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10+ year manager named Joe was apparently fired for bringing cookies to be thrown away before their sell by date to a food pantry in my town
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Joe should see a lawyer about a wrongful termination lawsuit.
The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act (pdf) brought to law in 1996 shields most liability for people donating food exactly like he did.
This may have been a knee-jerk reaction from the employer incorrectly assuming they could be liable if someone got sick. Though its also possible they've been looking for a reason to dismiss a long time employee to replace him with a cheaper one. Corporate ownership makes me leans towards the latter.
Liability if the food is bad. He was fired because the company perceives it as theft. The act does not cover that.
Same reason grocery stores toss perfectly good food in locked dumpsters in lieu of donating it.
The only chain place with fresh food that donates their extra at the end of the day is Panera.
And this is exactly why by law Italian supermarkets have to donate anything approaching its sell-by date.
Oh fuck. We need that law in the states.
is this the kind of law you had in mind?
Maybe... I guess Id rather see a law that makes it illegal to stop someone from gathering or donating discarded food. I dont want a restaurant or grocery store to have to fuck around with record keeping and shit. I just want them to have to allow someone to do the right thing if it's not going to be them doing the right thing.
They'll get there. The US is still working through the Italian playbook. They're up to the 1930s.
Fuck, too accurate.
On the surface it seems like you're being encouraging. Too bad i've skimmed a history book at least once in my life.
😭
Interesting, here in the UK they sell it at a discount, which greatly helps us poorer people afford food.
Ironically if it's all donated to food banks instead, I'd never see it and would struggle more - I may be poor but I can afford food so I don't want to take away from what others might need more than me.
The whole system is sadly broken anyway, so much food, yet so many hungry :-(
There’s a place near me that sells under-selling, damaged package, and past-sell-by-date processed food for a super steep discount. It’s priced like being in the 90s or early 00s. They buy it from grocery store distributors who collect items that are “returned” to them by the store, and it’s run by Amish which don’t seem bound by quite the same regulations..? Not entirely sure how they are allowed to do that, though there’s another place in the opposite direction that isn’t Amish and does the same thing, so maybe it’s just allowed here.
Since most packaged food is still good well beyond the sell-by date, this means I can buy dry goods, shelf-stable microwave meals, and condiment sauces, and fill my car trunk/boot for about $100. It’s pretty out of the way, so I only make it there every few months, but I stock up heavily when I go. I’d probably have needed food assistance or just starved if I hadn’t found that place. (I prefer not to use it since my understanding is that it’s not a forever benefit even if you need it forever, and circumstances may warrant use later)
Have to be super careful about what sorts of things you buy, some of it goes stale or separates a lot faster than other things, but it’s all still edible, and if I get stuff that’s not tasty to me, my chickens eat it and poop out eggs, so it’s not really a loss.
I worked in a grocery store that had a little pizza making section. End of the day they'd throw out a lot of pizza. Management absolutely did not want employees to grab some at the end of the day.
Well, I was friends with the guy who worked there so he'd "throw it out" into my possession. I had a lot of free pizza back then.
Nowadays there's an app "too good to go" where you can get cheap food at the end of the day from places. Not as good as free, but like four slices of pizza for $5 isn't bad.
is that app your chain specific or location because i love the idea
So far as I know it's available in a bunch of regions: https://www.toogoodtogo.com/en-us
thank you so much! i am going to share this with the rest of the faculty, this is great.
They used to dump them in unlocked dumpsters but people figured that out and started pilfering the dumpsters. My dad, not poor at all but quite frugal/cheap, somehow heard about this and started taking me as a kid to go dumpster diving with him. It was crazy the amount of food we brought home for those couple years before places started locking the dumpsters. And there were a lot of people driving up and going through them just like us.
There was an entire documentary about people dumpster diving at grocery stores for free food.
That documentary is called: Dive! Living Off America's Waste.
Here's a trailer for it.
And here's the full documentary on YouTube.
Crazy to me that it was filmed in 2010. My experience dumpster diving was as a kid in the 80s in Phoenix and as I mentioned, the stores started locking things up and so it stopped. Or so I thought... it seems in many areas it was and maybe still is occurring. Perhaps locking dumpsters is too much of a hassle for some places. Anyway, thanks for sharing!
We're the only super power that refuses to agree that food and water are a human right.
"Hey! Are you bootlegging that AIR? You gotta pay for that!"
Oh and I forgot we are the only ones that think medical care and housing is pay to play as well.
I didn't really consider the reason the company gave for the dismissal. Though it occurs to me now that any incident where someone loses their job due to donating food nearing expiry could be plausibly written up as thievery by the company doing the firing.
Which is a nuance that might be worth chatting to a lawyer about.