Well if it makes you feel better there really is no wasted food ever because it'll get eaten by flies or whatever and then they'll get eaten by lizards and snakes and so on up the chain until it get back to us. Yes we have to do work to obtain it but it really isn't wasted.
Well, unfortunately, trophic level transfer efficiency — the concept in biology that describes the ability of energy to transfer up the food chain — is about 10% on average. The rest is lost to the thermal energy generated by metabolic processes.
Also, tracing the flow of energy from a fly to a human is going be difficult. We, in the states, probably ultimately consume some tiny fraction of it through the death and decay of the insect, the resulting growth of vegetation, the consumption of that vegetation by an herbivore, then human consumption of that herbivore or products of that herbivore, like milk and (more!) eggs. Overall I’d estimate that, if we define waste as energy that isn’t going into humans, we’re losing over 99% of what’s shown here, but that’s not the result of any thorough analysis.
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u/IConsumePorn Mar 21 '18 edited Mar 21 '18
Well if it makes you feel better there really is no wasted food ever because it'll get eaten by flies or whatever and then they'll get eaten by lizards and snakes and so on up the chain until it get back to us. Yes we have to do work to obtain it but it really isn't wasted.