Food waste responsible for 10% of global emissions?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
1) It counts the non-edible portion of food as "waste". Consider this just in terms of bananas: About 50 billion tons of bananas are produced each year. The banana peel, not edible, is about 30% of the banana weight, which means you're already ready starting with 15 billion tons of supposed waste on bananas alone.
2) A significant amount of waste not accounted for in the underlying UN report is actually not wasted: If not suitable for human consumption it is often used in animal feed (often pig slop) or composted back into productive material for further use on the farm.
3) Even food that is well & truly wasted isn't really contributing all of its carbon or the emissions released to grow it back into the atmosphere because carbon is actually sequestered in the food itself, the same way and for the same reasons that planting new trees sequesters carbon.
I am by no means an anthropomorphic climate change denier, but sloppy studies like this do significant damage to the cause by giving such people ample ammunition by which to paint the entire body of science with the same "fake news" brush.
People have to eat. How do we cut down emissions from food waste?
-eat within growing seasons. bananas in Greenland have a much larger distance to travel, loss of stock increases.
-aesthetics, a wonky looking apple is less likely to make it into the grocery store(even if taste and nutritional value is no different)
https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/108605509324443238...
Considering how bad many people are at managing their finances(USA credit card debt, I'm looking at you), it's no wonder people buy groceries that end up in the waste bin.
Distinguishing needs from wants
and
Estimating how much of something is necessary to fulfill a need.
The recipe for a cake I made recently calls for 14 oz of maple syrup. I can buy it only in 12.7 oz bottles.
Bananas everywhere not tropical have this issue, but they're also picked very green and ripened locally. Container shipping is very efficient, so I'm not sure if this is really a problem. It's even possible that if you live near a major port, bananas have fewer emissions than apples that were trucked 400 miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...
For a container ship this is inverted, so I'd expect CO2-neutral shipping to use minimally-processed biofuel in a turbine power plant. Or nuclear, of course.
what’s more efficient? not eating tomatoes in Quebec.
For those who can and are willing, there are a number of things you can do as an individual. They mainly come down to the three Rs environmentalists would have us apply to our waste stream in general: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, ideally in that order.
Reduce: Focus on right-sizing your purchasing of perishables, so to minimize the amount of spoilage you have to throw away. Also work on right-sizing the amount of food you prepare, to minimize the amount of leftovers you have to throw away. Taking the time to do some meal planning for the week can help with this.
Deliberately purchase the ugly perishables in the grocery store. Often, meat near its sell-by date and misshapen vegetable produce are heavily discounted to incentivize its purchase so the store doesn't have to throw it away. Said discounted perishables are often perfectly functional. The lopsided apple still tastes like apple. You were going to marinate that flank steak anyway, which turns beef brownish in color, so who cares if a corner of it is turning from red to brown? Have means of preservation and storage can also help. Fruits can be dehydrated and turned from a perishable to a non-perishable that can be stored long term. Even a small chest freezer lets you keep the meat you know you won't get to this week.
Reuse: Find ways to recook your leftovers. Still have a chicken breast from dinner a couple days ago? Shredded chicken enchiladas. Instant ramen is kind of boring. Instant ramen with the leftover porkchop chopped up and mixed in is not only less boring flavor-wise, but is also more nutritious. The ham from Easter dinner makes a fine addition to the morning omlet.
Also the not-directly-edible portions of many foods can be put to use. Citrus rinds can be dried and used as a spice for appropriate recipes, or to add some extra flavor to your green tea. Meat bones can be boiled or simmered to make a broth or stock that can serve as the base for soups, gravies, and other foods. The pits of stone fruit can be roasted to destroy the cyanide-producing compounds and turn the kernels into a nutty snack. And so on.
Recycle: Your spoilage and non-edibles can be composted. This is actually better than the landfill. The decomposition that happens in a landfill is largely anerobic, and produces methane and other gases that have higher global warming potential than CO2. The decomposition that happens in a compost pile is aerobic. Yes, aerobic decomposition does emit CO2, but not all of the carbon added to the pile becomes CO2. A good deal of it becomes sequestered in the produced compost.
Even if you don't have the space to compost your food waste because you live in an apartment, you can still compost. Odds are, there's one or more compost collective in your city that will be happy to collect your food waste on the regular and provide a bin for you to use.
The headline says "Food Got Wasted — Mostly at Home" but the article seems to say that this applies to "food available to consumers", i.e. it is only really measuring the quantity of waste as household vs catering/restaurants.
Since more food must surely be eaten at home than elsewhere, it's not surprising that food waste is produced at home is first out of two options.
The article later admits that a higher quantity of food is 'wasted' before it reaches stores.
other than the cost of transportation and storage. the the decomposition phase, which produces quite a lot of greenhouse gases.
http://www.fao.org/economic/est/est-commodities/bananas/bana...
