Farms till excessively damaged produce back into the soil along with the crop’s stems and leaves, recycling their nutrients. “Drops” (produce that’s fallen on the ground) are left behind because otherwise they tend to cause food-poisoning outbreaks.
With many crops, misshapen produce knocks against its neighbors during transit, poking holes and jeopardizing entire bins. Much of it is bruised or weeping goods that can quickly break down and rot the entire crate. Despite the dramatic anecdotes about truckloads of landfilled crops, little of farm waste is due to merely “cosmetic” blemishes. When produce doesn’t make it off the farm, there’s a reason. The hype surrounding this movement is inflated by the public’s ignorance of the food supply chain.įarms run on tight margins they don’t casually waste their crops. “Rescuing” ugly produce is just one of the few, small slices of the food waste problem that are easily monetized by private entrepreneurs. The vast majority of waste - more than 80 percent - is generated by homes and consumer-facing businesses like grocery stores and restaurants. Less than 20 percent of total food waste happens at farms and packinghouses, where the ugly-produce movement works its magic, according to ReFED, a nonprofit dedicated to researching food waste policies. That’s because advocates are getting the problem exactly backward. Yet while the trend may have upsides for some farms and consumers, it’s nowhere near fixing food waste. never leaves the farm just because it looks a little different. . . People understood that a small apple was as delicious as a large one, a misshapen carrot as nutrient-rich as any other.” The website for rival service Imperfect Produce, recently valued at $180 million, says: “Approximately 20% of organic and conventional produce in the U.S. “Shark Tank” alumnus Hungry Harvest, which delivers boxes of “rescued” fruits and veggies to subscribers’ doorsteps, claims that “demand for aesthetic perfection & homogeneity” drives us to squander food: “100 years ago, farmers could sell their entire harvest regardless of the size, shape or superficial beauty of their produce. Over the past several years, start-ups that bring ugly produce to consumers have proliferated. Typography by Danielle Evans for The Washington Post Food & Wine magazine launched #LoveUglyFood, with then-editor in chief Dana Cowin urging readers to “embrace all that is edible, not just what is beautiful.” Activist Jordan Figueiredo has championed the “Ugly” Fruit & Veg Campaign by sharing cute photos of knobby eggplants on social media and petitioning Walmart, Whole Foods and other retailers to stock imperfect produce.
We’re talking about good, fresh food that is being wasted on a colossal scale,” proclaims Tristram Stuart, author of “ Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal,” recounting how, as a teen, he discovered a local farmer throwing away edible potatoes too misshapen for supermarkets. “We’re not talking about rotten stuff, we’re not talking about stuff that’s beyond the pale. In our nation alone, we throw away some 63 million tons of food a year, even as 40 million Americans are considered food insecure.Īdvocates of the “ugly produce” movement say they have a way to radically reduce this waste: cutting the price of fruits and vegetables that normally go uneaten because they look too weird. If food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, after China and the United States.
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