I volunteer at a food bank, and the company that sends us our food decides what we get. Last Tuesday they sent so much produce we could not fit it all into fridges. We were trying to give away cases of the food on Wednesday, but people were turning it down because they had no place to store a case of tomatoes, or cauliflower. This was what we had left after last Wednesday's morning give away. Not pictured the 5000lbs of watermelons, the 2500lbs of onions (those will last a lot longer).
The company that supplies us wants to move from sending shipments every other week, to once a month. This would cause even more no produce loss.
It is so frustrating to have all this food for it to go bad. Even if we got the same volume of produce, but there was variation in what it is we could give it away easier.
Edit: I posted this in a comment.
Because of bureaucracy we have to request this. If it is found out we are giving away the food to unapproved recipients we can lose all of our funding. If we give to unapproved recipients and they in turn give us prepared food to give out, that is okay.
Word got out that we were loading up my pickup with food and taking it to the homeless camps. I did get a number of them to start coming to the bank to get food. But it was easier when I could take stuff to them.
We are not allowed to simply give it out to anyone. This is not like a church pantry where all of the food is donated by the community and's parishioners. There is government funding, as well as private businesses, which I am guessing get their money back from the government for funding this. If we could simply give it to anyone we would not be in this situation.
It's not the bureaucracy. It's the capitalist that run the bureaucracy. In a society like this, it's all about managing perception. It's all about your brand. It's about looking good and not doing good. As things start to centralize further and further, you'll see what this is all about. In my town we have hooverviles. The homeless are there to remind you to work harder, or you'll become homeless. Working inside the system will not work. Capitalism in the US Empire need overthrown.
The branding is one aspect, they definitely publicize the food bank donations and it's often one of the few things food manufacturers do that sounds good. The rest is just profit and employing mass contract labor at near minimum wage.
If they threw out thousands of pounds of product it would look like a bad number if publicized... if they donate ten thousand pounds of tomatoes a couple days before they go bad they get to look like they donated ten thousand pounds of tomatoes in value, and then they get to write that off as a donation.
I'm pretty sure when they do said "donations" they get to write off the retail value, whereas if they just wrote it off as a loss to the business it would only be the actual cost.