Yes, other sources are taking between 80 to 115 million, but if I have to choose the UN over National Geographic, I'm choosing the UN source. though I acknowledge that the UN could still have had a typo.
If one banana weighs 120 grammes [1], then 6 tons / 120 grammes = 5000 bananas per year. I'm not sure that the average person eats 13 bananas a day.
--- [1]: https://whatthingsweigh.com/how-much-does-a-banana-weigh/
> High, acute potassium intakes have been associated with symptoms related to neuromuscular dysfunction, including weakness, paralysis, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. These symptoms, however, do not consistently develop prior to life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK545424/
That said, radioactive isotopes that make it into the digestive tract are far more dangerous than external exposure (and then again, the potassium isotopes aren't accumulated so it might be a wash)
So about 130 bananas a year per person? That seems like a lot: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=117+million+metric+ton...
(2) the report distinguishes food loss (harvest, initial processing, transport etc.) from food waste (at home, in restaurants and cafetarias) and explicitly discusses only the latter
(3) the CO2 stat is just a spiel, there's many other reasons to dislike food waste
The report and the development of the index is not misleading at all. On the other hand, the way it was pitched to the media is questionable, and I've got to think that some of the people who worked very hard on this must be rolling their eyes.
They can't just ignore that because ignoring it makes things easy to measure. They don't get to do a bad job just because doing it right is hard. Even a tough estimate to give an upper & lower bound would have been fine.
My job it to analyze data & write code in support of that analysis. I don't get to ignore categorical variations or a dozen different edge cases just because a general rule is easier: "Hi boss, it would take 500 more lines of code to get you the correct answer so I skipped that to give you a wrong one instead" I would get fired.
2) I don't think their definition is perfectly clear on exactly where they draw the line between these categories, but either way there is still significant amounts of food that is "wasted" in these end-user locations that actually goes on to be useful in some ways: Many areas of the world routinely compost anything they can and feed it back into the farming ecosystem even after it gets to what this reports calls waste.
3) Sure, but that's not the topic. The fact that food waste is also bad in other ways is no reason to produce a misleading report like this that climate deniers will use as anti-science fodder because, as I said initially, I don't know what the real number is, but I absolutely know it's not what this UN report claims. Criticizing this report doesn't imply someone thinks wasting food is okay. Pointing to other reasons that waste is bad is a rhetorical diversion, nothing more.
What I meant re: the CO2 statistic is that that's only a very, very small part of what the report is about, that unfortunately is getting a lot of attention. You're absolutely right that it's misleading to use this information as a headline, but the report and the associated UN effort is simply about how to reduce food waste, as a part of the sustainable development goals for 2030: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal12
I'm not allowed to do that sort of thing when the data is reasonably available. The UN could have obtained at least enough data to get an estimate rather than ignoring it completely. The Department of Agriculture in the US and similar organizations all over the world actually provide databases on their specifications for inedible portions of many specific foods. The UN could have at least used the US data alone, along with research showing that food waste in the US tends to be higher than other parts of the world, to place a probable upper-bound on this.
I think we can agree there's not a hard & fast rule here about when to use estimates and when to get full (or at least more) data. I sometimes have to impute values where data is available but it would take many hours of someone's time going through countless boxes of documents in cold storage and doing manual data entry with them. If the missing data is small enough or the issue is of low enough importance, I do the best I can. However a recent project of mine did actually involve having a few people go back into those files and get a random sampling of the data so that I could make reasonable estimates.
It all comes down to resources & importance. So lets look at this situation through that lens with the UN: Resources? The UN absolutely has them, and this information is neither unavailable nor unreasonably burdensome to gather enough for an estimate. Importance? It doesn't get much more important than a report intended to be used to guide global food & climate policy at the highest levels. The UN department that produced this report has an annual budget around $500 million/year [0], and this is one of their landmark publications: They have the resources, and this is important, they shouldn't have ignored the issue.
I also don't think the headlines were unreasonable in leading with that given the report's contents: Literally the first sentence of the report is about the climate impact of food waste. Media often gets science interpretation wrong, but when the first sentence of a report is:
"If food loss and waste were a country, it would be the third biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions"
Given that, I think it's reasonable for reporters to lead with a similar headline. I don't blame the reporters here, or at least it's not where I assign the majority of blame.
[0] https://www.unep.org/about-un-environment/funding-and-partne...
FWIW, at a first glance, I think the report [1] looks well-executed and talks about a lot of quite subtle aspects of food waste, e.g. it breaks everything down by sector and by where in the supply chain waste occurs, and it acknowledges cultural aspects to food waste such as whether we consider bones or skins to be edible or inedible. It's just that its main goal is to provide indicators of how well different countries fare in reducing food waste and for that purpose the absolute numbers matter much less than how much the indicator changes over time.
