It's frightening to think about just how much edible food is wasted in the U.S. each year: Earlier this week, The Guardian reported that 1/3 of all foodstuffs—about 60 tons, worth $160 billion—is wasted by retailers and consumers every year.
(Unfortunately, those numbers concur with worldwide waste: On the global level, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 1/3 of all food grown is lost or wasted, estimated at $3 trillion. To visualize it: That amount of food would cover all five New York boroughs, as well as Jersey City and Newark.)
But the unfathomable quantity of waste (according to the EPA, discarded food is the biggest single component of landfills and incinerators) isn't made up of the lettuce that your family (and millions of others) forgot about, or the leftovers you never quite got to.
Food is wasted at all levels of production, well before it reaches your home.
To hedge risks of insects, blight, and weather—and to protect themselves against the fluctuation of supply and demand—growers often over-plant, which results in surplus crop and never-harvested fields.
And, at harvest time, "vast quantities of fresh produce grown in the U.S. are left in the field to rot, fed to livestock or hauled directly from the field to landfill, because of unrealistic and unyielding cosmetic standards," according to the Guardian. "Ugly" vegetables are abandoned to save the expense and labor of harvesting it; blemished food that does make the cut might be left to rot in warehouses when grocers refuse to stock the shelves with imperfect produce because American shoppers refuse to buy it. It's a messy, wasteful sequence that does ultimately spring from the consumers' desires. Ultimately, it does start with us.
Doug Rauch, the former president of the Trader Joe’s Company told The Atlantic that “Grocery stores routinely trash produce for being the wrong shape or containing minor blemishes." (Last year the biggest supermarket in the U.K., Tesco, agreed to giving away its unsold food last year, after it admitting to throwing away 30,000 tons of edible food.) Noticing this waste, Rauch founded The Daily Table, a grocery store in Dorchester, Massachusetts that sources food that other grocers don't want and sells it for a discounted price.
Of course, there are circumstances that make all of this food waste possible—The Atlantic pegs the cheap price of food in the U.S. as compared to prices in the rest of the world as a primary reason. And yet, writer Adam Chandler hypothesizes that "the great American squandering of produce appears to be a cultural dynamic as well, enabled in large part by a national obsession with the aesthetic quality of food." The problem is deeply entwined in our economy and our culture (could our endless Instagrams of perfect farmers market produce and our desire to always have the best of everything, especially when it comes to food, have a role here?); it's hard to isolate and it's bigger and more complicated than the apple peels I throw in the compost bin when I'm making pie.
This is not to exempt me from saving my radish tops or making sure even not-so-great tomatoes find a good home in a savory cobbler. But it is to say that, even if these little things help, there is more to be done: We can support companies, like The Daily Table or San Francisco's Imperfect Produce or Baltimore-based Hungry Harvest, that recover food that would otherwise be wasted; we can go to farmers markets and buy the knobby peppers to let the growers know we still want them; and we can support chefs, like Dan Barber, Tom Colicchio, Roy Choi, and Daniel Patterson, who are making the food waste conversation a popular news item.
So yes, when you're cooking, don't throw away your cauliflower stems; but when you're shopping, buy the darker-hued heads—they're perfectly fine.
To read more about where food waste happens:
- Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests [The Guardian]
- Americans are throwing away tons of “ugly food” each year, causing widespread food insecurity [Quartz]
- The US is still throwing away a ridiculous amount of edible food [Quartz]
- Why Americans Lead the World in Food Waste [The Atlantic]
- Can America Learn to Love Misshapen Veggies? [The Atlantic]
- The Untapped Potential of Wasted Food [New Yorker]
- New Crop of Companies Reaping Profits From Wasted Food [New York Times]
Do you select the less-than-perfect fruit and vegetables at the grocery store? (Or are have they been weeded out before that point?) Tell us in the comments!
Written by: Sarah Jampel
Popular on Food52
15 Comments
Like: What "gross-looking" things on various vegetables don't matter, and which do.. Which discolourations are safe, and which aren't.. How we can properly clean and prepare an imperfect vegetable.. Which foods can have mold or deterioration safely cut off, and which can't.. What bugs to worry about or not, and how to safely combat them..
On another note, I have to chuckle when I see "news" discussions about the sale of imperfect produce. For as long as I've been going to Oakland's Chinatown (several decades) it's been obvious that at least some of the less than perfect produce brought to the wholesale markets six blocks west are being sold in Chinatown for 20 - 60 percent of the price of perfectly shaped, symmetrical, unblemished produce in the shops in Oakland's affluent neighborhoods. Similarly, certain vendors at our nearby farmers markets sell at lower prices across the board than others at those markets, for the same reason, without identifying any particular item as "imperfect".
Though I'm admittedly no expert on this, it seems to be a rather obvious case of market efficiency.
Finally, I learned recently that our local Whole Foods sells imperfect small potatoes - oddly shaped, not uniform size -- for about 1/3 of the perfect, in conspicuously branded net bags. It's good to see. ;o)
Once you start attending the farmers market on a regular basis, grocery store produce sections look increasingly bizarre, like the Stepford Wives or something uncannily perfect.
At some point, someone always does a triage of blemished food.
Sometimes it's the farmer, leaving the bad ones in the field or sending them to a commercial processing plant that will pay less at wholesale. Why would a grocer want to buy a case of apple at wholesale if most of them were blemished? Sometimes it's the grocer, only putting out the good ones in the display cases.
I buy almost all of my produce at my town's farmers market and I am happy to peruse the bargain bins that are at several vendors' tables. Some of the stuff really much be addressed either that day or within a day or two, either cooked or consumed. At those tables, it is the market staff who is doing the triage and putting the blemished ones into the bargain bins.
Heck, if I'm at a farmers market table and there are a bunch of peaches all at the same price, for sure I am going to pick the ones that look the best. That’s just human nature.
I've already commented on this topic in other recent posts so I won't rehash the same points I've mentioned elsewhere.
See what other Food52 readers are saying.