World Innovations: India's Efforts to Erase Food Waste

India is taking steps to overcome their food waste problem, but is it any good?

Sources- https://scroll.in/video/1023923/eco-india-the-economic-value-of-india-s-food-waste-is-over-rs-900-billion-is-there-a-fix

Food waste is a major problem, and it turns out that it has more consequences than starvation. For example, in India, 900 billion rupees or $15 billion in CAD is wasted a year through food waste. Starvation is still an issue, as 200 million people in India are starving and could have used some of that wasted food.

Of course, there’s more than just an economic loss: the food causes methane and uses oxygen to decompose. This can mean a huge loss to the environment. What India does is that they’re feeding things to the cows as they’re finding non-human ways to get rid of waste.

Personally, I like that approach, but the problem is they may be feeding cows toxic things, and rotten food, which means that if they’re feeding animals that (I don’t think they eat cows in India but they might be feeding pigs that) then humans might end up eating their own waste (as the toxins might accumulate in cows). The only thing worse than throwing away food is eating that food after it’s gone bad.

In terms of solutions, I have a few others: one of them is to just test for toxicity of any sort before feeding it to the animals, as I don’t think the grains the animals were being fed were that high quality anyway, and we just want to make sure that the resulting milk/beef from cows or the pork from pigs is still safe for human consumption.

We also might be able to use the food as fertilizer (as with other organic waste) if we determine it doesn’t have any toxins (if it does we can dispose of it as garbage to minimize contact with the soil).

Another way is to plug the other end of the problem, so to speak. You can try the conventional approach of minimizing the amount of food waste. I assume most food waste is from restaurants, so you could charge extra for customers that waste. For grocery stores, you could also give food that is close to expiration to homeless shelters to avoid starvation.