From Farm to Feast: Practicing Thanksgiving Food Waste Sustainability
Thanksgiving is always a special time of year; it marks the beginning of the holiday season and offers a time filled with gratitude, quality time with friends and family, and the oh-so-exciting Thanksgiving dinner. However, along with our Thanksgiving turkeys and cornbread stuffing, unfortunately come millions of pounds of food waste.
From the leftovers we don’t finish to the roughly 50% of the Thanksgiving turkey considered inedible by Americans, the holiday season often becomes a time of year marked by a surge in food waste. Not only does this food waste contribute toward landfill buildup and increased greenhouse gas emissions, but it also poses costly repercussions, both in terms of the disposal process and the spent resources put into producing, packaging, and distributing food products.
What Is Rendering?
At its core, rendering is recycling. It’s the repurposing of by-products from the meat industry that would otherwise go to waste — think bones, fats, etc.
With the help of renderers, these by-products are turned into clean and safe rendered material that can then be used to develop a variety of new products, from pet food and animal feed to biofuel.
While the rendering process significantly contributes toward food waste sustainability in the meat industry, allowing for 99% of the otherwise unusable and discarded animal by-products that we don’t eat to instead be repurposed and recycled, there are also simple ways that each of us can help to reduce our own household food waste during the holiday season.
Plan, Plan, Plan.
While preparing for your holiday dinners, take the extra time to estimate the number of guests to feed, adjusting portions accordingly. On top of this, consider planning recipes that use ingredients you already have at home — the perfect opportunity for a two-for-one with a pantry cleanout.
Repurpose Leftovers
Even with the best planning, many of us are left with the inevitable fridge-full of leftovers. To ensure leftovers get eaten and enjoyed, consider ways to repurpose them into new recipes.
Donate Unused Ingredients
For the ingredients we bought in excess or didn’t get around to using, donating them to a local food bank creates the perfect opportunity to minimize waste while reducing food insecurity.
Through the reduction of food waste, both on a larger scale through the rendering process and within our own homes, the positive impacts are threefold: increased environmental security, long-term sustainability, and cost-efficiency. By taking a moment to consider where our food comes from and the role we can play in the reduction of its waste, we can work together to make consumption — and our favorite holiday dinners — more sustainable for all of us in the long run.