The absolute number could never be zero anyway, because you'd need a perfect just-in-time supply chain, refrigeration that never breaks down, predictable crop yields that don't vary too much from year to year, we'd have to eat at restaurants that have machines for zero-trim prep and high turnover so consumption is stable, and so on... all of which would be incredibly costly in other ways, so it doesn't make sense to focus on the raw stats, except as an intellectual exercise. It's similar to the numbers you sometimes see about the environmental impact of Portland cement production, which of course is huge, but that's simply because of the huge quantities that are produced given how important it is to modern construction.
As a result, though, the report does not translate well to newspaper headlines that want to present just one (preferably shocking) number. Admittedly, the 8-10% comes straight from the executive summary itself, so there's that...
[1] https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-...
Reducing livestock agriculture will automatically decimate this number, too.
Edit: It's rather misleading that they put a carrot on the cover of their report, too.
the issue has always been subsidies are politicians means to show their constituents they are doing their job, bringing home the bacon. however the rules and regulations are stacked such that only very large farms and organizations see real benefit.
US wise, most subsidies are towards guarantees of rates. Dairy and Meat get picked on a lot because they are very noticeable but much of the numbers assigned to them are because corn is a feed product and the biggest crop in the US by far. Throw in that many who don't care for animal farming will then associate any other subsidy they can find, to include WIC payments shows just how much a stretch it becomes Outside of pandemic years the estimates for all of agriculture in the US ranges from the low twenties in billions to highs in fifties. Again, depends on what you count.
The real issue isn't what we are subsidizing in this case but that we don't insure that the small farms are compensated as well as large private and commercial farms are because the regulatory burden puts obtaining such funds into the category of not worth the time and money
It's not the chemical structure, it's the physical structure. Slow freezing causes large (relatively) ice crystals, which are more likely to break cell walls than smaller ice crystals. Those broken cell walls result in more moisture loss when cooking, and a different texture when thawed.
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=http://...
[2] http://neerlander.nl/2016/09/07/vers-vlees-supermarkt-vaak-o...
agree that requiring all meat to be sold frozen is a step too far though. adding a tax somewhere along the meat production chain to account for the externalities would be a better solution.
But the way humans raised animals prior to the last century seems a lot less problematic. If we reverted to a more sustainable, regenerative practice of farming, that would surely reduce animal suffering and not damage the environment to anywhere near the same degree. It would also create a lot of jobs. But if you're trying to feed 8 bln people then you will need to figure out ways to reduce waste in the supply chain. Like freezing meat.
It would be nice to get rid of factory farming, and have community farms focused on regenerative agriculture and sustainability, but I will violently oppose anyone who tries to make me eat veggie burgers ever again.
-Former vegetarian, who tried for years to eat that way for ecological & ethicalreasons, and who switched to a 80% meat-based diet and will never look back to what I view is naive in hindsight.
That can't be right, is that a typo or you mean the percentage of meals that have some animal products?
What did your vegetarian diet look like?
It's interesting to me that you had such problems on plant-based diets if you were eating balanced meals. I wonder what nutrient you could've been missing? Thanks for sharing your personal experience, though!
(Also, not to steal your line, but sorry for the late reply.)
Additionally, factory farms are pretty much the only option to make animal products available anywhere close to the quantity required. Community farms have significantly lower output at a higher cost, and therefore animal products prices would presumably skyrocket.
There are plenty of delicious and easily available vegan recipes that require 0 veggie burgers, if you're interested in reducing your carbon footprint.
Obviously your actions are up to you, but community farms like you suggest just aren't feasible at scale.
As far as crops, the majority of what we grow is fed to animals. For example, according to the USDA, approximately 70% of U.S. soy is used as animal feed. If you're interested in reducing crop farming, go vegan. (Source: https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...)
As far as the limited abilities of carbon sequestering, "Grazing management could potentially, and under very generous assumptions, offset between 20-60% of annual average emissions from the grass-fed only sector," meaning that even all grass fed beef is still going to involve horrifying amounts of GHG emissions, completely ignoring the cost/land use that would make it otherwise unfeasible. (Source: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-grazing-livestock-climate-impa...)
Bonus link for more info on ruminants and carbon sequestering: "https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/animal/article/abs/m..."
Another way to be responsible re food is to only buy good grass fed beef. As a bonus cows can make use of grass on land that's too poor for traditional farming.
Your claims don't seem to match any of the evidence I've seen, but I'd be interested in discussing them further if you could provide sources.
As far as poor soil, a) current animal agriculture is mostly making use of usable soil & farmed crops, so this currently seems like a moot point, and b) this gets back to the above issue of being completely unable to scale. Unless you're being careful to only eat meat about once a month, I don't understand how the use of only poor soil is supposed to produce enough meat to feed everyone who would want it.
One is to look from first principles and analyze how the great plains came to be. It should be obvious that the carbon didn't just sequester itself. Therefore if one were to mimic the roaming herds of bison closely enough (and how close is close enough is up for debate) then it should absolutely be possible to be net sequestering. I'm having trouble finding a good source for this.
There's a guy named Gabe Brown from North Dakota who is consistently increasing the amount of organic matter (and thus carbon) in the soil of his farm. I don't know how you'd interpret his results as anything other than sequestering.
https://www.sandyarrowranch.com/2019-fall-winter-update/
Finally there are places that are trying to study this rigorously as there's huge money to be made if you can offer guilt-free beef. Might that taint their results? Yup, but they might also be right.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90368127/is-it-possible-to-raise... https://www.greenbiz.com/article/how-regenerative-land-and-l...
Gabe Brown definitely does seem like he's achieving carbon sequestering, which is great! I have no doubt that carbon sequestering exists and is effective — my problem is that it neither matches nor exceeds the carbon output of e.g. cattle. So even with maximally effective carbon sequestering practices, there's still on net large GHG emissions. (See 20-60% figure from above.)
As far as the links you provide, here's the direct quote from the conclusion of the FastCompany site: "...better management techniques can be helpful but not as much as many think, and that the term 'regenerative' is so vague that it risks becoming greenwashing. Another study, from the Food Climate Research Network in the U.K., found that better management of livestock only sequesters carbon under some conditions and even then may be temporary and not necessarily large enough to offset the negative impact of raising the animals."
The second link seems to be marketing copy from General Mills, which as you note I might tend toward being suspicious of. Their sponsored study seems to contradict both the FastCompany site and all the other studies I've read. Definitely something to look more into on my part, though: will update here after reading more thoroughly.
Thank you for the interesting links, and for being willing to engage in good faith.
I am having a hard time understanding this concern. If the cattle and grass combo are releasing more carbon than they're sequestering then shouldn't soil carbon be going down?
Conversely if carbon is building up in the soil despite cattle eating grass and presumably incorporating some of the carbon from what they eat into their bodies, where did that carbon coming from besides the atmosphere?
I really cant wrap my brain around the idea that carbon can be building up in the soil while simultaneously cattle grazing operations are a net carbon producer. What am I missing?
For example, one molecule of methane (CH4) contains the same amount of carbon [the element] as carbon dioxide (CO2), but is >= 28x more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/why-methane-cattle-warm...).
Therefore, when talking in carbon dioxide equivalents (i.e. making something carbon neutral), my understanding is that for 1kg of methane emitted by cattle, there would need to be ~28kg of carbon dioxide equivalent sequestered by the soil.
Even if cattle produced only CO2, to create a closed carbon cycle, it seems like soil would still be insufficient for carbon sequestering, unless you have massive tracts of land for relatively few cattle. Cattle need a constant input of feed, but it takes time to remove GHGs from the atmosphere.
I'd imagine taking these minimum steps toward environmental sustainability would either a) greatly exacerbate food insecurity in America or b) make meat into a luxury that only the top 10% can afford to eat at all.
Either way, I suppose it would be an effective way to let the market reduce animal agriculture.
If you'd like to help this come about, please consider boycotting the current animal agriculture industry until it reforms, as this kind of carbon-neutral meat currently does not exist.
The solution is distributed permaculture, with animals integrated (referred to as silvopasture). Silvopasture produces much more food per acre than conventional row crops, and when permaculture principles are followed, requires minimal or no use of fertilizers and sprays. In addition, it builds soil fertility and retains water. The animals in the system naturally fertilize the plants while controlling pests and weeds.
As long as the dominant mode of agriculture is thousand acre farms growing monoculture commodity crops, sprayed with gallons of chemicals, which are then trucked back and forth across the country from processing plant to factory to store, we're going to continue to erode our future food supply.
However the problem is that the large majority of these monoculture crops go to animals. Reducing animal agriculture not only means less direct GHG emissions from animals, it also means a huge reduction in the amount of crops required to feed the same number of people.
In the US, 41% of land is used for animal agriculture, while only 19.8% is used for food humans eat. (Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/)
"The 7 billion livestock animals in the United States consume five times as much grain as is consumed directly by the entire American population." + "For every kilogram of high-quality animal protein produced, livestock are fed nearly 6 kg of plant protein." (Source: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...)
If you're worried about greenhouse gas emissions, stop paying into animal agriculture.
If you're interested in reducing the need for monocrops, reducing land use, and creating more sustainable plant farming, your best choice is still to go vegan.
You can rail all you want on factory farmed meats, and I'm with you on there, but to go from "factory farmed meats are bad" to "people shouldn't eat meat" is fallacious as hell. That would be like going from "drinking too much water will kill you" to "people shouldn't drink water".
If you are able to provide sources showing that sustainable, ecologically-sound animal agriculture exists, please do link me, as I'd be very personally interested.
And just to clarify: I am under the impression that all forms of animal agriculture that currently exist are environmentally and morally negative, in their current forms. My opinion would more be that the fact is "burning coal is bad", so my opinion is "let's switch to renewables." I am only trying to act in alignment with my conscience, even though it can be inconvenient.
