Far too much food is just binned if somebody is too full, needs to leave early, or similar, and if food wasn’t wasted, there would not be nearly as large of a hunger crisis. Encouraging the reduction of food waste is great, but I’m wondering whether the inevitable food waste could be collected in special bins and be reprocessed into a mixture of various foods, a bit like recycled plastic almost. This obviously could be bad for those with allergies, and there’s no clear expiry date for such a mixed assortment of food. There is also the trouble of people throwing in non food items, like tissues and plastic wrapping. This is already a big problem in recycling!
An alternative could be to separate food waste into multiple bins (meats, vegetables, nuts, dairy, etc.) that could be individually processed, kind of like how recycling is separated into paper, plastic, and cans. Then, allergens could be separated, vegetarian unfriendly products too, and the reprocessed food would be less of a mix and could be portioned into balanced diets.
Some food waste is already processed to become compost, but I’m wondering whether it’s possible for reprocessed food waste to be edible and eaten over being dumped in landfills?
Restaurant waste, which is what your post body starts with, can’t be recycled like that. It’s an unsafe practice due to the contamination gained at the table combined with time out of the temperature safe zone. Even if you killed an the pathogens there, the risk of the toxins left by those pathogens is problematic. That and it would ruin the food trying to kill them to a reasonable degree.
Now, back in the kitchen, you could do what some restaurants do and donate the prepared but unserved food to local distribution centers (often focused on homeless charities or government outlets). But it wouldn’t make sense to turn it into some kind of “nutrition loaf”. Seriously, look up that term and be prepared to hate the prison system more than you do currently.
And that is why even if the process could be perfectly safe, it would still suck. Nobody should have to eat the horrible crap that it would turn into. If would be cheaper, safer, and more humane to just make sure everyone has good food to eat in the first place.
The only application for the kind of bricks you’d get from the process is feeding people that don’t have access to good, healthy food in the first place.
Bacterial contamination, fungal contamination, toxicological contamination from fungi and bacteria, other sorts of contamination (rodents, worms and shit).
Short answer is No. Long answer: Hell no.
We can easily grow more plants than humanity can collectively eat, and still have plants left over for global industries. Food is abundant. There is just no need to be that frugal with food. The problem of hunger does not come from lack of food, it comes from avarice.
and a lack of companies with ethics. shipping companies often make massive profits. there is nothing stopping them from shipping donations for free…
Hunger is not caused by people not finishing what is on their plate or by allowing over-ripe fruits and vegetables to be discarded.
Hunger is caused by our profit based food distribution system.
People with little or no money get little or no food. It sucks, but that is how it works.
Unless you can somehow take the profit away from the final destination so that anyone who wants food can have food, that will not change. I can’t even imagine a way to do it in an equitable fashion without a cultural shift away from money and towards having a healthy community that cares about the individual humans and is willing to share equally to do it.
Cause that sounds nasty.
Aside from the fact that hunger is not caused by lack of food but by a capitalist distribution of means of subsistence, that also sounds profoundly unsafe. So you want to grind raw meat, raw eggs, with berries, leeks, idk what else, and hope for the best? Some of the food might have been on the verge of expiration. If some of the food was bad now all of it is bad because you mixed it all up. Different ingredients need different cooking methods, temperatures, times, etc. Some of your paste will be cooked to inedibility whilst some of it won’t be at a food-safe temperature yet. Even if it didn’t cost anything to implement this, no one had any dietary requirements, etc, this food would just be unsafe to eat.
Not to mention that their idea is focused on people’s unfinished meals, so now you have a bunch of new pathogens to worry about.
Maybe feed the scraps to chickens then eat their eggs? Seems cleaner and easier.
I would much rather that than eating someone else’s roats lamb from a month ago, even if it were “processed” (I guess you mean dehydrated ?)
There are food safety considerations, but feeding pigs with waste food is a practice. Like food that stores throw out shortly after their expiration.
That’s cruel and requires violence. There are situations that justify cruelty and violence, but given that there is no food scarcity, it is not justified now.
Feeding chickens and eating eggs is cruel and violent?
I’d love to hear your misguided reasoning.
I said eggs not butchering them for meat !!!
Explain yourself.
not op, but I assume they are vegan. many vegans have the misconception any product from a animal is violence against them. as they cannot consent…
but the truth is, no vegans live on farms… they don’t understand chickens lay unfirtalized eggs regardless.
they also see the breeding programs of chickens as violent as it’s for producing meat/eggs. so by raising chickens you are perpetuating it… but that’s stupid. that’s like seeing a hurt dog by the side of the road and saying “if we help that one we have to help all of them”. baby chicks are often given away not sold…
Just to add, a lot of vegans (not all) ride their high-horse on their moral high-ground and judge, if not outright insult/shame non-vegans for their choice to not be vegan. A lot like how many religions shame each other for not believing the ‘right’ thing.
‘A few bad apples spoil the bunch,’ as they say. The most vocal also make the group as a whole, difficult to tolerate.
Pathogens could easily spread this way since your collection bin would require to meet hygiene standards (i.e. cooling and rodent-free) and you would need to make sure the people treat the scraps they throw in right. And are not such with gastroenteritis or similar diseases.
If you had a magic wand which removes all pathogens, your approach becomes viable I guess.
A waste food purée doesn’t really sound very appealing. So what is stopping me is that this sounds like quite a bit of effort for something that I don’t even want.
But you’re free to collect my food waste and do what ever you want with it.
I mean you could do all that, make it taste good, even solve the issue with allergies, but i reckon most people would say “ew im not eating that wtf”. Also from the amount of distrust in the government and corporations, you’d probs also get people thinking its bad for them regardless of facts and evidence
This might pass US food standards, but I can imagine the rest of the world would have a few objections.
There’s too many factors over which there is virtually no control, such as other things ending up in the food bin (plastic wrappers, people’s saliva, etc). It would be classified as not fit for human consumption.
as soon as food starts the process of production, before it even hits a preparation or cooking surface it has bacteria on it. nothing is completely clean.
freezing, washing and cooking ingredients reduces these or makes them go dormant. but it does not get rid of them entirely.
when it’s plated and served, that bacteria is already stating to revive and reproduce. by the end of a meal, between all the new nutrients from the human body added to the plate from the utensils, the leftover food is a breeding ground. this is why leftovers are generally considered risky if not handled properly.
you simply cannot reliably disinfect them and the only things you can do is store it in a chilled environment to slow bacterial growth and reheat to aid in killing some but not all of that new growth off.
if you start mixing these together, the salavia, which is unavoidable as spittle occurs whether you notice it or not, and trace amounts are on your utensils from mouth contact. plus any airborne contaminants from the person are in the food.
it basically becomes a Petri dish. as it’s a perfect microcosm for bacteria and mold…
we used to grow mold, yeast and fungus by spitting on potatoes and rice. to later harvest it. we understand it well.
Yucky
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!!
you mean like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf or what
there no benifits to this. extreme bacterial contaminations and mold/fungus concerns aside, there is simply too much unprocessed food available that goes unsold and is wasted as a result to ever need to recort to this.
it’s not a ecology issue, there has never been a shortage of “food”. when people say there is a “Shortage of food”, what they mean is there is a shortage of food /given/ to them.
it’s a economic shortage of food. they do not have enough wealth to acquire food and therefore they are not getting any. greed is the reason there is so much food wasted. not at the table, but at the market.
governments should be subsidising the poor and supporting their food needs by taking excess from markets at value, not margin.
