Just got this in my inbox. Not really relevant to vegans but something else that we can feel good about - not throwing out meat.
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You may have heard the grim statistic by now:
Around one-third of food produced in the US is never consumed, ending up in landfills as waste.
The biggest benefit of reducing food waste is self-evident —
over 10 percent of US households are food insecure, and diverting food that’s safe and edible but destined for those landfills to those in need could help millions lead healthier, better lives.
There’s another benefit of reducing food waste that’s starting to get more attention, and the EPA just shined a spotlight on it in a
new report, "Farm to Kitchen: The Environmental Impacts of US Food Waste."
“This uneaten food results in a ‘waste’ of resources — including agricultural land, water, pesticides, fertilizers, and energy — and the generation of environmental impacts — including greenhouse gas emissions and climate change,” the authors write in the report.
According to ReFED, an organization that fights food waste,
food waste accounts for 4 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions — a little more than aviation.
Even though meat, dairy, and eggs compose just a little over a quarter of US food waste, the EPA report authors argue that there are disproportionate environmental benefits to reducing such waste. That’s because animal products typically require much more
land, water, and energy — and
emit more carbon and methane — than plant-based foods.
But there’s another potential major benefit to reducing animal product wastage: preventing hundreds of millions of animals from entering factory farms in the first place.
The animals we raise and kill — only to throw away
Harish Sethu, a data scientist and author of the blog
Counting Animals, estimates that
Americans throw out 26.2 percent of animal products as of a 2011 USDA report. This translates to around 1 billion chickens, more than 100 million other land animals (mostly turkeys, pigs, and cows), as well as 25 billion fish and 15 billion shellfish (mostly shrimp), all raised or caught only to wind up in a landfill. (This estimate only includes food waste at the retail and consumer levels, and excludes waste during processing, shipping, and on-farm production — more on this later.)
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In 2015, the USDA and EPA set a goal of
halving food waste by 2030. If the US can achieve this goal, it stands to reason that hundreds of millions of land animals might be spared a lifetime of suffering on a factory farm each year, and tens of billions of fish and shellfish could be spared the suffering entailed in capture and slaughter.
We hear a lot about eating less meat — I even wrote a
newsletter series about it. But I think it’s time for an additional slogan to enter the conversation:
Waste less meat.