It seems we do have a lot of common ground, though; if you're already boycotting factory farmed meat, eggs, and dairy, we'll have way more in common than different.
There are a lot of permaculture farms integrating animals, fruit/nut trees and crops, but the most famous one is polyface farm (https://www.polyfacefarms.com/).
Ultimately, until agriculture is supplanted by ecosystem creation, and it becomes something that most of the population has some minor role in (if only to save compost for, and help harvest from your local food forest), we're going to be destroying the environment to feed people. Not eating factory farmed meat will slow it down a little bit, but the problem will still be there festering away, until we change our ways or population levels drop an order of magnitude.
He successfully replicated the oak savannah that covered a lot of the US before the Europeans tore it up, but using species that are useful for humans.
Like you're saying, the animals are an integral part of that system: reducing pests, mowing and pruning, cleaning up waste etc.
The trouble is that he seems to keep a lot of ruminants for the amount of land he has. Ruminants produce very potent greenhouse gases that are not offset by sequestration (cited a few times in other sources), so with that plus all of his other animals kept I'd be very interested in independently gathered data (i.e. not marketing materials he wrote himself ) about the GHG production / absorption by his land.
Sadly, I'm struggling to find the number of animals he keeps or anything I could use to run any sort of calculation.
Therefore, this definitely looks like the closest I've seen to sustainable animal agriculture, but its claims are currently unsubstantiated.
Polyface seems to have a few other issues, such as using the same breeds of meat (broiler) chickens as used in factory farms. I need to dig into more data on this particularly, but their chicken farming doesn't seem to meet sustainability standards.
He also feeds his animals grain grown from outside the farm, meaning that this doesn't make sense as a "closed loop" sustainable system, even ignoring the other concerns.
[Note: this is not intended to come off as overly negative, I'm just attempting to analyze what I see as shortcomings in this example. After looking more into it, I would still classify this as ecologically net negative, and less sustainable than a plant-based diet based on the GHG emissions of the animals. If you have further data to provide on this example though, I would definitely be willing to revise my position.]
Your conclusion paragraph seems a bit pessimistic, given the reality of how much food we currently produce — "According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the world produces more than 1 1/2 times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s already enough to feed 10 billion people, the world’s 2050 projected population peak... the bulk of industrially produced grain crops (most yield reduction in the study was found in grains) goes to biofuels and confined animal feedlots rather than food for the one billion hungry." from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241746569_We_Alread...
So it seems to me as though reducing or eliminating animal solves the problems you bring up: to have the same amount of food available to humans, we'd need to farm less crops, which means we could e.g. start switching to lower-yield organic farming without compromising human nutrition, and diversifying a lot of current corn/wheat/pasture land into more nutrient dense vegetables.
Theoretically, a plant-based agricultural system taking compost and natural land replenishment from wild (native) animals & plants as inputs and producing a variety of plant foods as outputs would be lower GHG emissions, lower pesticide use, lower soil erosion, all while supplying a higher number of people food.
What am I missing?
Talking about our abundance based on how much food we produce today in this context is like talking about how rich you are when you're spending above your means with a credit card. We're depleting topsoil, depleting aquifers, polluting our water, and breeding blights with our lack of diversity.
You keep talking like it's somehow desirable to remove animals from these food producing systems, but it's not. They work better with animals, and those animals need to be herded and culled to maintain the health of the ecosystem. Everything needs to be in balance.
Why do you think it would be better for the environment to take a bunch of trucks into a forest so you can haul stuff from it to a hundred miles away or more to feed conventional agriculture with all its problems than just have a balanced system initially?
Supplemental feeding of commercially grown oats, for example, means that these animals are not only using resources on the land they're raised on, but they're also directly contributing to the crop monocultures we both agree are unsustainable. Humans could eat these oats directly, which is much more efficient than passing them through other animals first.
-
Vegetables, crops, etc. can be grown effectively and less wastefully without farmed animals. Insofar as animals are necessary to a natural ecosystem, it's the native species with lower impact rather than the extremely modified modern livestock that consume massive quantities of input at produce large amounts of GHGs and other unwanted waste.
As for your last sentence, it's disingenuous to act like animals (including the animals in your example who require supplemental feed) aren't the ones consuming the majority of the feed and therefore are the reason for most of those trucks moving conventionally grown crops.
It seems like the most sustainable system is relying on plants: preferably grown in the same country, preferably grown in less intensive organic means, but even plants that don't meet these two criteria are still more sustainable than the best current forms of animal agriculture.
Consider that transportation is only 11% of a food's total greenhouse gas emissions, and dropping red meat and dairy for a single day of the week is better for the environment than making your entire diet 100% local food. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18546681/)
By all data I can find, trying to run plant calories/protein through the inefficient process of creating animal protein, which necessarily involves much higher GHG emissions and calorie waste, is not a good idea — even with a local farm using carbon sequestering.
