So Much Food, So Much Food Thrown Away

I wish we could collect all the food wasted and send it to Africa, China or wherever people are truly hungry.  If this doesn't disgust you, nothing will.
From the LVRJ: The freezer the size of a football field is packed full of food.
It's everything needed to daily serve 200,000 meals, most of which are prepared from scratch and trucked to the Clark County School District's 357 public schools.
Over the course of this school year, the kitchen near Las Vegas Motor Speedway will provide close to 40 million meals to students of the nation's fifth-largest school district.
District cooks never have been so busy, but not because they are serving more school lunches....
FOOD THROWN AWAY
Just because a poor student eats school lunch, is school breakfast also a must?
The district fed breakfast to 55,600 low-income students daily in 2011-12, a sharp rise of 17,500 students. More than 61,000 students are taking school breakfasts this year, reports district Food Services.
But at Craig, where 96 percent of the school's 800 students are low income, only a fifth of the children came early for breakfast when it was served 10 minutes before school, Principal Kelly O'Rourke said.
"I don't think any more kids are actually eating school breakfast now," even though many of the school's children are in the program, she said.
The reason: Much of the food now lands in the garbage, unopened.
The school's physical education teacher even quantified the waste by assigning each class of fifth-graders to tally what they didn't eat. The three classes reported a total of 700 breakfast items unopened and thrown away by students over three weeks. And that's just one grade of 125 students.
The most common reason that low-income children don't eat school breakfast is because they are being fed at home, said Anderson, referencing a University of Nevada, Las Vegas report commissioned by the district. And like a buffet, the federal program doesn't allow food to be saved or taken home, even though Food Services individually packages everything from apple slices to cinnamon rolls....
For the district to be reimbursed, the low-income students must take all food and drink items or none, even if they already ate breakfast and just want a juice box.
And the district wants to be re­imbursed. It assigns a worker to every cafeteria to make sure every child in the breakfast line takes every item. Students who just take a milk or juice box are told to go back and get the rest. And the school can't take back unopened items.
"It's called a full-meal reimbursement," said Anderson, blaming the federal system.  http://www.lvrj.com/news/school-breakfast-bill-adds-up-in-clark-county-189554391.html
As a teacher who spends time in the cafeteria, I have seen so much food and drinks thrown away. Most of the time, it is milk, juice and fruit that is thrown away and feeding the garbage dump.  And yet we are unable to save the food and give it to a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen.
Just at our school, hundreds of dollars of food are thrown away every week because the students don't want to eat the healthy food, they just want to eat the cinnamon roll, sausage and bun or French toast sticks and throw away the rest.
And yet, there are people starving in the Las Vegas Valley, supposedly.
What a shame.