Читать книгу Zero Waste Cooking For Dummies онлайн

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Cattle farmers upcycle, too, by using grocery store food waste to create ingredients for animal feed. No, they don’t hand-feed a cow a candy bar or slice of old bread, but they take foods like them that are past their use-by dates (as well as waste like vegetable trimmings, food pulp, and nut hulls) and grind them up and add them to other feed material. That feed is then carefully analyzed for specific macro and micronutrients, to provide the specialized nutrition profile that meets the animal’s needs. Animal science experts call this a circular bio-economy (our backyard chickens did the same — pecked at our moldy bread or rotting vegetables then created new nutrition via eggs!).

While food spoilage is one of the biggest reasons people throw away food, many Americans throw away perfectly good, safe, and consumable food. In addition, the water and energy used to produce the food is also wasted. Food that sits in landfills results in the production of nitrogen pollution, and it emits methane, a greenhouse gas. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), food waste accounts for about 6 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, preventing food waste can be one potential solution to slow global warming.