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Comment by cerol | Hacker News Reader

I don't think food waste can be eliminated. I would even argue that there is threshold after which a decrease in food waste comes at the expense of quality of nutrition.

Even in my university's restaurant, which feeds students on a massive industrial scale, I see food waste. But even in a much bigger scale, the amount was significantly less.

Elimination of food waste is not practical and should not be a goal, you'll just ultimately fail and give up on intermediary goals that might just suffice.

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Food waste may always be a thing, but it can be handled a lot smarter than we do. We need more of this: https://www.porkbusiness.com/news/hog-production/famed-dirty...

As with any engineering problem, the harder you push some constraints the more you'll have to pay with others. A university-scale cafeteria could greatly reduce food waste by fetching the food off of the plates the customers are done with and putting that food back into the cafeteria for the next customers. But there's reasons that's several violations of the health code. Something has to give at some point.

Onsite composting and vermicomposting is a better place to dump “food waste”.

Where the food usually goes are into landfills where they produce dangerous accumulations of methane that can explode. Some folks have tried capturing that methane to burn, but if stuff can be made into compost, you’d need less synthetic fertilizers.

I think there is some room to innovate before we get to that point. For instance, they could educate students on the economic and ecological costs of food waste, and equip them with tools to reduce it, like associating certain levels of hunger with visible portion sizes, or putting in electronic scales so students are shown how much of each food they eat.

There is an all you can eat chain in my area. Its cheap, but they do charge extra for any leftovers - that approach would likely significantly reduce the waste in places such as uni-scale cafeterias.

Food waste is mostly just a sign that food is very cheap. Cheap enough that it's not worth trying to save or find another use for what's wasted.

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