Said By Brad

Now as many of you will not know, I started a job almost a month ago, working in a bistro. Well it’s hard to say what it is really, they serve coffee, sandwiches, pasta, salad, cakes all that crap. It’s basically a posh cafe. But I like to call it a bistro because it sounds posh. Basically what I do is prepare food that is then used to make up the sandwiches and other food. Chopping vegetables, slicing meat, and sometimes making up various deserts.

Now on saturday of last week I went in to work and found lo and behold the waster who normally loads the dishwasher was ill, so there was nobody to make sure the dishes, cutlery, and glasses were clean. Quite an important job, no plates or cutlery, nobody has anything to eat on. So I was asked bymy manager to fill in for him. I had no problem with this, it always looks like fun, loading up a huge machine, and just basically being able to yell at the waitresses, most of whom are lazy bitches, to come and collect the clean plates. I could not have been more wrong. As with most jobs, they look a lot more fun than they actually are.

Basically, the way things worked was; the waitresses would bring the plates that customers had finished with and put them on a counter probably apar with my neck height, so first off I have to struggle to reach up and get the plates without spilling the leftovers and sauce on myself, then I have to load up a dishwasher, which is suprisingly small for the volume of crockery and glasses that are being deposited on the counter. So I was constantly working to clear a back log. And all the time more dirty plates and glasses were being brought back and piled up. (After about 2 hours of this you grow to hate anyone who puts a dirty plate on your counter with a passion) But anyway, that’s not the only point of this rant.

After a while of doing this, I began to notice how much food was being left over on the plates at the counter. Every 2 or 3 plates an entire plate full of food would come back, near a whole sandwich, or a great multitude of pasta and nasty grimy sauce (which by the way is a bitch to get off, the washing machine alone doesn’t do it, so I had to scrub at it with a scourer) How people can order and pay for, and then leave so much food is beyond me.
At the start of the day I had a big bin, and I mean big, infront of me, just down behind the counter. I remember musing at the start of the day that I didn’t see much use for it; there was almost no rubbish from the process. Just the odd paper napkin, and pherhaps a straw now and then . By the end of the day the bin had been emptied twice. In less than 8 hours this colossal bin had been filled with leftover food, emptied, then refilled, then emptied again and then refilled once more.

It sounds ever so cliche, and has been said many times before. But the amount of food we waste in western society is sickening. The fact so many people can see nothing wrong with going to a bistro, ordering and paying for food, and then hardly eating any of it is just plain wrong.

Besides that cleaning up is a real bitch and I’m glad I don’t have to do it when I go in to work tomorrow.

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