We can easily grow more plants than humanity can collectively eat, and still have plants left over for global industries. Food is abundant. There is just no need to be that frugal with food. The problem of hunger does not come from lack of food, it comes from avarice.
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
23 points (87.1% liked)
No Stupid Questions
47340 readers
1134 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
USA grows a lot of corn. Only 1.5% of it is edible strains.
and a lack of companies with ethics. shipping companies often make massive profits. there is nothing stopping them from shipping donations for free...
Food insecurity is not a resource issue, it is a class\profit\interest issue.
Since the industrial revolution food production has always had the potential to feed to world easily with plenty left over.
Why do stores call cops on starving people who go through the bins that are full of perfectly edible food? because profits (free food makes payed food less appealing)
Hunger is not caused by people not finishing what is on their plate or by allowing over-ripe fruits and vegetables to be discarded.
Hunger is caused by our profit based food distribution system.
People with little or no money get little or no food. It sucks, but that is how it works.
Unless you can somehow take the profit away from the final destination so that anyone who wants food can have food, that will not change. I can't even imagine a way to do it in an equitable fashion without a cultural shift away from money and towards having a healthy community that cares about the individual humans and is willing to share equally to do it.
Restaurant waste, which is what your post body starts with, can't be recycled like that. It's an unsafe practice due to the contamination gained at the table combined with time out of the temperature safe zone. Even if you killed an the pathogens there, the risk of the toxins left by those pathogens is problematic. That and it would ruin the food trying to kill them to a reasonable degree.
Now, back in the kitchen, you could do what some restaurants do and donate the prepared but unserved food to local distribution centers (often focused on homeless charities or government outlets). But it wouldn't make sense to turn it into some kind of "nutrition loaf". Seriously, look up that term and be prepared to hate the prison system more than you do currently.
And that is why even if the process could be perfectly safe, it would still suck. Nobody should have to eat the horrible crap that it would turn into. If would be cheaper, safer, and more humane to just make sure everyone has good food to eat in the first place.
The only application for the kind of bricks you'd get from the process is feeding people that don't have access to good, healthy food in the first place.
I mean you could do all that, make it taste good, even solve the issue with allergies, but i reckon most people would say "ew im not eating that wtf". Also from the amount of distrust in the government and corporations, you'd probs also get people thinking its bad for them regardless of facts and evidence
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.
Bacterial contamination, fungal contamination, toxicological contamination from fungi and bacteria, other sorts of contamination (rodents, worms and shit).
Short answer is No. Long answer: Hell no.
there no benifits to this. extreme bacterial contaminations and mold/fungus concerns aside, there is simply too much unprocessed food available that goes unsold and is wasted as a result to ever need to recort to this.
it's not a ecology issue, there has never been a shortage of "food". when people say there is a "Shortage of food", what they mean is there is a shortage of food /given/ to them.
it's a economic shortage of food. they do not have enough wealth to acquire food and therefore they are not getting any. greed is the reason there is so much food wasted. not at the table, but at the market.
governments should be subsidising the poor and supporting their food needs by taking excess from markets at value, not margin.
Cause that's commie shit! What next? Gonna make us eat bugs?!
/S (I hope it was obvious lol)
Cause that sounds nasty.
This might pass US food standards, but I can imagine the rest of the world would have a few objections.
There’s too many factors over which there is virtually no control, such as other things ending up in the food bin (plastic wrappers, people’s saliva, etc). It would be classified as not fit for human consumption.
as soon as food starts the process of production, before it even hits a preparation or cooking surface it has bacteria on it. nothing is completely clean.
freezing, washing and cooking ingredients reduces these or makes them go dormant. but it does not get rid of them entirely.
when it's plated and served, that bacteria is already stating to revive and reproduce. by the end of a meal, between all the new nutrients from the human body added to the plate from the utensils, the leftover food is a breeding ground. this is why leftovers are generally considered risky if not handled properly.
you simply cannot reliably disinfect them and the only things you can do is store it in a chilled environment to slow bacterial growth and reheat to aid in killing some but not all of that new growth off.
if you start mixing these together, the salavia, which is unavoidable as spittle occurs whether you notice it or not, and trace amounts are on your utensils from mouth contact. plus any airborne contaminants from the person are in the food.
it basically becomes a Petri dish. as it's a perfect microcosm for bacteria and mold...
we used to grow mold, yeast and fungus by spitting on potatoes and rice. to later harvest it. we understand it well.
Aside from the fact that hunger is not caused by lack of food but by a capitalist distribution of means of subsistence, that also sounds profoundly unsafe. So you want to grind raw meat, raw eggs, with berries, leeks, idk what else, and hope for the best? Some of the food might have been on the verge of expiration. If some of the food was bad now all of it is bad because you mixed it all up. Different ingredients need different cooking methods, temperatures, times, etc. Some of your paste will be cooked to inedibility whilst some of it won't be at a food-safe temperature yet. Even if it didn't cost anything to implement this, no one had any dietary requirements, etc, this food would just be unsafe to eat.
Not to mention that their idea is focused on people's unfinished meals, so now you have a bunch of new pathogens to worry about.
Pathogens could easily spread this way since your collection bin would require to meet hygiene standards (i.e. cooling and rodent-free) and you would need to make sure the people treat the scraps they throw in right. And are not such with gastroenteritis or similar diseases.
If you had a magic wand which removes all pathogens, your approach becomes viable I guess.
Holy shit....this was actually predicted by an art performance duo, who hacked into economic conferences with a slide deck about how the west should feed the poor shit.
A waste food purée doesn't really sound very appealing. So what is stopping me is that this sounds like quite a bit of effort for something that I don't even want.
But you're free to collect my food waste and do what ever you want with it.
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!!!
I get your point but, ewww
Yucky