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This is not about the guilt-ridden question: Should I eat meat? That personal dilemma has already been debated thoroughly on Grist and elsewhere. Instead, here’s another dose of angst for us meat eaters, just in case we needed one:  If we’re going to condone the killing of animals, the least we can do is eat all of the resulting meat.

You’re welcome.

When I do readings for my book, American Wasteland, I begin by talking about the ethical shortcomings of wasting food. Primarily, there’s the idea that someone would have loved to eat the foods that we squander. Wasting food devalues the suffering of millions in America and a billion worldwide who don’t get enough to eat. These days, 15 percent of Americans [PDF] are food insecure, or struggle to find enough to eat. And food banks and hungry people have a hard time getting sufficient protein, especially the kind not found inside a tin can or a cylinder of casing.

Wasting meat raises the stakes to create an ethical double whammy. Squandering animal protein – and some would include offal here – debases our quotidian killing of animals. As Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics, told me: “To treat food cavalierly leads to a lack of appreciation of the importance of food, of the fact that some go without it, of the suffering of animals that the carnivores among us are willing to tolerate to eat our food.”

Ideally, the growing number of hungry people would motivate us to treasure our edibles – meat especially – at all stages of the food chain. But, contrary to what we claim, we do not. Globally, at least one-third of all food isn’t consumed [PDF]. Domestically, that figure jumps to about 40 percent. And zooming in further, we squander about 25 percent of the food we bring into our homes.* It seems that in the cold calculus of everyday life, ethics aren’t all that motivating.