Where are the savvy shoppers?

I am a terrible grocery shopper. Just ask my wife. My failing lies not with budgeting; I’m very savvy when it comes to paying the best price or getting the best value for an item. No, my fault is buying some ingredients with the intent to use and then forgetting about them until they have sat in the refrigerator until they have gone sour, or rancid, or moldy.

As a result, Karen has taken over the shopping in our house. She sits down and plans menus for the week and then buys accordingly. I get to shop on weekends, only for what I might need to cook on Saturday and Sunday.

Purchasing is all about planning, whether I’m stocking my fridge or pantry or you are buying the staples you need for your next few menu cycles. The difference, of course, is that if I shop without planning, I throw away a half-empty container of ricotta cheese and waste a couple of dollars. If you follow the same M.O., you throw away pallets of food and cost your institutions thousands of dollars.

This is why scandals like the one currently unfolding in Boston Public Schools are so hard to fathom. Foodservice managers write menus for a set period of time, forecast their needs based on expected enrollments or patient census or customer counts, and purchase what they need. The very nature of forecasting suggests that sometimes you will buy more, or less, than you need. But by and large, you either hit your numbers or you realize that you’ve bought too much and you find a use for the overage.

But in the case of a large school district—and it almost always seems to be a school district—apparently food can be bought and stored away and then forgotten until the foods’ shelf life has winnowed away to nothing. Forgive my naivete; I haven’t worked in foodservice since my teenage years and never in purchasing. But how is this possible?

I understand the size and scope of the operations we’re talking about when we consider cities like Boston, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. I can even see how this might happen—once or even twice. But to have food expire repeatedly, and then either try to use the food or sweep the problem under the rug is more than just dishonest. It’s potentially deadly.

Am I off base to think that this sort of thing shouldn’t happen? I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue.