People are very much on edge when it comes to food prices, especially considering the inflation we're now seeing under the Biden Administration. Americans are also very much on edge with the large number of incidents taking place at food manufacturing and food processing facilities across the country.

That being said, when someone sees a headline about a massive amount of fresh and frozen food being thrown out at a local landfill in Billings, Montana- it is going to generate some interest.

Earlier this week, I got e-mails from some of our listeners who saw a story posted at SteveQuayle.com. The website featured a letter from a "source" claiming that 60-70 tons of food had been taken to the landfill in Billings. It also claimed that the food came from 3 different box store grocery stores in the Billings area.

Since a few of our listeners reached out, I figured I would find out what happened, and see if there was any official word out there that we could share.

I did confirm that there was a freezer outage at the Sam's Club in Billings. A Wal Mart spokeswoman told me that the Billings location had a freezer outage over the weekend. As a result, the food did have to be thrown out.

The Wal Mart in Miles City also had a freezer outage last week, but the Wal Mart spokeswoman says those shortages had been resolved by Monday morning in Miles City.

So, how much food had to be thrown out and disposed of in Billings? I reached out to the City of Billings, which operates the landfill, and here's the response from Billings Public Works.

Debi Meling: The landfill does accept loads like this at times. Our records show a 3rd party hauler hauled five loads of food to us between 12:00 and 5pm, weighing anywhere from 5.5 tons to 7 tons. It is common for this to occur at landfills and is common for the staff of the respective companies to observe it being destroyed. From what I understand, there is a liability involved on the part of the stores to ensure the “spoiled” food is destroyed and not used.

 

Related: Billings landfill sees spike from Carbon County

LOOK: Food history from the year you were born

From product innovations to major recalls, Stacker researched what happened in food history every year since 1921, according to news and government sources.
 

 

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