How my employer can save thousands of dollars on soup; and, Antacids and stomach ulcers

I was going to put this on my regular blog. But as the writing went on, I became more and more grouchy and irritable - probably because I've had hardly anything to eat today, and was somewhat sick last night. So it was too hostile and angry to put it on my regular blog, if I didn't intend to be in open conflict against my employers.

I cut back my work hours to three days a week because of how sick I've been. I was planning to do that anyway, and was planning to get a second job, and work both jobs for three days, then have four days off. Now, it turns out that they cut my hours even more than I had wanted. So I have only one day of work next week.

Oddly enough, my response is to look on the bright side of this, and ask 'What will I do with all my free time?' There are dozens of urgent problems that I need to deal with, like the toxic house (which has improved, by the way, but I'll write about it later). So actually I am kind of glad to have extra free time. My money is going to run out very quickly and I am going to have to ask my parents to help. I would not have done this except that I really have been in a barely-livable situation for so long now. This was a life-or-death situation and I literally was almost passing out and fainting from the fumes in the house. I think it was bleach and ammonia.

Well, anyway, even as I'm glad to have some extra free time to deal with my emergencies, I am also 'disgruntled' about a lot of things at work, but I haven't been writing about them on this blog. But it seems safe enough to talk about the soup waste problem and how easy it would be to solve that problem. I can then tell myself that I'm a valuable, but unappreciated, employee with good ideas, even though I've been so sick that I could only move slowly and didn't feel like I could do as much work as I was supposed to.

So, what is the problem with soup?

We have three pots of soup at the salad bar every day. Behind the salad bar, there are usually three extra pots of backup soup warmed up, in case anything runs out. So we usually have six pots of soup warmed up at all times.

Backup soups are heated up ahead of time, because it's a large pot of soup, and it takes two hours to warm up. So you can't just quickly microwave a pot of soup in an emergency if it runs out. It has to be set up for at least two hours ahead of time. And you don't know for sure if anything will get used up or not. You just have to guess.

It all seems pretty straightforward so far.

But here is what happens. When soup, or any foods at all, are kept on heat for a long time, they deteriorate. The chemicals change. Oxidation of fats, denaturing of proteins, destruction of vitamins, and other chemical processes happen, and I'm not a chemist, so I don't know much of the details. But a lot of things change when a food is kept at high heat for hours upon hours upon hours.

Eventually, the quality of the food gets pretty bad. I know how it is: if you eat food that's been on heat for a very long time, it's so bad you can hardly swallow it. And it upsets your stomach, and causes reflux, and tries to come back up. If you have a sensitive stomach, like I do, it makes you feel like you're going to throw up.

I've had other customers complain about stomach problems after eating the hot foods, not just me alone. (The complaint was about the fried products, not the soup.) It isn't all that rare. But people hardly ever know what causes this problem, and instead of solving the problem (by switching to high-quality foods that aren't on heat all day long, but instead are freshly made new) they will go buy antacids and other over-the-counter drugs to fix the problem with their stomachs. And they tell stories of going to their doctor for recurring stomach problems and reflux, and their doctors never know what's causing it. They then prescribe (or give samples of) drugs like Prevacid. I know, because I have been there - in 1999 when I was sick, I was actually still going to doctors and hoping they could tell me something.

I am totally opposed to using antacids. I never, ever, ever use them. I also never use that pink liquid that I can't remember the name of.

One time, while working on a temp job, I mentioned to the lady beside me that my stomach was refluxing and I felt sick after eating. She gave me an antacid. I accepted it.

Shortly after taking the antacid, I felt as though a hole was burning in my stomach. I felt like I was getting an ulcer. This was worse than the original problem! The 'ulcer' lasted several days after taking only one antacid. I never took them again. And I never have any symptoms of ulcers. (The only other time I developed stomach ulcers was when I was selling blood plasma. They reassured everyone that donating plasma is totally harmless and safe, but I almost passed out several times after doing it, even though I was eating and drinking, and I developed stomach ulcers, which quickly healed by themselves after I stopped selling plasma. Plasma might have something to do with the immune system protecting you against stomach ulcers, but I don't know the details.)

Ulcers are caused by bacteria growing in the stomach, called helicobacter pylori. My theory is: when you use an antacid, you are shooting yourself in the foot - you get rid of stomach acid, which is your ONLY NATURAL DEFENSE against the growth of bacteria in the walls of the stomach! Stomach acid is good for you. It kills bacteria. When you get rid of acid, the bacteria are now safe and can grow easily without being destroyed. They then create ulcers.

Antacids cause ulcers. Don't use them. I'm pretty sure of it, especially after hearing stories about people who have ulcers and who use hundreds of antacids every day while they try to cope with the ulcers. It looks like they're making things worse, not better.

The point is that bad quality food can cause people to go to the doctor trying to solve the problem, or else they go buy over-the-counter drugs that make the problem even worse. To solve the problem, you only need to eat fresh foods. Avoid foods that are heated for a very long time, and avoid foods that are fried in old oxidized vegetable oils. Oxidized vegetable oils will give you 'charlie horses,' or severe leg muscle cramps that happen when you stretch or just move the wrong way, usually when you wake up in the morning. My nutrition teacher told us that, and I've observed it many times myself, from eating french fries at fast food places, but I can't find scientific papers talking about it and I don't know the technical words to describe this phenomenon. ('Charlie horse' isn't a scientific phrase that will help google take you to technical research papers.)

So I pay attention to bad quality food that's been heated for too long or reheated too many times.

But our soup isn't THAT bad. I've eaten it sometimes.

But here's the other problem:

After the soup has been heated for one day, we put it into the cooler and keep it. We are allowed to reheat the soup once. Then it has to be thrown away, after it's been reheated that one time. This is legitimate, because of everything that I said just now about the quality getting bad if it's heated too many times or too long.

So here is what happens.

The morning people heat up three freshly opened soups. After two hours, they put them on the salad bar, ready to serve. Then, they usually open three brand new freshly opened soups, and heat them for backup. This is typical.

They don't write anything about which soups are new, and which ones are reheats. I have no way of knowing this. It's supposed to be put in a book, and they make a big deal of writing the temperatures and all that, but they aren't following the instructions on the soup page. You are supposed to write an 'R' for reheat, and 'N' for new, and they totally ignore that. Meanwhile, I'm the one who puts them away at the end of the day, not knowing which ones need to be thrown out and which ones kept. But that's not the main part of the problem.

We hardly ever use much soup at all. Most of the time, the backups aren't needed. The soups on the bar will get a little bit taken out of them, almost nothing. At the end of the day, those soups are now tomorrow's reheats. So are all the backups. All six pots of soup are now 'reheats' instead of 'new.'

Tomorrow, all six soups will be thrown in the garbage after being reheated all day. Hardly anything will have been taken out of most of them. Only a few spoonfuls, most of the time. Some days are more busy. But it hardly ever runs out and you hardly ever need to go get out one of the backups.

Also, you don't just throw away reheats at the end of their second day. I am also required to throw away all soups that are LESS THAN HALF FULL, whether they are new or old! If a significant amount of soup has been taken out of the pot, I am supposed to dump it and weigh it, because it 'can't be put out that way,' half-full like that, because it doesn't look nice, and it's inconvenient, since you feel uncertain and insecure about whether maybe it will get used up, and you'd rather have it be low-maintenance and just not have to worry about it - you want to say it's full, it'll still be full hours from now.

Throwing away all six huge pots of soup: I have to dump them into a plastic container and weigh it to find out the cost of soup lost. This is always interesting. It'll often be, like, twenty or thirty pounds of soup. Over a week or so, we throw out hundreds of dollars worth of soup. Over a month or two, it's thousands of dollars.

