It is a horrible waste to produce any strawberries from an environmental perspective compared to the least sensitive feed crops so feeding them to animals is more of a better than nothing while getting someone out of the market for the grades of strawberries that drive production is not. But any mediocre quality strawberry jam probably does that.

Despite the quotes, the person you’re replying to didn’t use the word “waste” nor have they claimed using that fruit to feed animals would be bad. In short, they didn’t make the argument you’re against.

However, in the interest of good faith discussion, I’ll offer a rebuttal to the argument you are making. The logic applies when (and this is very important) that food goes to farm animals which will be slaughtered of humans to eat.

“Waste” isn’t really the right word, more like “inefficient”, in the sense that the amount of food which takes for an animal to mature is orders of magnitude greater than what you take from it. In other words, you could feed significantly more people if they ate what you’re feeding the animal.

When you couple that with the environmental impact of raising animals as food, including deforestation and land use, which in turn affects us as well, it becomes a major issue.

Opportunity cost, mostly.