What you rarely hear about is the gross amount of waste.
People are especially wasteful when the food is 'free' and plentiful. If you watch waiters that are removing plates during a typical cruise ship meal many/most contain uneaten portions.
Which is why some all-you-can-eat restaurants have started charging for uneaten food that's ordered but left on the plate i.e. sushi places especially.
> If you watch waiters that are removing plates during a typical cruise ship meal many/most contain uneaten portions.
Lunch and on some lines for dinner perhaps, but the line I've often travelled on you have the executive chef walking round at dinner and inspecting the returned plates to assess the quantities remaining (and whether any dishes perform better than others).
It's the buffet that has the potential for greater waste, but you often see them rotate leftovers for a couple of days.
They're certainly not great, but I've seen greater per-person waste in hotel breakfasts (or basically any free buffet scenario as you say).
The bigger amount of waste is from food prepared in excess to demand. That's why food is repurposed as much as possible - leftover meat into stews, leftover vegetables into hash etc.
Yup. Kitchen makes a few hundred sheet pans of stuff according to a menu that's set well in advance (so that the ship can take on the proper supplies) and then because of the way things just happen to turn out certain dishes will get mostly eaten and others mostly trashed.
You simply can't optimize beyond a certain level because you need room to absorb changes in customer demand. You can't not serve soup on Thursday because the customers ate all your beef Wednesday and you have no stock.
People are especially wasteful when the food is 'free' and plentiful. If you watch waiters that are removing plates during a typical cruise ship meal many/most contain uneaten portions.
Which is why some all-you-can-eat restaurants have started charging for uneaten food that's ordered but left on the plate i.e. sushi places especially.