The Carnage of Waste

We will be left wanting

“What is that smell?!” I asked, reaching for a wet cloth to cover my nose and mouth.  I had taken a food service job in a grocery store deli. I have smelled death before and recognized the stench of rot.

“It’s chicken blood,” the cook replied, tossing the juices into a drain in the floor and washing it down with a hose. I gagged.

Juices from the raw chickens sat in a stainless steel pan uncovered in the same fridge as the cooked chicken, which sat on a baking tray loosely covered by a sheet of paper. Other juices collected in the rotisserie oven’s drip pan where they sat for too long before being cleaned. Meat from the chickens got pulled daily, breasts on one sheet, legs and thighs on the other. The rest tossed into the trash.

On my first night of pulling the chickens, I cried. Then I prayed to Mother Earth to forgive us. I threw a dozen chickens in the trash that night, minus their breasts, legs, and thighs. Good parts, like the oyster on the back, skin, wings, good meat, and bones that could have become bone broth.

I couldn’t connect the carnage and the waste with anything that made sense. It was forbidden to eat at work. Taking free food out of the store or giving it to someone (who might be starving) were grounds to be fired. On shelves, a few isles over sat expensive bone broth. How much money was the store losing on this waste?

The Grandmothers taught me, “waste not, want not.” It is one of my deeply held values and something that I practice. I purchase quality items made to last, like leather, wool, and wood. I take care of my things and value them. I detest our throw-away society. And I use every part of the chicken, although finding one intact has become difficult, the giblets often missing.

I learned from my Native American teachers to use every part of the animal and to honor the gifts of Mother Earth. Standing in the carnage of waste behind the deli counter of my local grocery store left my heart in ruins.

I am not so different than you, needing to make ends meet during a difficult time. I had to take that second job. I don’t own a house, and my husband and I have one leased car. When our rent soared to an unprecedented amount, I chose to work close to home so I could walk. The neighborhood grocery store was short-handed and desperate for help. The apartment complex raised the rent $700 in one year above an already exorbitant amount. The waste of greed also contributes to the carnage of increased homelessness.

My husband and I live in an apartment. The reason is because the landlord refused to fix a roof leak in the house we had been renting. It became filled with toxic mold and created another kind of waste – an expensive roofing job and the loss of a good tenant for him, and an expensive move and loss of a home and garden for us.

When we first moved into the apartment, they offered recycling pick-up outside our door. Since I could no longer compost, I could at least recycle. But that changed during COVID. Almost three years later, the apartment complex still doesn’t have recycling due to being understaffed, but we are still required to pay for it. Determined not to be defeated, my Green Man husband drives the designated blue bags across town to the one existing recycling dumpster.

Everyone is understaffed – creating more carnage, especially in the hospitals. Recently in our local hospital, two floors of patients went without food for two whole days. I learned of this from a friend who works there. She and her co-workers were forbidden to speak of it to the public and feared losing their jobs if they did.

There was much waste during COVID, including the loss of human life from financially incentivized protocols and suicide to the loss of education, businesses, livelihoods, and more. We also saw the waste of emotional energy as we fought among ourselves. And emotional energy is power.

Waste not, want not. The truth of this value will leave us wanting in a way previously unimaginable. We are paying the price in extinctions and the collapse of global systems. And the snowball has only just begun to roll downhill. The irony of the situation is that we have the technologies to turn it around. But like so many other things – they have been hidden and forbidden. The U.S. government’s waste of money is in the trillions. The current estimate is that we throw out 60 tons of household waste a second and 2 billion tons a year globally. And our waste production is increasing.

“There should be a law,” we say. There should be a law against throwing away good things, as opposed to the existing laws that forbid removal to where it could be repurposed or recycled. But in truth, we don’t need more laws. We need sovereignty and an evolution of consciousness where each person practices the values that support living systems.

I have often wondered how the one chicken I buy and cook every other week and use every part of could possibly make a difference when I compare it to the hundreds being thrown away across town and thousands more around the country. But that is where you will find me, whether in a home, an apartment, an organic farm, or living out of my camper van — still pickin’ chicken and puttin’ up bone broth.

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