@HeavenlyPossum when I worked grocery retail we had to separate all foods that could not be donated to the food bank by meat vs non meat. I tried to donate as much as I could but they would not allow us to donate meat if it went past the date, same with if it was a weekend because they didn't do pickups on weekends, and they figured deli stuff and bananas and avocados or whatever would not survive the weekend in the dairy cooler before being picked up Mondays.
It went down to the level of pulling apart deli sandwiches, and all the meat went into this big nasty trash can of old meat they called a "bone barrel" and I was the person made to do that a lot of the time when I worked in the meat department. All non-meats were poured together into a dumpster that during the summer was a foul brew of maggots and rotting food. It was a fuckin crime against me and my senses just like it was a crime against humanity to destroy edible food.