-
But again, given that 99% of U.S. farmed animals live on factory farms (https://sentientmedia.org/u-s-farmed-animals-live-on-factory...), if you're already eating according to the morals you've claimed in this post, our diets will be extremely similar. I'm assuming anyone who avoids animal agriculture we all agree is unsustainable (by not getting meat/cheese at regular restaurants or at general grocery stores, by avoiding baked goods containing factory farmed eggs and dairy, by eating plant-based when you're anywhere that's going to use these kinds of animals) will have much more in common with a vegan than with those following the Standard American Diet, so I'd still have a lot of respect for your commitment.
It seems like your problem here is the capitalist society that demands a race to the bottom, pushing farmers to farm in a way that damages the earth. Perhaps you can redirect some of that simmering rage to the root causes of the things that you don't like.
As far as I can tell, even in the best case scenario, they consume intense amounts of resources and output a lot of unwanted byproducts, such as greenhouse gases, that are not removed by the farming system.
I honestly believe that current animal agriculture is a root cause of what I'm against, such as increasing global warming. There seem to be less bad forms of animal ag, but I've yet to see any proof that there are good versions.
I think you overestimate my feelings on this topic though. I feel compelled to act with my conscience, but if there were hard data that any of these systems are net positive for the ecosystem, I'd definitely reconsider my stance.
... and then let the consumer concretize themselves and reach wrong conclusions.
Almonds, for vegan milk substitute, are implicated in drought in California. Soy is responsible for massive tropical deforestation. Meanwhile you can easily farm sheep and goats on land that no crops can grow on.
I have no clue if the assertion is correct.
Edit: FWIW, it appears that US soy is mostly used for livestock:
> Just over 70 percent of the soybeans grown in the United States are used for animal feed
https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...
And globally, even a higher percentage:
> About 85 percent of the world’s soybean crop is processed into meal and vegetable oil, and virtually all of that meal is used in animal feed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170112075924/http://www.soyate...
There’s an immense amount of green things growing we can’t digest that cows, sheep, goats, and chickens will happily chomp on or peck at. The idea is that we then eat the cows, etc. It’s simple really.
As an aside, I’ve been on a fat-loss diet all lockdown long, and if it wasn’t for animal products, it simply wouldn’t have worked as well as it did. I need high protein within a limited calorie budget. Hello, chicken breasts and whey powder.
Anyway, if cows are not a good enough system to feed 7 billion people, we should grow fake cow parts in vats, also neatly eliminating the need to kill the animals. I’d be the first to sign up for a fake steak, if it was chemically identical to a grass-fed one (the taste of which is fantastic, absolutely beyond description)
Seriously though the reason it is fed to animals is likely because of cost. Generally animal feed is chosen based on cost and effectiveness.
Really though, humans can't eat grass, beet pulp shreds, beet molasses, and many other things we feed animals.
80% of Amazon rainforest deforestation has been driven by cattle farming (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/27/how-beef-...)
According to USDA data, over 70% of soy grown in the U.S. is fed to animals (https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...)
Dairy uses almost double the water of almond milk per glass, as well as ~4x the carbon footprint and more than 10x the land. See https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46654042 for graphs that represent this wide gulf
As far as farming ruminants, even in the best-case scenario where they're eating land otherwise unfarmable plus maximally effective carbon sequestering practices are in place, it still produces unsustainably massive quantities of GHG emissions (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987) [Most relevant subsection: "Producer mitigation limits and the role of consumers"]
The good news is that there are plenty of plant-based dog diets that meet all AAFCO nutrition standards. A quick google search will bring these up. As dogs' most common allergens are all meat and they're considered omnivores, this is a great solution for dog owners.
Cats are obligate carnivores, and require molecules that only occur naturally in meat (e.g. taurine). Technically, this does not translate to a requirement for meat itself — artificial taurine, etc. does exist. However, while the only research review says it can be done (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/6/9/57/htm) I don't see enough longitudinal evidence that it can be done safely, as issues like urinary crystals are a major concern. I think the best hope for cats' diets is something like the lab-grown mouse meat kibble Wild Earth is developing, but sadly this product just doesn't exist yet.
So those interested in reducing their carbon footprint should absolutely consult their vet about switching their dog onto a plant-based diet. For cats (and ferrets/foxes/etc), I think the best we can do right now is fund overpopulation control measures (i.e. spay/neuter programs) and continue research into sustainable nonanimal food.
It goes without saying that all pets should be adopted (is anyone capable of coming up with some edge case where this is bad advice? if so please let me know) so as to not breed more animals into the world. As long as you adopt, I see no moral negative to having a plant-based dog.
And for those unable/unwilling to do so, taking up gardening instead is a great option.
- wild animals contribute to their local ecosystem, they are "useful" to the environment.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusion, I just don't see how you got there.
