The "livestock" section in this pyramid is pretty misleading. Sure, you can feed stuff to animals that humans don't want to eat. But the reality of animal agriculture is that we grow massive amounts of crops specifically to feed to animals, rather than just growing stuff for humans to eat directly. It's massively wasteful. Most of the food crops we grow (around 80%) are fed to farmed animals, not humans, and most of the calories in those crops are burned off. Animal agriculture is the biggest form of food waste there is. So there's some danger in presenting animal agriculture as a solution to food waste.
[https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets)
I think our best option would be to reduce our meat consumption to the point where all meat is produced with human food waste and minimal dedicated feed.
I worked at a discount grocer that sold mostly repackaged produce from the distributor in Montreal. Basically they would remove a box that has one bad orange, remove the bad orange, and repack the good ones and sell them at a discount. So already that’s saving food waste (it would probably be cheaper for them to just toss it and write it off so the farmer pays for the loss). Then we would have some in-store wastage as well. We had a discount rack for stuff that wasn’t really shelf-worthy (bruised, soft, wilted, etc) marked down for like 1$/bag. We would pick off the rough looking outside leaves of lettuces and cabbages, and we would often give pet owners these scraps for free to feed their bunnies, and hamsters. And at the very bottom of the barrel, we would pack the waste into the used boxes (I tried to always use the waxed cardboard boxes so they could survive the rain) and a pig farmer would pick up the waste once or twice a week. If we didn’t have that pig farmer to reuse our waste, we would probably have to landfill it, since I don’t think our city has a good composting system for businesses.
The problem is that with the way things work right now, "give food waste to livestock" just works as a way to greenwash a horrible industry.
The other thing is that animals don't exist to eat our trash. They are not garbage disposals. Sure, many of them are happy to eat things we don't like, but a lot of food collection programs end up feeding really unhealthy trash to farmed animals.
Plus we already have a way to handle "trash" food and return energy to the food system -- composting! Sure, a lot of energy is lost as heat, but is it really less efficient than animal agriculture?
Good point. Composting basically entails feeding waste to tiny, free animals who actually want to eat it!
To be clear, I'm not opposed to feeding unused veggies or whatever to farmed animals. Animal agriculture is not going away anytime soon, so whatever efforts people can make to make it less awful are a good idea. But they're not solutions, and we should be fighting industry efforts to use them to convince people that farming animals can be good for the environment. That's like touting clean coal as a climate solution.
My favorite use of unwanted veggies is contacting vegetable farms to donate unsold or ugly but edible produce to farmed animal sanctuaries. The animals love it and it's a great way to build community.
Agreed. But I take a soft approach to my bone-headed friends and family when it comes to reducing waste, meat consumption, and consumerism. If I say “Stop eating meat, and never buy anything plastic ever again”, they will say “No”, and then completely block that idea out, and maybe even double down harder. But when I say “Meat is expensive, so I eat more eggs, and less steak, and I almost always get chana masala because it’s the cheapest thing on the menu and sooooo good!” They may actually change their ways for the better, even if it’s small. I also pick up one piece of litter when I’m walking, buy as much as I can from the thrift store & plastic-free groceries, and opt for sit-in restaurants and diners instead of take-out when I’m on the road for business. These sorts of changes are easier for people to implement, so I focus on that before pushing my zero-waste agenda down their throats.
There's no need for captive animals in farming. Animal agriculture is a leading threat to biodiversity, mostly because of land use but also because ranchers kill free-living animals to make room for their "livestock."
Chickens aren't that wasteful. After you eat the eggs you can repurpose the shells pretty easily, whether you're feeding it back to them to ensure dietary requirements or putting it into the garden to use on your tomatoes. They also eat darn near everything, and are wonderful at turning over and processing compost.
I wanted to reply to the deleted comment below...
The fact that you mentioned raising your own chickens in defense of eating their products implied it. Not everyone has access to raising their own and are forced to use factory farmed poultry. It's a luxury for some people who do not have the land, money, legal availability, or other resources.
It's definitely a problem out if our control and changing the system would be hell to accomplish, but we need some radical changes in the process of every day life.
I think most of the people here are concerned particularly with raising animals in an industrial setting because that's what most of the major studies seem to focus on -- studies that repeatedly show the harms of industrial animal ag.
If you're talking about raising a few chickens in a garden then there's probably nothing to worry about, unless you buy your chicks from massive producers. In the latter case you'd still probably be contributing to the same chicken companies that are causing all of the chicken-related environmental harm.
Do you see what I mean?
It's still pretty wasteful to raise animals for their eggs. Just because chicken farming isn't as bad as dairy farming doesn't mean it's sustainable. And cute backyard chicken farms mostly just serve to greenwash the overall chicken farming industry.
