are restaurants the new addiction.

When I returned to work I got a new customer that I had never heard of. It was a order and eat type of place like your typical McDonald's or burger king.  It was in a new development where other convenient eateries are waiting to take your hard earned money turn it into a donut and coffee and wave you on your way. While i was servicing this place I couldn't help but notice how many loads of bread they have to keep in stock not to mention how much chicken beef or vegetables . I wondered how much of this stuff goes to waste and why this restaurant decided to be here in the first place. During the last 3 years I have seen a spike here in utah in food eateries.  Now I am all for free market to a certain extent but I just couldn't believe how many developments of restaurants and stores utah has had in the last 3 years not to mention all of the apartments townhouse and condos going up everywhere. Then I started thinking about restaurants. Are they the new addiction? Is having more restaurants around doing more damage then good?
In my line of work I have alot of customers who have ALOT of food waste and I'm not talking about the bad kind. I remember seeing a utah based company who specializes in soups salads and sandwiches where everyone thinks is "so good:/" throwthrow away barrels and I mean BARRELS of good 2foot long loaves of bread. I know of another popular restaurant in utah that specializes in made from scratch breads throw at least a barrel full of their popular bread  every 3 days. Gas stations probably throw away at least a third of their grill items and your grocery deli is the worst. You wonder why your macaroni Salad is 5.99 a pound? It's because half of it's THROWN AWAY!
Now i want to share with you why I am bringing this up. First of all I believe we here in utah and America but especially in Utah right now are eating out WAY too much. I've even noticed WOMEN are the worst.  I have been to several of these "popular" Utah based restaurants at lunch time and the majority of the customers are your stay at home moms meeting up with their friends for lunch. We are becoming addicted to their food. Another reason is food prices continuing to go up. Restaurants buy alot of food and turn around and sell it to their customers for profit then we go home buy food at the grocery store but don't end up eating it because we are lazy and don't want to make anything or we don't crave anything but we do crave southwest egg rolls or a ranch and bbq salad or maybe a juicy hamburger so we let our food go to waste while we go to the resturaunts where they produce more waste and more demand on our food supplies which makes the prices go up.
So I guess my point of this blog post is (and I'm getting bored of this posting) is to avoid eating out as much as you can when you have other bills to take care of. Get ahead of everyone. Their food is overpriced anyways. One more thing I thought of. When you buy a menu item do you ever think what goes into the calculation of the food. In short it's probably something like this. Cost of food, energy rent, loans, payroll, insurance, health coverage, taxes
 We are already paying that. Avoid restaurants and Learn how to cook. that is all.