Flour milled from discarded coffee fruit. Chips made from juice pulp. Vodka distilled from strawberries that nobody seems to want.
At one point not so long ago, such waste-based products were novelties for the Whole Foods set. But in the past three years, there’s been an explosion in the number of start-ups making products from food waste, according to a new industry census by the nonprofit coalition ReFED.
The report, which was released Tuesday and tracks a number of trends across the food-waste diversion industry, found that only 11 such companies existed in 2011. By 2013, that number had doubled, and ReFED now logs 64 established companies selling ugly-fruit jam, stale-bread beer, and other “upcycled” food products.
The companies have diverted thousands of pounds of food waste from landfills, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. They’ve also become a model for larger, multinational food companies, which are starting to realize that upcycling peels and piths can be good business.
“What was once considered ‘waste’ — or an accepted cost of doing business — is now seen as an asset and revenue generator,” said Chris Cochran, the executive director of ReFED. “As companies begin to track, measure, and understand food loss and waste, the economics of food waste solutions begin to look a lot more attractive.”
You do not fry chips made from juice pulp when you are swimming in potatoes. I suspect some shortage is beginning behind the scenes and we are not being told about it, though it is making such schemes as above appear profitable where they would not have a decade back.
I have always suspected the leftist r-strategists have a propensity for eating unusual foods that most of us would reject, as a way of exploiting unused resource streams and avoiding competition for more desirable fair. It would jibe with monkey studies on amygdala lesions. Amygdala lesions produce tendencies to eat all sorts of food, absent any disgust or aversion.
I wonder if that novelty-seeking gastronomic urge amps up as the stress of K-selection – and the arrival of a God-Emperor ply their stresses to the amygdalae of suddenly frightened rabbits.
My guess is that just as the left-wing Antifa types exhibit and seek out strange sexual traits in their mates, as the collapse closes in we will be seeing leftists eating some weird stuff that we will not understand either.
I would also assume it will amp up the chance of a pandemic beginning.
Tell others about r/K Selection Theory, because Antifa chicks are a public health hazard
[…] New Trend – Converting Garbage To Food […]
This does not strike me as an indication of a shortage so much as it does of being the sign of an impending bubble. In the late nineties we had internet start-ups shipping people cat litter on the assumption that somehow buying over the internet was going to make it profitable even though you could walk down the street and get it from the local grocer. That lasted for a while, but then the capital dried up and the market crashed.
“I suspect some shortage is beginning behind the scenes and we are not being told about it, though it is making such schemes as above appear profitable where they would not have a decade back.”
What I don’t understand is where do they get the financial backing for this. Doesn’t it seem like the equipment needed to do this on a large basis, the physical plaint, fixed costs, personnel, marketing, advertising, and the cost of obtaining and shipping large quantities of garbage would run several hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars? Businesses are normally attempts to make money. Is this just a loss leader, like modern day newspapers?
I think it was within the last decade, if not the last few years, that I saw an uptick in media pimping bugs as the new “future of protein” or some sort of shtick.
I have less disgust for tofu.
There has always been a leftist propensity to take garbage and sell it as upscale (like art).
I would guess the stale bread beer is sold at 2 to 3 times what a coors sells for. It lets the upper middle class endulge is prole tastes and feel both elite and satisfied they are doing something for the environment.
That and there has always been a propensity to eat nasty shit as an “acquired taste (sniff)”
cof… Santa… cof… Clarita…cof… Diet…
So, this is some sort of transitory phase rabbits go through before some form of psychological transformation into compliant dogs to survive the dominance of wolves?
Like squirrels fighting over a trashcan. I’d say vibrants will probably be feeding themselves and lefties a steady diet of lead. Abstract concepts like food production, disease and the future are likely a little beyond their grasp though.
Maybe there is a shortage developing.
Or maybe there are folks who consider virtue signaling that important.
Not really a new trend. Icelanders have been eating putrid shark meat (hakarl) for centuries. Iceland never had a high enough population density for any sort of coastal defense, so they learned to harvest and eat something that roving pirates would not steal.
“Adirondack” means “bark eaters” because the native tribes subsisted largely on pine bark. California natives ate salmon only during the spawning run, and hoarded acorns to see them through the hungry season. Why not dry salmon and store it? Because stockpiles of ready-to-eat dried fish would be too attractive to thieves. Few would bother stealing acorns because they require a lot of preparation to be made edible.
Why do so many tribes mutilate their women with tattoos, piercings, scarring, and stretching? To make them so ugly that no other tribe will steal them!
Turning Garbage into Food? Isn’t this the business model of McDonalds?
It’s not a new idea… recall the old Amishman:
“We mashed the apples to cider, fed the pomace to the cows; took the milk from the cows to make cheese; took the whey from the cheese to feed the pigs that we ran through the orchard to fertilize the Apple trees and clean up windfalls.”