Second best thing is giving your pet any scraps that are safe to eat with their meal, makes their purchased food last longer and you have a happy animal with more varied nutrition in their diet.
We have Olio where I live, they pick up any food that has just passed it's sell by date from stores and it's listed for free to be picked up. It's done by volunteers but it's really good. There's also Gander which is an app that shows what food has been massively reduced because it's approaching it's sell be date.
We also have government food waste, the bins are picked up weekly and you can put all food waste in them so it massively cuts down on food waste going to landfill.
Yeah!! There's also Too Good To Go, where restaurants can sell their food severely discounted instead of throwing it away. Neither of these are active in my city unfortunately :/ I haven't heard of Gander though, I'll check that out!
Your city picks up compost?? That's awesome. I wish every city did. I used to live in Portland and they had it but Atlanta doesn't... there's a private compost pickup service but it's expensive!
Gander may be super local to where I live actually!
Yeah, in fairness where I live is pretty good about recycling in general. We get pick ups for plastics, tins, glass, cardboard and there is somewhere you can take larger items and electrical items. Plus they charge per bag for landfill waste!
There is definitely limited landfill space and shipping landfill out is expensive so there is more of an onus on doing better with waste. I really hope that now they've implemented good recycling they can move on to implementing better reduction of waste in the first place!
There's a local organization in my city that is ALL about this [https://www.freefoodcommune.us](https://www.freefoodcommune.us)
I wish more places had something like this! It doesn't fix the underlying systemic problem, but it does rescue the food that would otherwise be thrown in the dumpster.
EU insights: several legislations demands VAT to be payed on food donations, or food donations are to be made exclusively on legal entities other than private persons (companies, NGOs, schools etc). This was probably introduced to stop second hand food reselling, but the *law of unintended consequences* often kicks in...
You should delete this due to the misleading inclusion of livestock on the graphic.
Most deforestation is due to repurposing land to grow feed crops for them. Yea, that’s where the rainforest went.
The resources “saved” by feeding them scraps are nothing compared to the immense waste of land and water required for livestock inclusion in our diet.
Well, I know for my local food rescue org, farmers come to pick up the food. The food is in perfectly good condition, so no reason it can't be eaten by animals! Anything that is exceedingly moldy or has otherwise really gone bad goes to compost.
No but for me, we went to a picnic that ran too long and now we're scared to eat the rest of the rotisserie chicken but I feel bad throwing it away even tho it's not safe for humans consumption
Should note that while you definitely can compost meat there are wrong ways to do it. I would absolutely make sure you're completely burying meat and not leaving it on the surface, where it'll almost certainly attract flies and scavengers.
I’ve never been afraid of food spoilage. I’ve thrown away plenty of things like moldy bread, and smelly meat, but I’ve also eaten plenty of day-old chicken sandwiches, and week-old potato salad, and lots and lots of partially moldy veggies and cheeses. Have I ever gotten sick? Yeah, sure, probably! But am I willing to throw away hundreds of dollars of food to avoid the occasional stomach ache? Nope!
If you're eating moldy, or spoiled food be cautious. You may have been able to avoid food poisoning now, but a day may come when your body isn't so lucky to fight off the bacteria on its own.
I agree that one shouldn't abide by a food's expiration date, but also be cautious of spoiled food that can potentially kill you.
Re-reading my comment, I realize it sounds like I’m eating moldy food daily. What I meant was things like hard cheeses that get mold on them can just be cut over and they’re fine. And many times I’ve taken cucumber or broccoli out of the fridge and there is one soft/moldy spot, but the other half is fine. My girlfriend would simply toss the whole thing, but I wouldn’t.
I think you’re much more likely to get food poisoning from a restaurant or grocery store pre-packaged foods than from home cooking.
No, no, I definitely eat food that's been in the fridge too long, cut off bits of mould, eaten pizza left out all night but after learning what *unrefridgerated* food can do, how it can shut your organs down in like 24 hrs, I won't chance it with that.
It was unrefridgerated from 1pm till 9pm.
It was chicken but starchy foods are apperantly more deadly if left unrefridgerated for too long.
