I’ve been calling around various grocery stores this week, trying to get a hold of pork fat trimmings so that I can make my own lard for some recipes. One of the stores I called today said that they couldn’t give me the trimmings because they don’t have a code for it. I forget exactly what I said, but it was something to the effect of, “so you’re just going to throw it away instead?” “Yes.”
I understand that it does require some effort to separate from the rest of the waste, so I don’t mind paying a bit, but its upsetting that they have no way to pass scraps along to someone who will use them instead of just tossing them in the waste.
Edit for anyone invested: I called around to a few other stores after making this post. One or two mentioned that they don’t necessarily throw all of those bits away, but often use them for other products, such as sausages. I also found a store that will be putting aside their trimmings for me tomorrow, and they should have more than I need. It’s almost an hour away on the bus, but right next to another store that should have any other hard to find ingredients that I’ll need for the tamales.
Also interesting was that different locations of the same chains had different answers for me regarding even their ability to provide the scraps to me, so the suggestions that a manager might be able to make it happen are probably very accurate.
If it’s so much effort to try and get fat trimmings from butchers, why not just buy a block of lard from the supermarket?
My main reasoning is that I just wanted to try making it from scratch at least once, just for the experience. A secondary reason is that I guess I’m technically looking for “manteca de puerco”, which has more pork flavor than the shelf stable lard available at the closest grocery stores, so I have to make a special trip to get the right stuff anyway, and I’m just exploring my options as to how to get a hold of the necessary ingredients.
Where I grew up, there’s multiple huge Mexican grocery stores, so it’s easy to get exactly what I need in one stop, but where I live now, I have to go to multiple stores to get everything, and still have to make do with some minor substitutions (eg. frozen banana leaves instead of fresh).
Fair enough, I agree the situation is mildly infuriating, whatever the reason you wanted it. A lot of restaurant/pub chains over here will throw out extra food if they prepped too much, rather than letting staff take it, probably because they don’t want people creating waste on purpose but also don’t want to spend the minimal effort required to stop people abusing the system if they allowed people to take excess food home. The distrust of low paid workers leads to most stores being unable to deal with special requests unless you are speaking to the manager and I don’t know where I’m going with this…