Posted on 08/20/2024 8:47:19 AM PDT by Red Badger
Recycling food scraps back into food you can eat sounds disgusting at first. But I’m sure everyone hearing about Japan’s way of tackling waste would want to know how the process works and how the resulting food tastes. It turns out the process is not disgusting at all once you get to learn about it. It’s ingenious, and everyone should be doing it. Spoiler alert: people don’t aren’t being fed the liquid mass that results from fermenting food scraps with this technology. Instead, pigs get the liquid ecofeed, and then people ultimately eat the pigs.
The technology aims to fix two of Japan’s biggest problems: pollution and food waste. That’s because Japan imports two-thirds of its food and three-quarters of its livestock feed.
Moreover, Japan is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and burning food waste contributes to the problem. Japan wants to cut emissions by 46% by the end of this decade and become carbon neutral by 2050. Recycling uneaten food scraps into pig feed can help with that.
The clever process seems like a no-brainer once read the BBC’s story of Koichi Takahashi and his idea. A veterinarian by training, Takahashi created the Japan Food Ecology Center to tackle the food waste problem and help save the environment.
The idea behind the Japan Food Ecology Center isn’t just to take uneaten food scraps and shovel them into a trough for pigs. Instead, the company processes the scraps using a techique Japan is famous for: Fermentation.
Takahashi worked with the government and researchers to develop his lactic acid-fermented liquified feed for pigs. The end product has a shelf life of 10 days without refrigeration. This is possible by lowering the pH to 4.0, a level where bacteria can’t survive.
The feed is “pale and watery,” and it tastes like sour yogurt.
As for the quality of the feed, the researchers developed a formula that’s optimal for pig growth and meat quality. The initial version slowed growth and produced fatty meats. Interestingly, farms that buy the feed can ask for specific customizations to meet their needs.
Takahashi’s factory processes around 40 tons of food waste per day. It comes from various places, including supermarkets, department stores, manufacturers, and local convenience stores. Incinerating food waste is more expensive than recycling it, and that’s why these businesses prefer to work with Takahashi’s company and others like it.
Interestingly, Takahashi has not patented his technology, so anyone can replicate it. Some 1,000,000 tons of ecofeeds are produced a year from all of Japan’s food waste recycling facilities. Takahashi’s company accounts for only 35,000 tons of that.
Recycling food in this manner is also a profitable endeavor. Takahashi wanted to prove that environmental efforts like food recycling do not have to be too expensive to pursue. As for the farms that buy the feed from his company, they pay half the price of conventional feed.
The resulting pig meat is growing in popularity in Japan because it’s both “delicious and sustainable.” Ecofeed-grown pig sales generate $2.3 million in annual revenue. That might not be that impressive in the grand scheme of things, but Takahashi’s idea could be easily replicated.
To put things into perspective, Japan throws out 28.4 million tons of food annually. It’s spending some $5.4 billion a year on waste incineration, 40% of which is uneaten food scraps.
The report also notes another benefit of creating food waste processing plants like the Japan Food Ecology Center. In addition to generating 70% less gas emissions than importing conventional feed, Takahashi has adapted his processing plant to convert some of the resulting methane into energy he sells back to the grid. The energy his food recycling plant produces can power 1,000 households per day.
Finally, the powdery black substance that results from energy conversion is turned into fertilizer that’s rich in nutrients.
The post Japan is turning uneaten food scraps back into edible food appeared first on BGR.
I use leftovers from meals at least once a week here, and very often, twice a week. Very little goes to waste. I’m astounded by people who thinks leftovers are gross. In my house, they are turned into very tasty meals. I was raised that way, and I’m still using the techniques I learned from my parents.
This new technology is only several hundred years old.
It’s good that this is being done commercially.
That amount of food waste is appalling.
We do the same here. Pigs and chickens are amazing food recyclers....
Hard pass for me, but if it’s helping to feed them, and they’re willing, go for it Japan!
All scraps around here go to the chickens, the compost piles or to house dogs.
The hunting dogs get no scraps but DO get the occasional Milk Bone from me. They’re already on some pretty expensive, balanced kibble. The Mule likes Milk Bones, too. ;)
Same here.
They are doing something we used to call ‘Slopping the hogs’....... I guess that’s ‘new’ to Japan.........🙄
Bottom line: They’re feeding (processed) kitchen scraps to swine, then eating the resulting pork.
This will be familiar to American farmers.
This is the exact process for making silage for cattle you take a mass of material inoculate it with acid.making bacteria and ferment it till it’s PH4 or less then it just sits there waiting to be feed.
There was a episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike went to a pig farm in the desert outside Vegas where they were trucking in food scraps from all the Vegas buffets they conveyor belt it from dump trucks to a giant pressure cooker where they heated it till 225F for a few hours the sludge that came out was then with much comedy loaded into a cart and deposited into pig feeding troughs they went nuts for it.
Also unsold produce from grocery store and edible garbage from restaurants.
We’ve been doing this for 200 years.................
I think “we” (the human species) have been doing it for a lot longer than 200 years. Medieval European peasants would surely recognize the concept ... probably swineherds for as long as swine have been herded would recognize it.
If it is good for the pig you’ll soon be eating, then skip the middle pig and feed it straight to the human.
One of “Dirty Jobs” best segments was about making pig food from Las Vegas table scraps.
Yup Mike Rowe on the skid loader was comedy gold. That and the conveyor belt of doom with all the hand picked out nasty things people put on their plates.
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