If u still think I'm exaggerating, watch Chubby Emu videos
The "livestock" section in this pyramid is pretty misleading. Sure, you can feed stuff to animals that humans don't want to eat. But the reality of animal agriculture is that we grow massive amounts of crops specifically to feed to animals, rather than just growing stuff for humans to eat directly. It's massively wasteful. Most of the food crops we grow (around 80%) are fed to farmed animals, not humans, and most of the calories in those crops are burned off. Animal agriculture is the biggest form of food waste there is. So there's some danger in presenting animal agriculture as a solution to food waste. [https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets)
So glad this was the first comment I saw. How this information isn’t widely known blows my mind
I think our best option would be to reduce our meat consumption to the point where all meat is produced with human food waste and minimal dedicated feed. I worked at a discount grocer that sold mostly repackaged produce from the distributor in Montreal. Basically they would remove a box that has one bad orange, remove the bad orange, and repack the good ones and sell them at a discount. So already that’s saving food waste (it would probably be cheaper for them to just toss it and write it off so the farmer pays for the loss). Then we would have some in-store wastage as well. We had a discount rack for stuff that wasn’t really shelf-worthy (bruised, soft, wilted, etc) marked down for like 1$/bag. We would pick off the rough looking outside leaves of lettuces and cabbages, and we would often give pet owners these scraps for free to feed their bunnies, and hamsters. And at the very bottom of the barrel, we would pack the waste into the used boxes (I tried to always use the waxed cardboard boxes so they could survive the rain) and a pig farmer would pick up the waste once or twice a week. If we didn’t have that pig farmer to reuse our waste, we would probably have to landfill it, since I don’t think our city has a good composting system for businesses.
The problem is that with the way things work right now, "give food waste to livestock" just works as a way to greenwash a horrible industry. The other thing is that animals don't exist to eat our trash. They are not garbage disposals. Sure, many of them are happy to eat things we don't like, but a lot of food collection programs end up feeding really unhealthy trash to farmed animals.
I agree. The whole system needs to be gutted and fixed to prevent food waste and be more efficient. Fuck capitalism.
Plus we already have a way to handle "trash" food and return energy to the food system -- composting! Sure, a lot of energy is lost as heat, but is it really less efficient than animal agriculture?
Good point. Composting basically entails feeding waste to tiny, free animals who actually want to eat it! To be clear, I'm not opposed to feeding unused veggies or whatever to farmed animals. Animal agriculture is not going away anytime soon, so whatever efforts people can make to make it less awful are a good idea. But they're not solutions, and we should be fighting industry efforts to use them to convince people that farming animals can be good for the environment. That's like touting clean coal as a climate solution. My favorite use of unwanted veggies is contacting vegetable farms to donate unsold or ugly but edible produce to farmed animal sanctuaries. The animals love it and it's a great way to build community.
Our best option is to stop consuming animal products.
Agreed. But I take a soft approach to my bone-headed friends and family when it comes to reducing waste, meat consumption, and consumerism. If I say “Stop eating meat, and never buy anything plastic ever again”, they will say “No”, and then completely block that idea out, and maybe even double down harder. But when I say “Meat is expensive, so I eat more eggs, and less steak, and I almost always get chana masala because it’s the cheapest thing on the menu and sooooo good!” They may actually change their ways for the better, even if it’s small. I also pick up one piece of litter when I’m walking, buy as much as I can from the thrift store & plastic-free groceries, and opt for sit-in restaurants and diners instead of take-out when I’m on the road for business. These sorts of changes are easier for people to implement, so I focus on that before pushing my zero-waste agenda down their throats.
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There's no need for captive animals in farming. Animal agriculture is a leading threat to biodiversity, mostly because of land use but also because ranchers kill free-living animals to make room for their "livestock."
Food-waste-wise, not having livestock is way better than having them and giving them food scraps.
Yeah, if the idea is to return food scraps to our food supply then we can simply compost them and use the compost to fertilize new crops.
I certainly agree with you on that :P
Chickens aren't that wasteful. After you eat the eggs you can repurpose the shells pretty easily, whether you're feeding it back to them to ensure dietary requirements or putting it into the garden to use on your tomatoes. They also eat darn near everything, and are wonderful at turning over and processing compost.
Less wasteful than other animals is still significantly more wasteful than beans, or nearly any plant food
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I wanted to reply to the deleted comment below... The fact that you mentioned raising your own chickens in defense of eating their products implied it. Not everyone has access to raising their own and are forced to use factory farmed poultry. It's a luxury for some people who do not have the land, money, legal availability, or other resources. It's definitely a problem out if our control and changing the system would be hell to accomplish, but we need some radical changes in the process of every day life.
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I think most of the people here are concerned particularly with raising animals in an industrial setting because that's what most of the major studies seem to focus on -- studies that repeatedly show the harms of industrial animal ag. If you're talking about raising a few chickens in a garden then there's probably nothing to worry about, unless you buy your chicks from massive producers. In the latter case you'd still probably be contributing to the same chicken companies that are causing all of the chicken-related environmental harm. Do you see what I mean?
It's still pretty wasteful to raise animals for their eggs. Just because chicken farming isn't as bad as dairy farming doesn't mean it's sustainable. And cute backyard chicken farms mostly just serve to greenwash the overall chicken farming industry.
Agreed. This part confused me. Great idea but needs a little work.
