Relatives love wasting food, and I usually wait until the last second to take it and eat it, I really hate it, and nagging them hasn’t changed anything.
So what’s your opinion on this? Or what do you do?
Are you starving or otherwise in poverty to where this would be one of the only things you get to eat?
Outside of those circumstances, I wouldn’t do it. For two reasons. To me, it’s no longer ‘food’. It’s the equivalent of eating bark or sawdust, so it doesn’t matter to me that it’s going in the trash. The waste was created when the animal was slaughtered in the first place.
Even if you don’t have that perspective, this creates a weird dynamic where it expresses to other people that you’re okay with all of it as long as its ‘extra’. Meaning a family member might intentionally save some for you, knowing you’ll eat it, because they think you’ll starve otherwise.
Maybe they’ll buy extra portions of food the next time they get takeout with this same intent. Not necessarily out of ill intent to say “see, you’re not vegan”, but more like “I’m worried X isn’t getting enough protein, so I always get an extra chicken wing and say I can’t finish it”.
In short, it’s their problem, and you choosing to eat it only has potential downsides outside of the dire circumstances I mentioned.
I agree but also disagree. It totally can send the wrong message and have people hold out food for you, which I definitely don’t want. But if you can manage to avoid that, I do think it is less wasteful. It can be very circumstancial, but If I can eat your food that would go to the trash anyway, then I don’t have to find food for myself for that meal. I don’t have so much food in my fridge that if I eat something else instead then I would have to throw something of mine out. Also consider getting wrong orders, if I don’t eat it it is probably just going to get thrown out and I have to still get something for myself anyway
Thank you for giving some insight, I never thought of it as already waste, that really reframes my entire relation with it.
Im not starving thankfully, it’s more of a after four days if a cake is still there and it’s starting to smell or look weird I’ll eat it
Thank you again, I think I just have a bad relation with food
Please don’t eat the smelly cake, I want you to be happy
I don’t but realistically I don’t think it’s a significant moral issue if someone is scavanging stuff thrown out, like “freegans” or whatever. I just think it’s gross, like if someone ate another human they didn’t kill.
Eating stuff at family gathering might create incentives for excess and/or send the wrong message though. e.g. that secretly you want it (reenforcing that animal ag is desirable) or that nobody can actually be vegan.
Yeah I do eat non vegan that people throw out but try to be careful about toeing the line. I don’t want to make it look like I was hoping there would be some meat for me, but if someone is literally holding a plate over a trash can I will stop them and eat it
Personally I lost the ability to digest meat or something and now whenever I accidentally ingest some (most recently: cabbage rolls filled with rice that had been cooked in meat-based stock) it gives me a bunch of GI distress, especially acid reflux. So for that practical reason I would avoid it.
A similar conundrum presents itself when a restaurant mixes up my order and gives me something with meat. Obviously if I tell them this and they take it back the dish is thrown out and wasted. I occasionally used to just sigh and eat the dish for that reason until the GI issues became too bad. Sometimes if the server is nice they’ll just let us pack up the extra meat dish for someone else to eat.
No, I wouldn’t eat the dismembered corpse bits from the garbage either.
