Some of my thoughts on this.
First, God bless those companies who donate the food products they can not sell and the people who work to distribute it to those who need it. This is how things should work.
Why would some companies not donate their products? Well, law suits for one. Somewhere along the line someone who received a free product like theirs got sick and perhaps died. Instant blame on the company that donated it. Lawsuit, probably by a law firm working on speculation and taking a percentage of the amount awarded. They don't sue the charitable organizations because that would be bad publicity and they probably don't have enough assets to make it worth their (the lawyer's) time.Do they sue the company who donated the food. After that, the lawyers for a company which may want to donate the same or a similar product advise them to just trash it instead of exposing them to possible legal action. That's far cheaper in the long run.
As for the recycled goods going to the truly deserving, that may be a hard one. I am sure that there are some who get these and other donations who do not really need or deserve them. But I am equally sure that there are others who are truly in need. I don't even try to speculate on the proportions of those groups. So, what should we do, stop all charitable activity? I don't think so. The world is not perfect and there are many imperfect people in it, myself included. That does not mean that we should not help those who need it.
"Wasting it by not recycling": In my humble opinion, there is absolutely no way that anything can be disposed of without it being recycled. EVERYTHING gets recycled. PERIOD! It may spend some time, even centuries, in a land fill, or even longer in the universe in general, but in the end it will be recycled. Even if you bury it so deep that it never comes to the surface again, it will be recycled. Even if you launch it into the sun or outer space, it will get recycled. Sooner our sun will go nova and turn itself and this ball of dirt we live on into interstellar gas. And that gas will go into the formation of new stars and new planets. AKA, RECYCLED. Everything gets recycled. And there is no way to stop that. Even with the "heat death" of the universe, there are theories that the reverse of the big bang will occur and the whole thing will start all over again. There is nothing we can do to defeat the mechanisms of the universe and those mechanisms include recycling. I worry very little about just what mechanism we use to recycle things.