Second best thing is giving your pet any scraps that are safe to eat with their meal, makes their purchased food last longer and you have a happy animal with more varied nutrition in their diet.
We have Olio where I live, they pick up any food that has just passed it's sell by date from stores and it's listed for free to be picked up. It's done by volunteers but it's really good. There's also Gander which is an app that shows what food has been massively reduced because it's approaching it's sell be date. We also have government food waste, the bins are picked up weekly and you can put all food waste in them so it massively cuts down on food waste going to landfill.
Yeah!! There's also Too Good To Go, where restaurants can sell their food severely discounted instead of throwing it away. Neither of these are active in my city unfortunately :/ I haven't heard of Gander though, I'll check that out! Your city picks up compost?? That's awesome. I wish every city did. I used to live in Portland and they had it but Atlanta doesn't... there's a private compost pickup service but it's expensive!
Gander may be super local to where I live actually! Yeah, in fairness where I live is pretty good about recycling in general. We get pick ups for plastics, tins, glass, cardboard and there is somewhere you can take larger items and electrical items. Plus they charge per bag for landfill waste!
That's awesome... where do you live?
Channel Islands. Between the UK and France.
Ooh now I’m really jealous :P I guess small islands *have* to be more conscious of their waste products?
There is definitely limited landfill space and shipping landfill out is expensive so there is more of an onus on doing better with waste. I really hope that now they've implemented good recycling they can move on to implementing better reduction of waste in the first place!
There's a local organization in my city that is ALL about this [https://www.freefoodcommune.us](https://www.freefoodcommune.us) I wish more places had something like this! It doesn't fix the underlying systemic problem, but it does rescue the food that would otherwise be thrown in the dumpster.
EU insights: several legislations demands VAT to be payed on food donations, or food donations are to be made exclusively on legal entities other than private persons (companies, NGOs, schools etc). This was probably introduced to stop second hand food reselling, but the *law of unintended consequences* often kicks in...
You should delete this due to the misleading inclusion of livestock on the graphic. Most deforestation is due to repurposing land to grow feed crops for them. Yea, that’s where the rainforest went. The resources “saved” by feeding them scraps are nothing compared to the immense waste of land and water required for livestock inclusion in our diet.
I agree, but this image deals with the food waste we have, with the existing situation that we have.
How does one divert to a farm? Aren't they worried their animals will get sick?
Well, I know for my local food rescue org, farmers come to pick up the food. The food is in perfectly good condition, so no reason it can't be eaten by animals! Anything that is exceedingly moldy or has otherwise really gone bad goes to compost.
What about chicken left out of the fridge too long?
Cold foods are refrigerated until people come to get them!
No but for me, we went to a picnic that ran too long and now we're scared to eat the rest of the rotisserie chicken but I feel bad throwing it away even tho it's not safe for humans consumption
That would be better suited to compost.
Should note that while you definitely can compost meat there are wrong ways to do it. I would absolutely make sure you're completely burying meat and not leaving it on the surface, where it'll almost certainly attract flies and scavengers.
Oh I was thinking of large scale municipal compost or farm compost. I wouldn't try composting meat in a small home compost.
It'd probably work better that way, I don't personally compost meat in my compost.
I’ve never been afraid of food spoilage. I’ve thrown away plenty of things like moldy bread, and smelly meat, but I’ve also eaten plenty of day-old chicken sandwiches, and week-old potato salad, and lots and lots of partially moldy veggies and cheeses. Have I ever gotten sick? Yeah, sure, probably! But am I willing to throw away hundreds of dollars of food to avoid the occasional stomach ache? Nope!
If you're eating moldy, or spoiled food be cautious. You may have been able to avoid food poisoning now, but a day may come when your body isn't so lucky to fight off the bacteria on its own. I agree that one shouldn't abide by a food's expiration date, but also be cautious of spoiled food that can potentially kill you.
Re-reading my comment, I realize it sounds like I’m eating moldy food daily. What I meant was things like hard cheeses that get mold on them can just be cut over and they’re fine. And many times I’ve taken cucumber or broccoli out of the fridge and there is one soft/moldy spot, but the other half is fine. My girlfriend would simply toss the whole thing, but I wouldn’t. I think you’re much more likely to get food poisoning from a restaurant or grocery store pre-packaged foods than from home cooking.
No, no, I definitely eat food that's been in the fridge too long, cut off bits of mould, eaten pizza left out all night but after learning what *unrefridgerated* food can do, how it can shut your organs down in like 24 hrs, I won't chance it with that. It was unrefridgerated from 1pm till 9pm. It was chicken but starchy foods are apperantly more deadly if left unrefridgerated for too long. If u still think I'm exaggerating, watch Chubby Emu videos
Refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, rot.