More depressing than the fact that people still go hungry, even in wealthy countries like the United States, is the realization that they're experiencing hunger during a time of relative excess. A 2012 report from the Natural Resource Defense Council found that Americans end up wasting as much as 40 percent of its actual food supply, which adds up to $165 billion of wasted grub every year. A big part of that waste, the NRDC suggested in another study, could be attributed to our over reliance on food labels that leads us to toss out food before it's actually expired or spoiled.As the saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure, so figuring out some way to collect and resell food that's still perfectly edible could go a long way if such a system was set up at the proper scale. That's exactly what former Trader Joe's president Doug Rauch is trying to do with The Daily Table, a local grocery store and restaurant he's launching in Dorchester, Mass. in May of this year, Fox News reports.The idea for The Daily Table is to repurpose food that's been deemed 'unsellable' by other grocery stores due to expired labels and other similar issues. In the process, Rauch explained to Salon in a recent interview, the store can help lower the price of things like produce to the level of junk food, finally bringing a parity in pricing for economically disenfranchised people who are otherwise pressured to purchase junk food because it's cheaper and lasts longer.“Most families know that they’re not giving their kids the nutrition they need. But they just can’t afford it, they don’t have an option,” Rauch told Salon. In that kind of economic climate, it becomes "economically rational to feed kids junk," he said in an earlier interview with the New York Times. Lowering the price of fruits and vegetables to the same level as things like Pop Tarts and potato chips could therefore help people make "an economically agnostic decision."Eating food past its expiration date might sound gross, but keep in mind that the NRDC and FLPC's 2013 report examined exactly that visceral reaction on our part as consumers, only to find that the entire labeling system is "unreliable, inconsistent and piecemeal" as it exists today. And as for the issue of personal taste, countless bakeries, restaurants, and grocery stores already sell day-old (or older) products like bread for a reduced rate by using the exact same logic Rauch is trying to apply to The Daily Table.There's another reason to be squicked out by something like The Daily Table, however: the implication that, if ideas like this truly take off, there will be an institutionalized structure that basically resells the table scraps of the rich to poor Americans who can't afford to shop at places like Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. Rauch addressed this issue in a 2013 interview with NPR, saying that, once again, what he's doing is really no different than accepted practices at many leading food chains:I might say, without naming the names, one of the leading, best regarded brands in the large, national, food industry — they basically recover the food within their stores, cook it up and put it out on their hot trays the next day. That's the stuff that we're going to be talking about. We're talking about taking and recovering food. Most of what we offer will be fruits and vegetables that have a use-by date on it that'll be several days out.The real challenge for Rauch and The Daily Table might simply be one of marketing in that case. Trying to sell food labeled "past expiration" sounds dispiriting. But if a lot of that same food is still useful, I can't imagine a store would have much trouble finding possible takers.
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