Thursday’s power outages forced Montreal grocery stores to trash hundreds of foods, many of which were salvaged by diehards.
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“I know the process, I myself had to throw away food when I worked in a grocery store, but it’s still so frustrating to see,” says Joanie Valiquette.
The 24-year-old Montrealer had not done dechetarism, often called dumpster diving in English for several years. Since power failure often rhymes with food waste, she went for a walk in the yard of a grocery store. Among the foods found were prepared frozen meals, fruit, orange juice, vacuum-packed smoked salmon, ham and fresh pasta.
Photo Facebook Joanie Valiquette
“There were three bins full to bursting, opening the lid, there was food falling on me,” she says.
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Solidarity momentum
On the Facebook groups dedicated to this practice, several members give each other advice on the best places to go to find products. Although major breakdowns like those of yesterday are a delight for the followers of dechetarism, the fact remains that noting all this food loss saddens them.
“It’s annoying, I’m really outraged to see so many unsold items end up in the garbage,” laments Gabrielle, a mother of 4 children who has been practicing waste disposal for 4 years. The Longueuil resident wasn’t so lucky going to visit her usual dumpsters, but she encouraged the people in the group to keep an eye out.
Many of them are in the habit of bringing back some of the food they find in community fridges. The one located in the Pointe-Saint-Charles district was completely filled with sausages, packaged humus and fresh vegetables on Thursday.
The loss
Seeing all this food waste leads many to wonder why charities have not been called to come and recover this food. Unfortunately, the owners of three of the targeted grocery stores did not want to grant us an interview.
Instead, the president of the Canada Trade Council, Michel Rochette, spoke on their behalf to explain the situation.
“If a package of meat has been thawed, it has been heated, even if it looks good, there are food safety issues. […] there are temperature and maintenance obligations that we must respect,” he mentions to explain why so many products are thrown away.
He was also keen to point out that every effort had been made to keep the food cool with generators and refrigeration trucks, and that losses were relatively minimal.
However, by consulting the dozens of photos posted on various Facebook groups dedicated to dumpster diving, you can see that several hundred dollars’ worth of food has been thrown away.