What waste?

While I was walking home I came across an apple that had been (to me) lightly grazed on all sides by the tiniest of hummingbirds and discarded. My brain immediately began to sing the lamentations of all that wasted apple meat; and then my conscious thoughts took a sudden shift.

I saw that same apple meat rotting into the soil, relaying nutrients back to the soil to be sucked up by blades of grass, who are then going to change poison into breathable atmosphere. I saw a raccoon come by and snatch up the rest of the apple and bring it home to feed 17 children. I saw ants dismembering its corpse over the course of a hot, sunny afternoon. Energy, be it in an atom or several hundreds of thousands of them covalently bonded together to form an apple, is never wasted. It has always been. This morning I recognized its form in the shape of a half-eaten apple.