A Small Price To Pay

It's kind disheartening, the post I'm about to make.

For both yesterday and today, in the hour before we opened our shop, I was on tomato slicing duty. No big deal, just slice approximately 180 tomatoes in the hour to prep the 2 trays of tomatoes for the day. We have a slicer that operates by hand and makes things easy.

That's not the part that bothers/saddens me. The part that does bother me is the part where because of what the company wants to achieve as perception and optics (how the customer views things), we are asked to throw out the slices of tomatoes that have the stem and any white spots down the middle because of the stem. Then we also throw out the bottom couple of layers because for our subs we give them the nice flowery-shaped parts of the tomato, and the bottom just doesn't make the cut (pun intended).

I eyeball it since I don't stop to weigh each tomato and then weigh the parts we discard, but if I had to say, we throw away at least a quarter if not as much as a third or a half a tomato depending on size and how many white spots we see. Multiply that by the estimated 180 tomatoes per day, and that can be as few as 45 to as many as 90 tomatoes' worth of food we throw away because we want to please the customer's eye.

It sucks because I know it's not my manager nor the owners of the shop that want this. Or at least I would hope they wouldn't want to waste food (especially because any wasted food is wasted money and with capitalism driving this country's economy...). I would have to assume it starts from the head of the company/head of Jersey Mike's and then just trickles its way down since after all franchise locations have to follow a protocol in order to make the experience pretty much the same in every location.

I mean just look at all that wasted tomato from today. The picture doesn't justify how much is actually in there since you can't see the depth.

I don't know what you could use the discarded tomato parts for. Maybe send it to a juice bar that blends tomatoes? I don't know if they do that, but someone somewhere must have a use for this? Maybe make it into food for animals? There just has to be something better than just throwing it out. It feels like such a waste, but I'm not about to challenge authority as a crew member who's pretty much the bottom of the totem pole. Especially since I need this job to help fill out my resume so I can maybe explore other paths in life.

I guess this is just a small price to pay (for salvation) so that the customer has pleasant looking tomatoes on their subs.