Wastage

So I heard that 25% to 50% of all food in the west is wasted, thrown away.  I know from myself that this is close to the truth.  I had a garden and I grew vegetables and I decided to give most of it away and the stuff that I did take home I did not eat.  Apathy towards my health and cooking was the main source of not eating them.  The second year I gave away most of the food I grew, because I knew that I would not eat it.  I still wasted food because I bought food that expired or was planing to make something but never did.  In the end my refrigerator stood mostly empty, fear of putting food in it that would be thrown out and my freezer was overstocked.  When I moved I had to throw out my freezer load of food.  

I am not a big contributor to food waste, even taking into account the above.  Grocery stores themselves are the biggest contributor.  The food that does not get eaten gets thrown away, for insurance purposes.  In cities the food is moved around a lot, from the premiums store to the regular store to the discount store as the expiry gets closer to the present date, but that still does not mean all the food is not sold.  Restaurants are another major contributor.  When I worked at McDonalds, when there were still dinosaurs walking the Earth, they were throwing out a large garbage bag of food each night.  Other fast food restaurants were as bad with donuts, pizza, chicken and pastries all being dumped in the back.  Then there is the unbeaten food that is served.

Then I moved in with another family.  Small children don't always eat what is on their plate, and that goes in the garbage.  "Standards" of acceptable quality accounts for more waste.  Something that gets stained gets tossed, something that requires a minor repair gets tossed.  Pizza left ofer from the day before, gone.  Can't clean an appliance to your level of satisfaction, throw it away.  Dishcloth discoloured, gone.  There is a lays new stuff entering the house, so there is always stuff leaving the house as garbage that still has some use in it.  Discoloured fruit, gone.  

If I ruled the World, I know I could not put a stop to this.  There are compost programs but these might not be enough.  Diversion programs that divert food waste to three different ends, the poor: a close to expired or even expired product may still be edible and cooking the food can extend its shelf life.  Day old pastry is not bad, it may not even be truly stale.  Cooked items from fast food and spoiled food can still be eaten by pigs.  Things that pigs can eat safely that humans would find revolting is quite large.  They will eat spoiled and fermenting fruit and vegetables, they will eat spoilt milk and they will eat a lot of the waste vegetable matter humans don't want to like rinds.  The last diversion would be volumes the pigs can't handle nor eat and these can be composted.  

Animal waste is diverted to farms to grow things.  Once composted the bacteria in the waste digest organics and create heat, which kills the bacteria.  The heat can be used by people and the methane gas as fuel too. The composited manure is used to fertilize the feilds.  Why should human waste be treated differently.  There are a lot more of us and we eat every day, some times more than once, but our waste is not composted and not reused on the fields.  Most often it is simply buried or incinerated.  We use lots of chemical fertilizers and nitrogen pulled from the air or taken from fossil fuels.  Essentially we are mining the fertile lands of everything that makes them fertile to feed ourselves.  Organic matter tends to accumulate in the ground provided the plant matter that makes it, stays where it was made.  but farming removes plant matter.  If we brought back the plant matter back to the soil in the form of processed waste, then the soils would be better for it and more productive.  It should be thought of as a built in price of food.  When people purchase food, they purchase the cost of producing the food, transporting the food and displaying the food.  Why not add in the cost of processing the waste and redistributing it back to the farms?  Which would also remove this cost from the municipalities, potentially lowering taxes.  Or perhaps allowing them to reinvest the excess monies in services.

If the diversion of compost was in effect, there would need to be more pig farms located close to where people live.  Close proximity to the source of food for people would lower the wastage of food for people more aware where the food is coming from.  

Wastage of hard consumables can only be done by introducing the total cost of the waste processing of the item into the cost of the product.  If a toaster costs $20 and $30 to repurpose, the cost of the toaster would be $50.  This would lead to a few things: less wastage to be sure,  less complicated to recycle items and more durable products that last longer.  There will always be people that throw things away because they are dirty and cannot be bothered to clean them, but they should pay for their indulgences.