, very silly."
I think a lot of the time we don't follow things through logically.
When we do, it causes stumbling blocks.
And people very often don't like, couldn't be bothered with, or don't have the energy for stumbling blocks.
And sometimes people simply don't have the capacity to follow things through logically.
I think wanton hypocrisy is perhaps rarer than the number of accusations of hypocrisy.
Generally, if we accuse others of hypocrisy, the chances are there is a hypocritical element to the accusation. It's not a word I have much use for as I don't think it accurately, or fully describes many things.
jac_the_gripper Forum Posts (5,363)
RE: Do you believe in life after marriage ?........
You couldn't possibly imagine how nice it is.