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Comment by dandanua | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, in Russia some supermarkets use locks on garbage cans, so that poor won't gather around in the search for outdated food.

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Same in Germany. A Lidl supermarket employee explained in a TV interview it's a liability issue though. Somebody could hurt themselves entering a garbage box. Also supermarkets worry people throw in their own trash.

In the U.S. I frequently see dumpsters meant for store/office employee use locked, and the reason is always noted to prevent randoms from throwing their trash in there. They’re usually hauled away less frequently than residential trash cans and they don’t want it to fill up with bicycles, furniture, broken appliances, etc.

It happens in a lot of countries, not so long ago in France they'd spray bleach on the food before throwing it. It wasn't until 2016 that it was made illegal.

Meanwhile, some American stores were pouring motor oil over discarded food to prevent foraging, until exposure and a public outcry.

Wow. That's bad in so many levels. One thing is to avoid other people to get the food but that method also pollutes a lot of water.

My advice here is to be skeptical of outlandish claims on the Internet.

I think the health department in several places has put bleach on food that people were trying to distribute to the homeless. The logic was that the food wasn't prepared to commercial standards.

https://nypost.com/2018/11/12/health-department-poured-bleac...

Thanks for the link. That article is a bit one-sided and from a questionable news source, so I looked for a bit more nuance and found some here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/13/kansas-city...

At least it's not motor oil. They seemed to have a kinda-sorta-plausible excuse for the bleach, but it sounds like they've made an internal decision that it was an overreaction and they stopped doing it.

But I kinda see their point, too -- random people making food and handing it out sounds noble, but it probably should have some oversight too. Arguably that would have been the better response from the health department. I don't think the charity in this case did a particularly good job themselves of handling the situation. Hopefully everyone learned something and five years later it's no longer a problem.

is that not to protect themselves against lawsuits? A better solution would be to have a big disclaimer about taking discards at your own risk.

Disclaimer might indicate that you allow it to happen. And you would really prefer not to. It might simply be because then people would just spread it around outside the box while searching for stuff. Reasonable balance is pretty hard to reach.

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