Should restaurants donate excess food? The answer is not so simple.
At the end of the day, Karen Paek loaded up her car with several garbage bags of unsold loaves of bread and drove to a homeless women’s shelter on Los Angeles’ downtown Skid Row. Paek, the manager of Bread Lounge, a café and bakery in LA’s trendy Arts District only a mile from Skid Row, had donated bread before, but this time the shelter politely declined.
“The front desk person gave me a look and said, ‘Oh, more bread?,” Paek said. There were rows of tents outside the shelter, so Paek offered free bread to the homeless people living there. “People would look inside the bags and say no thanks, or just walk away,” she said.