I think it's fair to assume that globally this number is much, much lower than 20%, since no country has as many pets as the US.
1: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
"This suggests that 17 per cent of total global food production may be wasted" (page 8)
That would imply food is responsible for 47-59% of global greenhouse gas emissions which seems unrealistic.
https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions
"Food is responsible for approximately 26% of global GHG emissions."
Working backwards from that number: Food waste (17%) would be responsible for 4.4% of global GHG emissions.
Another thing that might be happening is that they take into account the emissions of its transportation via intercontinental ships, trucks, etc.
Don't forget lights for human workers, concrete for buildings, and fossil-fuel derived fertilizers.
https://www.hobbyfarms.com/black-soldier-flies-free-self-har...
I won't eat BSF, but I've no problem eating chicken or pork that's been eating them.
Historian Rachel Laudan talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about food waste. Laudan argues that there are tradeoffs in preventing food waste--in reduced time for example, or a reduction in food security, and that these tradeoffs need to be measured carefully when considering policy or giving advice to individuals or organizations. She also discusses the role of food taboos and moralizing about food.
https://www.econtalk.org/rachel-laudan-on-food-waste/
See also "Its a Wonderful Loaf":
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.” --F. A. Hayek
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6867865-the-curious-task-of...
Mine is slightly different as I built with what I had on the farm, but it’s what inspired me.
Here in Bangkok, the street dogs are so fat from all the wasted food, that they have become incredibly picky and really, don't give two f*cks.
They're so fat and lazy that you have to literally walk over some of them on the streets.
On the other hand, the dogs further away from restaurants and off the beaten path depend on people coming to feed them. So they are a bit more svelte.
And by golly, people have daily feedings of the "Soi" dogs.
So thats the one benefit of excess food, at least here.
I'm not so sure that fast-fashion is entirely bad, either. Lower clothing prices have also been very beneficial for clothing the poor. Fast fashion is more of a cultural side-effect of the fact that clothing is now affordable. Before that, people who could regularly afford new clothes were just called 'wealthy'.
That's leaving aside the fact that the way it treats it's models is plainly reprehensible, because the same case can be made for the sweatshop workers that end up crafting the clothes themselves.
It takes all kinds to run a civilization, and fashion is critical to a large portion of the population.
If you feed the goat 100 calories, there is no way you get back 100 calories.
It's always better plant and eat the food directly than to feed it to an animal.
Of course, if you're in a scenario where you live on a small island with no connection to the outside world, and you only have marginal land, yes, you need might need to have livestock to survive. But that's not what we're talking about here.
Say 10% of the calories produced for me at a human go to waste. And I can convert them at 25% efficiency to usable calories via a chicken. Then I have just increased the yield of usable calories by 2.5%. In consequence, I need to buy less and thus emissions can be reduced.
And wheat can be converted to pasta, which can be stored for years, and can be easily made edible by brief cooking. You can reduce wastage of wheat to negligible levels, and chicken farming has non-zero overhead, so it seems unlikely that the chickens are an efficiency win if you take reasonable care.
You're not taking into account that, by virtue of being an animal taking in oxygen and creating carbon dioxide / other pollutants, the chicken itself is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.
The question is, in real life, are the bonus calories we get from animal farming efficient enough so as to be worth those greenhouse gases? Given the massive GHG emissions of animal agriculture, it doesn't seem so.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your example, though: feedback appreciated
Is it simply that politically it would be extremely controversial to raise taxes on meat? In Europe we have very high taxes on petrol and petrol is universally used. It could also be argued that its use is beneficial to economic productivity too, yet that seems to be accepted by most people. So why can't we do the same for meat?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...
> When organisms are consumed, approximately 10% of the energy in the food is fixed into their flesh and is available for next trophic level (carnivores or omnivores). When a carnivore or an omnivore in turn consumes that animal, only about 10% of energy is fixed in its flesh for the higher level.
"Food waste means all of the environmental impacts of food production without any of the benefits of people being fed." — it reads, and I think it misses an important point: leaving food waste to rot with the rest of the rubbish is in itself environmentally damaging while using it for composting, feeding larvae or both, is immensely beneficial.
I'd like to see more practical recommendations for what we already know we can do about food waste. And not just about reducing it, which is more easily said than done, but also about giving it a proper goodbye.
- "How do you find these produce discounts?" Same process - exploration, helping, sympathizing with fruit producers vendors, they are often happy to get rid of unsold fruits.
I wish people will change their mind, damaged/ugly/super ripe produces should not be wasted, they are still mostly good, a fruit that fell on the floor isn't wasted, a fruit with a bug isn't wasted (all the opposite, it's a sign it's good), most people throw away way too much food, and parts of the food
Not counting off-cuts & things that turn out to be bad on day of purchase mine is functionally zero. Buy it & eat it. Not that hard.
