Carbohydrates are much cheaper than proteins and fat.
Proteins and fat of vegetable origin are cheaper than those of animal origin, but they come accompanied by excessive amounts of carbohydrates.
The most efficient way of getting food for human consumption for now is to dump as waste most of the carbohydrates from vegetables and retain only the valuable proteins and fat (this can be done at home for instance by making bread but washing the dough before baking in order to remove most of the starch, producing thus a protein-enriched bread, or by removing completely the starch by extra washing of the dough, converting in into gluten a.k.a. seitan).
The high proportion of carbohydrates from vegetable food can be used completely only by those who do hard physical work, but not by those who have a sedentary lifestyle, who must necessarily dump the carbohydrates as waste, either directly or indirectly (by buying food where the carbohydrates have already been wasted in various ways, including as energy sources for animals that have been raised for becoming food).
In the future it might be possible to develop better ways to use the carbohydrates that must be wasted now, by converting them with high efficiency into proteins or fat, by using bacterial or fungal cultures.
Are you arguing that wasting meat is more significant than wasting vegetation? I agree, but that doesn't diminish the fact that wasting both is significant.
Are you arguing that everyone should be vegetarian? That's a topic I was not even remotely touching on.
No, I was arguing that wasting a fraction of the carbohydrate part of the food that is produced is currently a necessity for a healthy human nutrition, even if most people are not aware of this.
For now, there exists no way of producing enough proteins and fats without also producing an excessive amount of carbohydrates, which must be wasted in some way or another.
One way of using the excess amount of carbohydrates from vegetable food is by feeding animals or mushrooms, to obtain food with a more favorable proportion of proteins or fat (and this is a form of food wasting, as less food is obtained as output than it is provided as input), but another way is just dumping the excess carbohydrates (i.e. starch or sugars), after using food processing methods that separate the protein-rich or fat-rich parts.
When humans eat the excess amount of carbohydrates instead of dumping them as waste, the result is obesity, which is a worse choice than wasting the undesirable food.
Carbohydrates are much cheaper than proteins and fat.
Proteins and fat of vegetable origin are cheaper than those of animal origin, but they come accompanied by excessive amounts of carbohydrates.
The most efficient way of getting food for human consumption for now is to dump as waste most of the carbohydrates from vegetables and retain only the valuable proteins and fat (this can be done at home for instance by making bread but washing the dough before baking in order to remove most of the starch, producing thus a protein-enriched bread, or by removing completely the starch by extra washing of the dough, converting in into gluten a.k.a. seitan).
The high proportion of carbohydrates from vegetable food can be used completely only by those who do hard physical work, but not by those who have a sedentary lifestyle, who must necessarily dump the carbohydrates as waste, either directly or indirectly (by buying food where the carbohydrates have already been wasted in various ways, including as energy sources for animals that have been raised for becoming food).
In the future it might be possible to develop better ways to use the carbohydrates that must be wasted now, by converting them with high efficiency into proteins or fat, by using bacterial or fungal cultures.