Conversation with a Cattle Man

For many, the holidays are a time of abundance: holiday parties, family gatherings, and spending time with friends. Sprawling buffets of food and bars stocked with spirits are staples of the season, and New Year’s resolutions to lose weight or detox with Dry January are also becoming long-standing traditions. With any celebration, however, comes waste. What happens to all of our uneaten food? Couldn’t it be recirculated to feed people, especially in light of the recent changes to the SNAP program? If we can’t get uneaten food to people, what about animals? Throwing food waste in the garbage is common practice, but this can’t possibly be the best solution. Right?

We sat down with Dr. Paul Walker—past president of the Illinois Beef Association, professor emeritus at Illinois State University, and one of the nation’s leading experts on feeding food scrap to animals—about how we can redirect more food waste to farms rather than landfills.

A Brief History

This is a surprisingly complicated issue, and each state has slightly different laws—Illinois being one of the most restrictive states in terms of feeding animals food scrap.

The Illinois Law to Prohibit the Feeding of Garbage to Swine, passed on June 26th, 1969, is still the current law overseeing feeding pigs “garbage.” This law defines “garbage” as “putrescible vegetable waste, animal, poultry or fish carcasses or parts resulting from the handling, cooking, or consumption of food.” In other words, “garbage” is everything except dry grains and cereal products. This law was passed 56 years ago in response to Trichomoniasis, Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) and Classical Swine Fever (CSF).

“Food scrap or waste can be divided into really two kinds,” Dr. Walker explains. “Pre-consumer and post-consumer. Pre-consumer is food waste that comes out of the cereal factory, for example. Post-consumer is what's left after eating or what you scrape off the plate or in a restaurant.” This gets a little tricky, however. Uneaten hot bar or salad bar food at a grocery store—or an event—is post-consumer food waste, but packaged to-go Caesar salads or sushi next to it on the shelves is classified as pre-consumer. The packaging is the distinguishing factor here.

Expired or unpurchased packaged food is classified as pre-consumer food waste / photo taken at Whole Foods

Offered but uneaten buffet food is classified as post-consumer food waste / photo taken at Whole Foods

It is legal to feed pre-consumer food scrap to cattle, as long as it is strictly vegetarian, such as scrap lettuce or bread products. Technically, in the state of Illinois, it is also legal to feed cows post-consumer food scrap, as long as producers can ensure that it contains absolutely no animal product. This is difficult to prove, so it’s rare to find farms feeding cattle any food waste that is considered to be post-consumer. Under Illinois law post-consumer food waste cannot be fed to pigs.

To complicate the issue further, another category of food waste is “rendered product”: this is meat and bone meal, from dead animals or byproducts of a meatpacking house. This animal product must be heated to over 212 degrees and dehydrated before it can be fed to animals. It’s legal to feed “rendered product” to livestock such as pigs and chickens, but it was outlawed for cattle feed in 1997 in response to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (known as BSE or Mad Cow Disease), by the federal Mammalian Protein Ruminant Feed Ban law. 

Feeding Pigs Food Scrap in Illinois

We stopped by the Chicago Greater Food Depository and saw food scrap donation to farms in action. This pallet of pre-consumer grain product—such as dry bread and cereal—was being loaded onto a truck destined for a pig farm. This is a great example of the Feed & Conserve hierarchy in action. First, feed people. Second, feed animals. Third, compost food waste.

A pallet of pre-consumer bread products destined for a pig farm / photo taken at the Chicago Greater Food Depository

This is easier said than done, however, and two challenges here are sorting the food waste into the appropriate streams and dealing with the packaging around much of our pre-consumer food. 

“De-packaging” facilities—such as the one at Chicago’s Green Era Campus—deal with packaged food by feeding it into a machine that shreds the entire contents and separates the food from the packaging, which is typically plastic, aluminum or composite material. De-packaging is something that must happen for pre-consumer food to be fed to animals or composted either at a composting facility or an anaerobic digester. In an ideal world, producers of pre-consumer food waste—such as grocery stores, restaurants and manufacturers—would sort their food waste into three streams: one stream for loose and packaged food destined for food rescue organizations such as Chicago Food Rescue (where people can de-package food themselves), a second stream for farms to feed animals (where any packaged food would have to be de-packaged for animal consumption) and a third stream, food that is inedible for people or animals that can be composted or sent to an anaerobic digester. In Dr. Walker’s opinion, this is a logistical hurdle.

“So you see in the dumpster some plastic, some cardboard boxes, other stuff starts showing up,” Walker points out. “Education of the workforce is a never-ending, ongoing battle for the grocery store. That dumpster on the left is waste, that dumpster on the right is food scrap. And so that's a huge problem in terms of source separation. And now we have the issue of PFAS in potentially contaminated compost or digestate that we are spreading on crops. This is a real problem.” 

Creating Better Systems

To find better solutions, we first need to understand the systems, and then we need to determine if we need to improve those systems via changing mental models, policy, or both. And when writing policy, it’s important to consider how easy it will be for producers of food waste to comply. Dr. Walker is generally cautious about policy for this reason. 

“Science will solve the problem if you keep politics out of it,” Dr. Walker said. “There’s a lot of food rescue already happening in Illinois. The free market will solve most of these problems.” 

But if it's economically just as advantageous for producers and consumers to throw everything in a landfill, why would we not need legislation to encourage companies and individuals to do the right thing? And this is the crux of most of our waste issues: we need to change the way that we think about waste and care for people, animals and the environment, and well-written policy will nudge systems change that is guided by not only economics but ethics. Dr. Walker mostly agrees with this. 

“This is complicated. And that’s why we need experts writing legislation,” Dr. Walker concluded. The Feed & Conserve Illinois movement, created to support cultural change and policy change represented by SB1398 and HB1707. This bill is currently going through the amendment process, where it is being analyzed by experts with decades of experience—such as Dr. Walker—and many others representing diverse industries and interests. 

Complex issues sometimes require complex solutions, and the Feed & Conserve Illinois movement is working hard to become one of those solutions.