Animal agriculture as a solution to food waste
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Animal agriculture is often targeted as part of the problem when it comes to environmental degradation. But some innovative companies are showing how animals are actually a solution. Do Good Foods co-founder and CEO Justin Kamine said he was shocked when he learned how much of our food gets lost or wasted.
Kamine… “40% of all the food that gets grown gets thrown away. If food waste was a country it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter. And when we started to talk to some supermarkets and some other companies, we started to recognize the significance of this problem and said, well, how do we create a real large scale sustainable infrastructure solution that could really preserve the value of those nutrients, and really recreate the way our current food system operates?”
Their solution is to convert excess food from the grocery store into poultry feed and work with poultry growers to produce their own brand of meat.
Kamine… “We're able to send them our feed, they include that into the overall diet, and then they're able to hand us back kind of those retail and food service products that then we're able to provide back onto the retail shelves. And the real emphasis there is that we're finally empowering consumers to be a part of the process, to truly fight food waste and combat climate change from their kitchen by simply buying a delicious piece of chicken.”
The key Kamine says is that no big changes are needed from poultry producers or consumers to start being part of the solution.
