| > the real alternative is that it gets thrown in the trash and wasted My view is a bit different nowadays, but this is very much an extreme bird's eye view from very high up, looking at only the smaller processes I have no disagreement. So, my point is more like an alternative co-existing higher level view, not a replacement of what you and others say. You will still be right to want to optimize your processes of course. I view it as different streams. Everything is a circle. There is a significant cost - energy (and time and space and effort). As long as we use ancient sun-energy dug out of the ground it's bad, but if we could power the circles with current sun energy it would not matter much. You have one overall stream or flow, all materials, and output streams are various sizes of end products. The good stuff stream flows to the customers (and forms bigger circles), the mistakes are instead rerouted into the recycling stream. In chemical engineering and in manufacturing you have the same. Making food, whether completely natural, or including any kind of processing even if it's just separation and packaging, will have similar properties. Quality varies, and you have additional processing streams for various qualities. Sure, one would want to optimize the streams, but if we did not have the fossil energy source limitation, and maybe also space, if you have to go back to the growing fields, it would not matter too much. ---- Imaginary picture: Imagine in the far future somebody set up a fully automated closed system for making food, from growing to putting it in a huge cafeteria buffet, fully stocked all day. But there is no more people. As long as there is energy, food is created, processed, put on the buffet, and then recycled, since there is nobody to actually eat anything. Is it a waste? Well, yes and no. The whole of earth is like that! As long as there is energy the cycles continue. What is "waste"? If you take the very big view, everything just "is". But again, our actual limitation is the energy source for our food cycles. Using ancient stored sun energy releases the carbon stored underground, and it also slowly depletes those stores. The real problem first of all is where we get the energy for our cycles from, not really if parts of it don't make it to the end customers. Opportunity cost, what we could use the space and general effort for instead of on recycling cycles comes a distant second, I think. |