The packaging situation on the other hand makes me hang my head in shame. So much plastic. Throw it in recycle sure but idk
Depends on habits I guess but basically everything my side is <48hr turn around. Food that can't make 48 hrs refrigerated was in my mind not fit for sale in the first place.
(Salad being the exception...I try to eat that same day)
My family has been saving piles of money with this, and getting all sorts of interesting food that would otherwise have gone to waste.
How many times does this have to be debunked until it goes away? The plural of "bad science" isn't "good science".
They don't? A 5s google search reveals this document
https://www.fda.gov/files/about%20fda/published/Recycled-Org...
>Recently, State Veterinarians and State Feed Program Managers have been approached by waste management firms that intend to use recycled organic waste from large wholesalers, distributors, and retailers as animal feed
...and this: https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/reduce-waste...
1. Is a report on the need to evaluate how prevalent the practice of recycling food scraps from manufacturing as feed actually is, as apparently the FDA (or the author of the report anyway) doesn't have access to good data on the topic.
2. Is advice that appears to be targeted at large institutions that want to _start_ recycling... doesn't really say much about the prevalence except that it isn't a novel idea.
Plus, the original article says: > Individual households were responsible for more than half of that, with the rest coming from retailers and the food service industry.
limited information on safety, not limited information on whether the practice is being done.
>2. Is advice that appears to be targeted at large institutions that want to _start_ recycling... doesn't really say much about the prevalence except that it isn't a novel idea.
No, the bottom of the page lists examples of businesses doing it on a large scale.
Moreover, the original comment claimed "We're not feeding wasted produce to livestock", which implies we weren't doing it at all, which the previous two links clearly disprove.
Oh, and also making sure that they eat absolutely everything they bring home or be charged penalties by the garbage man.
Those with children know that the kids can help estimate and reduce waste with even higher accuracy.
And given our experience with having to convince people to take a life-saving vaccine once, I anticipate no issues in regulating their activities having to do with the private hour by hour things they do multiple times per day.
Planned economies can instead more efficiently allocate resources, even when done within a capitalist economy and for profit. The book “People’s Republic of Walmart” goes into a lot of detail on this topic. A democratically planned economy with society’s overall welfare as a goal could be even more efficient.
See: USSR.
Even capitalist economies have benefited from significant central planning, most notably South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.
Today we also see it within the likes of Walmart and Amazon, unlike Sears’ internal markets. Even when profit is your motive planning beats markets.
Fun fact. Pretty much every other family in USSR either has community garden or a land lot (if living in countryside). People had to grow their own food because central supply in shops was so bad. Well educated engineers were spending their weekends growing potatoes and pigs to feed their families. Of course they got to space so that was cool :)
I even recall a paper that demonstrates that the market problem (balancing supply and demand perfectly) is NP-complete.
Just one example is Cuba. A highly educated and stable society failed to provide food (especially meat) and consequently had to open up that sector for entrepreneurs.
As I initially said, there are clear downsides with that, especially overproduction, environmental concerns, and worker treatment. But ironically, the same problems appeared in centrally planned economies as well.
Consequently, people will always choose free market economies over centrally plan ed ones because of the better supply situation. This then leads to a conflict between democracy and economy (see GDR).
Maybe the solution is not a centrally planned economy but centrally gathered information available to all? Subscription based production? I don't know, just throwing ideas.
Add to this backdrop all the unpredictability that goes into producing food. Growing crops has months of lead time during which unpredictable events like droughts or floods or pests can obliterate a large fraction of your production. Even after harvesting, natural disasters or industrial accidents can destroy significant quantities of food (think of a grain elevator explosion).
In short, growing surplus food is the only rational approach. Of course, what you do with the surplus once you have it is another question. There I agree with you that it is shameful we don't ensure more ends up in the hands of those going hungry.
In Zimbabwe, the only country I know of that has recently implemented Marxist ideas about farming, the problem is that people are starving.
And Zimbabwe is ridiculously fertile by the way.
Did Singapore recently have a wave of obesity that I hadn’t heard about?
> In Zimbabwe, the only country I know of that has recently implemented Marxist ideas about farming
If step one wasn’t “first, develop proletarian class consciousness in an mature capitalist society”, they probably implemented Leninist ideas, not Marxist ideas about anything. Marxism is, at its core and explicitly, path dependent.
No one wants more humans on the planet. We only need to account for humans that are yet to be born, before we hit the peak around ~10B.
And before you start blaming countries for high birth rates (which is the typical ignorant and possibly racist viewpoint), read some books to know that birth rates have dropped drastically since WW2 due to increase in education and healthcare ACROSS THE WORLD, and they are still dropping. We have already reached peak child [1]. We will reach peak human at around ~10B according to latest reports, which is much less than what we can actually support in the future with renewable tech. So everything's mostly good, get educated.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24835822 [2] https://www.gapminder.org/