Hacker News Reader

Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

> There’s a limit to how much food waste fertilizer can actually be used

once upon a time we fed food waste to animals to "recycle" the caloric content. Think table scraps(but not meat) going to pigs or chickens.

Would be interesting if we close the loop on this household content

Edit: Added note that I meant "vegan" scraps.

View on HN

Yes my uncle used to feed almost all food waste to his pigs. Then we ate the pigs. Unfortunately suburban Silicon Valley residents don't appreciate backyard pigs.

Chicken will eat a lot of table scraps and are backyard friendly in many places

Chickens will eat almost anything you throw at them.

Stopped in the UK due to BSE, and not being able to audit ingredients.

I wonder if cockcroach protein powder would bypass brain wasting disease and other nasties.

Black flies and worms are currently tested in The Netherlands. It’s 10 times more expensive vs other protein sources, mostly byproducts from human food production.

Dutch source: http://edepot.wur.nl/362233

I believe in China it was common to site toilets over pig stys. Some loop closing isn't a very good idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet

About 20 years ago I stayed for two weeks on a rural rice farm in Goa.

The toilets fed directly into the pig sty. Very directly down a short chute add though a hole. An eager pig snout poked through the hole could make contact. Never before nor never again have I been so startled.

But... why...

Pigs don’t eat human faeces...

Pigs eat anything. Well, maybe not rocks. I'm not sure about that though, they might still try.

If you want to see what happens when pigs that eat near human faeces are eaten by us: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/28/health/brain-parasites-case-s...

The CDC specifically say that you don’t get cysticerosis from eating pork, though the correlation with pigs eating human faeces is mentioned. As always, it seems that washing your hands is important.

https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/cysticercosis/index.html

I have seen first hand that they do, not that I wish I hadn't.

Pigs eat everything, including humans.

Pigs even eat pork. There is currently a problem with swine fever infected pork being reintroduced as feed in places like china. It is one of several vectors for the lethal (to pigs) disease.

Well to be fair, if you were served some nameless meat, would you be confident in your ability to identify human and/ or not like the taste of it?

Chickens will eat egg shells, and it's apparently a good source of minerals for them. You do have to scrunch them up, or else, from what I understand, they start associating egg shells with food, and start pecking their own eggs.

Its also good to bake them for a bit. It helps with the 'scrunching' and nutrient availability (so I've been told).

Gross.

Much of the 'compost' you receive at big-box stores is treated human waste: https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/frequent-questions-about-bioso...

Not much goes to waste in the USA on an industrial scale.

> Much of the 'compost' you receive at big-box stores is treated human waste: https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/frequent-questions-about-bioso...

I don't see anything on that page to support this specific claim.

Not "most", but there is milorganite.

https://www.milorganite.com/using-milorganite/what-is-milorg...

> So Milorganite is actually a bag of dried microbes!

great marketing

The page says "Biosolids are treated sewage sludge."

Sewage sludge is feces

Is feeding meat to chickens and pigs a bad idea? I get that brain matter could cause prion diseases in cows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com