This is not some trivial penny-pinching. This is THOUSANDS of dollars that can be drastically reduced instantly by doing a couple of small things differently. (In an irritable and disgruntled mood, I would call all of them morons and say they need to just use their brain cells once in a while.)

Here is how it should be done.

Day 1:

~Heat three fresh soups. Put on bar.
~Heat three backups if you feel like it. I wouldn't, but they insist. They won't get used, I know that.
~End of day: DON'T, I REPEAT, DON'T THROW AWAY any half-full soups!!! Keep them. They are tomorrow's BACKUPS.

Day 2:
~Put the FULLEST pots of soup on the bar (after warming them up of course). They are reheats. You are LIKELY to have at least three untouched pots of soup, because the backups are ALMOST NEVER used at all. If you ever used a backup the day before, it will only have one or two ladlefuls taken out.
~Put the EMPTIEST pots of reheated soup on BACKUP. These may be less than half full. These are the ones that 'can't be put out that way.' Normally, we'd have thrown them in the garbage, even if they were new that day, merely because they were no longer half full. So far, all of the soups warming up are yesterday's reheats. Nothing has been thrown away, unless you had a pot of soup so empty that you were practically scraping the bottom. I am telling you, they make you throw it away even if it is 1/3 full and there are still several pounds of perfectly good soup in the bottom. It is unthinkable to me, but this is what they do!
~It is very unlikely that any backup soups will even be put out on the bar. But if one of those on the bar does run out, you can put out a half-empty one, one of the 1/3 fulls that normally would be thrown in the garbage. You use those backups only if the ones on the bar are really scraping the bottom and can't get much out with the ladle.

Day 3:
~By now, some of the soups will have been mostly used up, and reheats are being thrown out. All six original soups are now second-day reheats and will all have to be thrown out.
~If you opened anything fresh on Day 2, put the freshest and fullest ones OUT ON THE BAR.
~Put the half-empty, or 1/3 fulls, or the REHEATS, on BACKUP. This includes anything which was 'new' yesterday, but half-full, and ones that 'you can't put it out there half full.'
~DON'T USE 'FIRST IN FIRST OUT!!!' First in first out means that you'll always be putting the lowest quality soups on the bar. Those are the reheats, first in, first out. Yesterday's half-ruined, bad-quality reheats will always end up on the bar. Don't do that. Keep the worst stuff on backup and avoid using it. Put freshest and fullest on the bar. Instead of 'first in, first out,' use the 'assume yesterday's reheats will probably get thrown in the garbage, and open as few new bags of soup as possible.' The goal is to always use the newest stuff on the bar, the oldest bad-quality stuff on backup, with half-full ones on backup also, regardless of 'first in first out.'

Argh, this is hard to explain. Yes, I'm not focused enough mentally to explain. The key concept is: DO NOT USE 'FIRST IN, FIRST OUT' ordering. Instead, always get the freshest stuff out on the bar, and the worst old half-full stuff on backup. Keep half-fulls and third-fulls on backup, and assume they'll never get used if the ones on the bar are full to the top. Don't even worry about whether they 'can't be put out 1/3 full.' You won't put them out, you'll put them on BACKUP.

I need to eat something. Maybe that's why I'm obsessing about food, while being too disorganized to explain myself clearly.

this is going to end up on retmeishka instead of my regular blog... it's too 'disgruntled and disorganized.'

I need to explain what it is that THEY do, and how it leads to thousands of dollars of wasted soup. I can tell that this is too disorganized to convince anyone. It needs to be described in step-by-step order, with both the 'good' method and the 'bad' method side by side to show what exactly is going on. I can only insist that I *KNOW* their way of doing it is totally idiotic and costing them THOUSANDS of dollars of soup being thrown out unnecessarily.

I'll write down the 'rules' for how to handle the soup. Then I'll write down my 'new rules' in contrast. (For instance, my rule says: DO NOT USE FIRST IN FIRST OUT.)