Duck-shaped potatoes. Curvy cucumbers. Broken carrots. Some food sellers, after decades of displaying piles of identical, aesthetically pleasing produce, are starting to sell slightly less beautiful 鈥� but still tasty 鈥� fruits and vegetables.
Millions of tons of food are thrown out or left to rot in fields every year in wealthy nations, simply because they do not meet cosmetic standards set by distributors or supermarkets. Under pressure from anti-waste advocates, the food industry has begun looking for ways to throw away less.
So now, in such cities as Pittsburgh and Paris, some of that imperfect produce has started to find its way into stores. And bargain-hunting consumers, who get a hefty discount for their willingness to munch on too-small apples and blemished oranges, seem to be buying it.
With the water, fertilizer, energy and other resources used to grow crops that never make it to the table, food waste carries an environmental price. In the United States, 40 percent of food, $162 billion worth every year, is never eaten, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group, and ReFED, an anti-waste coalition. Producing, processing and transporting uneaten food accounts for a quarter of America鈥檚 water use and 4 percent of its oil consumption, the council says.
Along with targeting waste, being able to sell food that once would have been tossed aside gives growers a new stream of income and offers consumers a way to save money without compromising on taste or nutrition.
鈥淭here鈥檚 nothing more disheartening for a farmer than to grow something and then throw it away,鈥� said Guy Poskitt, a carrot and parsnip farmer in Yorkshire. 鈥淐onsumers hate waste, and as growers we鈥檝e really got huge challenges in terms of profitability,鈥� he said. Selling imperfect produce helps solve both problems, he said.
Often, the cosmetically challenged fruits and veggies are hardly distinguishable from ordinary ones 鈥� an orange with a bumpy scar on it, or a potato that is slightly smaller than its peers.
Dana Gunders, a food and agriculture expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, recalled talking to a stone-fruit grower who every week produces 200,000 pounds, about 90,000 kilograms, of peaches and plums that cannot be sold. 鈥淗e said, 鈥極f those, you wouldn鈥檛 be able to tell me what鈥檚 wrong with eight out of 10 of them.鈥� 鈥�
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