Far too much food is just binned if somebody is too full, needs to leave early, or similar, and if food wasn’t wasted, there would not be nearly as large of a hunger crisis. Encouraging the reduction of food waste is great, but I’m wondering whether the inevitable food waste could be collected in special bins and be reprocessed into a mixture of various foods, a bit like recycled plastic almost. This obviously could be bad for those with allergies, and there’s no clear expiry date for such a mixed assortment of food. There is also the trouble of people throwing in non food items, like tissues and plastic wrapping. This is already a big problem in recycling!
An alternative could be to separate food waste into multiple bins (meats, vegetables, nuts, dairy, etc.) that could be individually processed, kind of like how recycling is separated into paper, plastic, and cans. Then, allergens could be separated, vegetarian unfriendly products too, and the reprocessed food would be less of a mix and could be portioned into balanced diets.
Some food waste is already processed to become compost, but I’m wondering whether it’s possible for reprocessed food waste to be edible and eaten over being dumped in landfills?
edit: mmm yep looks like a really good way to catch all sorts of nasty pathogens. Varied expiry dates also sounds pretty bad. Maybe not a good idea. And yeah, it does sound pretty nasty.
Maybe feed the scraps to chickens then eat their eggs? Seems cleaner and easier.
I would much rather that than eating someone else’s roats lamb from a month ago, even if it were “processed” (I guess you mean dehydrated ?)
There are food safety considerations, but feeding pigs with waste food is a practice. Like food that stores throw out shortly after their expiration.
That’s cruel and requires violence. There are situations that justify cruelty and violence, but given that there is no food scarcity, it is not justified now.
Feeding chickens and eating eggs is cruel and violent?
I’d love to hear your misguided reasoning.
Individuals must be treated as ends, never as means.
I have cats. Aside from rodent control, they don’t serve any purpose other than being part of the family. If my cats somehow had the ability to lay eggs, and since they are all fixed these are unfertilized eggs with no possibility of bearing offspring. Would it be wrong if me to make an omelette from them?
I might have made it more weird by using my cats.
But if you had a few chickens and provided them food and shelter and took good care of them, like you would any pet, why not use their eggs? They’re going to lay them either way. Is it more moral to throw them away?
Just for clarity, I don’t accept that it is okay to keep individuals as pets. But that isn’t relevant to the current discussion so I didn’t get into that.
Those chickens didn’t just happen. Their very existence is abuse. Creating an individual with the preformed intent that you prevent it from becoming able to care for itself, that it will be dependent on you for everything for it’s entire life, that is one of the most abusive things you can do to another individual.
Fine, rescue your cats or whatever, but that’s not what you’re talking about right now. You’re talking about a captive individual (ie a slave) who exists to convert calories for you, like a machine. And if you build your lifestyle around stealing eggs from slaves, then it’s not just one chicken, is it? You gotta replace them whenever they can no longer meet your needs for eggs. And in this scenario, what use is a broken machine that doesn’t produce eggs.
You’re not simply taking eggs that they would be laying anyway; they wouldn’t EXIST. Not as an individual, but also not as a genentic line that is cursed to lay far more eggs than its own interests have any reason for it to lay. It lays so many eggs that its body becomes depleted. It is not natural for chickens to lay eggs so often! That is something that we did to them. And it’s yet more abuse!
Abuse is inescapable when you use an individual’s body for your own purposes.
And again, we are talking about fucking eggs. There is no food shortage. So there is no justification for even a little bit of cruelty and violence. Plus, eggs are not good for you in the first place!!
Wow. That’s nuts. I respect that it’s your opinion, and I wish you the best of luck, but what do you eat?
I hope it’s not plant based. Because growing an individual from a seed only to eventually slaughter and devour it is cruel. Have you even considered how the plant feels when pluck it’s genitals off and eat them, or in some instances, gather a bunch and put them out on display?! How grotesque!
Just because plants can’t tell you how much they are suffering, do you take that as consent to dominate and devour them at your will?
I know you don’t really mean it, but I’m going to use your bad faith arguments to point out some things you should know but have probably never thought about.
