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…

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?