Recycled Edible Waste (Processed Tomato Sauce, Anyone?) You’re Here To Help Clean Up The Planet
(Illustration by Nicole Moss)
By now, it shouldn’t be a secret that tackling climate change requires a hands-on approach, but what about all the stomachs? A wave of innovative new recycled products indicates a growing business acceptance to divert all types of edible waste – leftovers, discarded products, even invasive species – away from landfills and back onto our plates. The companies that capitalize on the zero waste trend are both monoliths and mini: Take juice giant Ocean Spray, which in 2020 launched Cranberry Seeds, a new offering that transforms a key ingredient into a nutritional product; or Wilder Harrier from Montreal, who repurposes the notorious nuisance of the Asian carp ecosystem in doggy dinners. Who says consumption is always bad for the environment?
Recycling may seem like an old guard solution, but turning our personal digestive organs into rudimentary blue boxes to achieve emptier landfills is a relatively creative way to responsibly manage our food resources. According to research by the National Zero Waste Council, Canadians alone waste almost 2.2 million tons of food each year; A 2019 report by Toronto-based nonprofit Second Harvest revealed that 4.82 million tons of food is lost in the processing and manufacturing stages. These revelations are particularly dire in light of the fact that more than five million Canadians regularly experience food insecurity or a lack of reliable access to affordable and nutritious food.
In the Guelph-Wellington region of Ontario, SEED is a social enterprise aimed at ameliorating that very problem. Before COVID stopped, well, everything, manager Gavin Dandy says the organization had designs on a new set of products made with surplus ingredients and sold on a sliding scale: Transformation Ketchup, Karma Ketchup, and Spent Grain Bread, aptly named, to be crafted. made from a by-product of barley sourced from the Guelph breweries. (There are plans to reactivate the planned product line at some point in the future.)
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“We see food waste as a food source for everyone, not just the food insecure,” says Dandy, who notes that SEED’s annual budget has grown from $ 100,000 to nearly $ 3 million in four years. “There is a big learning curve from a logistical point of view: how do we establish a value for this food and how comfortable will people, in general, feel with buying food made with recycled ingredients. But [upcycling] it’s going to happen until it becomes the new normal. “
Dandy is encouraged that consumers are taking advantage of this new stream of what he calls high-quality food. This has fueled SEED’s Upcycle Kitchen, which has distributed more than 100,000 frozen meals (priced at $ 9) last year, along with Groceries from the SEED, a pay-what-you-can online grocery store populated with recovered products. “These [programs] they are examples of how we try to avoid creating a two-tier system; this food is for people who are not ‘poor’ or ‘rich’, ”says Dandy. “We want people, all people, to have access.”
According to Will Valley, associate dean of the College of Food and Land Systems at the University of British Columbia, the force of the repurposed food boom may actually be that it highlights the limitations of our current food production and distribution systems.
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“I like to think of ‘the glow in the shadow’ of these kinds of approaches,” says Valley, who classifies food reuse in the same way as food banks, more as a ‘harm reduction’ exercise than as a necessary systemic exercise. revision. “The shine is definitely in our becoming very aware of some of our negative impacts on ecological systems, drawing people’s attention to waste and inefficiencies. But the management of invasive species [like the Asian carp] by finding a new input, it does not address the fundamental problems that our food system has: that it is extractive, it is commercialized and it reinforces the participation in the profits and the great energy conglomeration ”.
Despite all its skepticism, Valley says this new wave of food ingenuity has an advantage over inventions of the past, as they are not exclusively focused on the potential for new sources of income (such as sexy seed-based protein powders). But they are at least working with a view to mitigating the myriad social harms of the status quo: species migration, destruction of biodiversity, carbon production, and ever-rising food costs. “I always tell my students that our food system is not broken,” says Valley. “Actually, it works exactly as designed.”
As our economic imaginations gradually move away from a linear A-in-the-trash model and towards a more circular one that sees the nutritional potential in more things, we will undoubtedly be forced to recognize that simply gorging ourselves on salvage products is not the best thing to do. climate quick fix we’ve always hoped for. The key takeaway is that we will be fuller, but our landfills will not. “We’ll all look back at the dark age of food waste and think, ‘Wow, we were really dumb,’” says Dandy. “‘How could we have done this otherwise?'”
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This article appears in print in the January 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline: “Five Ways to Make Leftovers!” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.
Reference-www.macleans.ca