About "expired" food donated by a research lab

From time to time, I get an e-mail from a well-respected medical research lab whenever they have an excess of food that is reaching its "expiration" date, which is 6 months after its milling. In this particular instance, the donated food has a higher protein content - 18% - rather than the usual 14%. It also has higher vitamin content, because this food was formulated to be autoclaved, for research animals in a sterile environment.

Given that food does not "go bad" after its expiration date, but that its various nutritional components will degrade over time until, eventually, it becomes like basic compost or sawdust, we take the food at its expiration date and distribute it. That food that cannot be consumed within two months goes into the recipient's freezers, to prolong the life an additional 6 months.

Regardless, the health and wellness media has done a good job of drilling into people's heads the idea that if you have expired food of any kind, you are taking a risk. I have some thoughts on competency losses and their resulting economic dependency - as well as bad supply chain management - that relate to this prevalent perception, but this post is not the place for making that argument. So I will focus on the idea of optimum nutrition of the individual in the context of how that food is delivered.

Consider the quality of laboratory blocks, even past due date, versus the quality that most pet rats are getting. Then consider that we also give our rats these blocks as a base, and add variety with table scraps and vegetables and sometimes bones. Given these, there are bigger issues to pursue than the idea of "perfect nutrition;" especially when proper exercise in a healthy life is pretty much the rule as the limiting factor for humans and their companion and livestock animals.

Now consider the metabolic and ecological argument. Rats have only been domesticated for 200 years, maybe less, and in all that time it is perhaps only the past 40 years that labs have scientifically developed "optimum" diets for any animals, *including humans.* This optimization research for humans is done to compensate for the real effort it requires to eat a varied, ecological diet. Diet research for animals is because they feed us and provide us with valuable information regarding pathways to disease for mostly our own health and well-being, or because some people fret about their pet, legitimately or not.

All manufactured food that is taken out of the human supply chain and directed towards animals increases our ecological footprint. We expend many, many more calories of energy in delivering food than the actual food contains. It is very important to me and what I see as the larger scheme of things that food never becomes waste, because waste, in all of its forms, plays a zero-sum game with food for us and other creatures. Given the arcane rules we have about quality and sourcing, both for better and worse, there is a lot of waste that goes into manufacturing. There is fish meal in these lab blocks. That fish meal - and soy and wheat, which are under cost pressure from corn and biofuel production, all of which in turn drive deforestation - could have gone to chickens for those Omega eggs that people seem to like to buy, or into fish food for fish farms because people like to eat farmed fish. In fact, I have inquired with my laboratory contact and this food, if ground, could be used for chickens, and it can certainly be used for pigs in its current form.

If my rats are not having any trouble digesting this food, then I give it to them. After all, they're omnivores. If they have a problem, I don't. That's my responsibility to the individuals who are my rats. But I also have a responsibility to the collection of organisms that have already went into or been impacted by the manufacture of this food, and to those that would go without such high-quality food without it - and be realistic, it is high quality - and finally, I have a responsibility to the process that ended up with getting this food to us.

Perhaps a lab technician needs to get better at estimating the food they will actually need so that not quite so much is at risk of being wasted, but we don't know the proportion of food they go through in a year. If there are 116 bags per year and that amounts to 5 - 10% of their food budget, that they want to give it to charity, to benefit homeless animals of the same species they study - then I am going to make sure this channel remains open and is appreciated. You do not look a gift horse in the mouth; you take that horse into your stable and you find appropriate work and companionship for it.