Let’s accept that you are a fully committed plant’s rights activist. You considered killing yourself out of respect for your plant brother’s experiences, but ultimately you decide that no creature should be obliged to kill itself simply because of its own inherent nature. You cannot help that you need to eat. So what do you do?
You decide that while you have to eat to survive, that doesn’t mean that you can just eat wantonly, whatever and however the urge strikes you, because there are these serious consequences to your plant friends. You look for the way of life that minimizes the number of plants that you have to kill. Easy, you think, you’ll just eat animals!
Until you realize, those animals eat plants. Those animals ate WAY more plants than you would have if you hadn’t eaten any animals. Oh. Shit. The more animals you eat, the more of your plant sisters you are killing. You realize that your ethical convictions demand that you instead eat only plants, and only as many as you need to survive. Because that is the only solution to this ethical quandary.
But of course, in real life, you are not actually concerned with plant’s rights. It was just a ruse you were pulling. You did not go down this train of thought to its logical conclusion. These are not issues that you have spent years and years thinking about. Rather, like most people, you have been trained to not think about them. You’re not engaging with intellectual honesty, you have begun to attempt to frustrate meaningful discussion. I’m giving you a lot of grace here because I don’t think you realize you did it, and I’d like to give you a chance to see it.
Ahh, I had suspicious, but now I’m convinced.
Between the overly condescending tone, and of course the initial butting in and telling someone who suggested feeding chickens that they are cruel, tells me that this isn’t about self growth, it’s about telling everyone how much better you are than them.
I’m giving you a lot of grace here because I don’t think you realize you did it, and I’d like to give you a chance to see it.
Okay, I can see you have become defensive. It’s understandable. When I finally accepted the vast cruelty and violence I was a part of, it fucking broke me. That is what you are trying to avoid. That is what I tried to avoid for a very long time. Eventually I accepted that I could not be a kind, decent, good person, and continue to use cruelty and violence to exploit unwilling individuals. The person I was deserved to be broken.
I’m going to let you take back your bad faith arguments. This isn’t merely an intellectual exercise for either of us. We’re talking about things that matter and choices we make many times every day and it’s hard to talk about dispassionately and objectively. When you use bad faith, it’s not because you think it will defeat me, but because it’s all you have to distract yourself from thoughts and feelings that you don’t want to process.
No, not defensive. You do you, and your thoughts on what I do, don’t affect me at all.
I just think it’s odd that you draw the line between plants and animals, when the animals themselves don’t even draw that same line. Some animals are designed to eat other animals, and some are designed to be eaten. It’s the natural order.
Sorry to keep referencing cats, but they NEED meat. Some people have tried to force their cats to go vegan, only to kill their feline friend.
By all means, if you need to create an illogical moral superiority to justify your existence, go right ahead, but know that there is no prize for whoever voluntarily suffers the most. In the end, the animals will thank you just as much as the plants would if you stopped eating those.
I said eggs not butchering them for meat !!!
Explain yourself.
I’m sorry, you cannot exploit the body of an individual against their will without cruelty and violence. This is a terrible thing to come to terms with, but I hope you try to. There is no way around it short of abject denial.
Here is some factual information about how egg laying hens (and their brothers, who are macerated alive in a blender within hours of hatching) necessarily suffer atrocity under the economic realities that rule them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko&t=1400s
not op, but I assume they are vegan. many vegans have the misconception any product from a animal is violence against them. as they cannot consent…
but the truth is, no vegans live on farms… they don’t understand chickens lay unfirtalized eggs regardless.
they also see the breeding programs of chickens as violent as it’s for producing meat/eggs. so by raising chickens you are perpetuating it… but that’s stupid. that’s like seeing a hurt dog by the side of the road and saying “if we help that one we have to help all of them”. baby chicks are often given away not sold…
Just to add, a lot of vegans (not all) ride their high-horse on their moral high-ground and judge, if not outright insult/shame non-vegans for their choice to not be vegan. A lot like how many religions shame each other for not believing the ‘right’ thing.
‘A few bad apples spoil the bunch,’ as they say. The most vocal also make the group as a whole, difficult to tolerate.