Читать книгу Zero Waste Cooking For Dummies - Rosanne Rust - Страница 39

You likely have heard the term upcycling as a way to take a discarded byproduct from one industry and reuse it to make another product that’s better than the original. But did you know that food can be upcycled, too? If you’ve ever enjoyed a spent grain pizza at a local microbrewery, you experienced an upcycled meal. Upcycling is taking food, or a food byproduct, and turning it into something edible. Beer manufacturers recycle their grain, creating flour, pasta, and bread products with safe, leftover raw material.

The first person who decided to make sausages, fruit jam, or banana bread may not have thought they were “upcycling,” but it was a great food waste strategy. Industry is now using byproducts that are safe to eat (that were previously wasted) to create other products. For instance, the fruit pulp left after pressing fruit for juice can be used to add nutrition to snack bars. In fact, there’s currently a whole industry focused on creating packaged foods from upcycled ingredients.

Because food is made from carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, out-of-the-box-thinkers are discovering ways to literally create nutrition out of thin air. In the 1960s, NASA came up with the idea to feed astronauts using a type of bacteria known as hydrogenotrophs to transform the carbon dioxide (CO₂) the astronauts exhaled into protein. Today, more scientists are evaluating this “carbon capture” process, including a company called Air Protein that seeks to solve a decades-long challenge about creating protein from CO₂.

Cattle farmers upcycle, too, by using grocery store food waste to create ingredients for animal feed. No, they don’t hand-feed a cow a candy bar or slice of old bread, but they take foods like them that are past their use-by dates (as well as waste like vegetable trimmings, food pulp, and nut hulls) and grind them up and add them to other feed material. That feed is then carefully analyzed for specific macro and micronutrients, to provide the specialized nutrition profile that meets the animal’s needs. Animal science experts call this a circular bio-economy (our backyard chickens did the same — pecked at our moldy bread or rotting vegetables then created new nutrition via eggs!).