The Untapped Potential of Wasted Food | Hacker News Reader

The Untapped Potential of Wasted Food

newyorker.com

12 pointslingben6 comments

The idea of environmentally friendly, non-food wasting burgers sounds good but I'm not sure if it's possible. Meat is so phenomenally resource intensive[0][1] that reducing waste at the restaurant to zero still leaves you with a pound of beef that required up to 1,800 gallons of water to make. That number gets smaller if the animal eats wild grass or what would otherwise be waste products but a cow is a an inefficient way of getting nutrients to your plate.

Livestock in general eat large amounts of corn and oats, and with their feed conversion ratios[3] that's a 40-95% food loss of food humans are perfectly capable of eating.

[0] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/food-water-footprin... [1] - http://foodtank.com/news/2013/12/why-meat-eats-resources [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio

In Bulgaria, food waste feeds the pigs, which are turned into food themselves pretty soon.

Most of our kitchen scraps go to the chickens, but most people don't have chickens (USA).

Is this institutionalized in Bulgaria? Is it collected from restaurants and delivered, or is it up to the individual/organization to arrange it?

This is for restaurants. People in villages feed their own livestock, so, no problem there either. But people living in the cities, unfortunately, still waste some food, but it's a lot less than here in the US. So much food is wasted here, it's a serious problem.

In general, in Bulgaria, wasting food is still planted in the minds of people as "sin", so, they try to avoid it in different ways.

I recently try something, which I call "distributed composting". For example, instead of throwing the test of an apple in the garbage can, I throw it in a bush or somewhere hidden where it will decompose and had to be driven away and burned or stored or whatever they do to our garbage.

> So much food is wasted here, it's a serious problem.

it's because restaurant portions are huge. i always eat everything i cook at home.

That's great!

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