This implies composting food waste is only slightly better than landfill, which is obviously absurd.

Illustrating that the next best existing option after composting is landfill, says nothing of the delta separating the two on the efficacy axis. It only speaks to a lack of altnernatives separating composting and landfill.

I'd argue that burying your food waste in any land that food will potentially be grown in is infinitely superior to sticking it in a landfill where food will never be deliberately grown.

From my perspective, living on a rural property with an outhouse where all food waste and human waste is buried and eventually grown food from your comment strikes me as ridiculous. I add obvious value to my land burying this waste, it completely escapes reuse, effectively exiting the system, when I put it in the dumpster.

There is a high loss to atmosphere/runoff on burying your food in the soil for recovering it later as available fertilizer nutrients.

There is 100% loss of what's sent to the landfill, while consuming energy to move it there.

On my property in particular, runoff is not an issue (desert). From what I've seen there's mostly increased insect activity in the compost area. I view it as more generally increasing the fertility of the area from waste using minimal effort.

Most of it is consumed by other lifeforms before I grow anything there. But those lifeforms are residents of my land and will continue to multiply (and die) here. Their increased activity effectively locks up the resources and I can leverage that with a large garden when time permits.

The landfill has CH4 off gassing, which is usually burned and used to power things. It also supports it's own ecology and residents. The transporting of rotting food around is pretty ridiculous though.

You might make your distributed practices even more efficient with vermicompost / bokashi; by selecting an organism with known beneficial outputs to metabolize the waste you'll end up with a higher conversion to usable nutrients and beneficial microbes for your plants.

"which is usually burned"

Have you got any sources for the usually?

Any ex landfill I've seen just has vents to the open air, and mentions of landfill gas never give the impression its mainstream.

There are plenty of landfill gas capture systems around. Veolia are particularly proud of their so-called "Bio-reactor". These kinds of systems don't work as well as advertised, but if you have a landfill, it's better than nothing. https://www.veolia.com/anz/our-services/our-facilities/landf...

But as others have been saying, it makes much more sense to simply bury the food in your garden. Or collect food waste on a municipal level, which has, for example, been the law in Germany since 2015.

The "dry fermentation" system used in Munich is a particularly good example. They collect food waste in the city, compost and ferment it in a big sealed hall near the soccer stadium, wait 12 weeks for the bacteria to work, collect the resulting biogas to put into their gas network (or power garbage trucks), and sell the leftover organic compost and fertilisers to local residents and farmers. A closed and sustainable cycle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF0gU9ljHo4

https://www.awm-muenchen.de/fileadmin/PDF-Dokumente/awm/Fold...

This seems like a ridiculous chart. First of all, no homeless people or animals want to eat leaf litter, moldy vegetables, or coffee grounds. Second of all, the only inputs to my garden are water, sunlight, and compost, so as far as I'm concerned composting garden scraps is net zero at worst.

There is a lot of waste in the food supply chain. Some of that is suitable for human consumption at the point where it is classified as waste [1]. In Europe the food waste in fruit and vegetables is over 50% [2], of which at least half could be turned into black soldier fly or mealworm feed, which makes for good poultry or fish feed. But most of it today is going into waste dumps or at best turned into biogas.

Disclosure, I work for a startup that turns this into a circular food production system, from food waste, via insects to fish and vegetables via aquaponics.

[1] EU rules say eggs should be marked “Best before date” as 28 days after they have been laid, but stored propperly they are good for at least double that time. (Swedish) http://www.svenskaagg.se/?p=19895 In the UK supposedly 720 million eggs are thrown away each year. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/eggs...

[2] http://www.fao.org/3/mb060e/mb060e00.htm

Can you share which startup you work for? I've been wanting to work for a company like that

From bjelkeman-again's HN profile: "CO-founder & co-director at http://akvo.org ... We build open source data systems which we run as a service that are used in international development and increasingly in country governance."

From https://akvo.org/ "With our unique approach to development, we help our partners design their projects so that they can capture and understand reliable data which they can act upon."

Thanks, updated my profile to include our new startup.

This is a new one, Johanna’s Urban Farms, in Stockholm. We are just now building the pilot installation. https://www.johannas.org

Tack!