
The Ugly Truth of Ugly Produce - yoloswagins
http://www.phatbeetsproduce.org/uglyproduce/
======
DoreenMichele
I spent nearly six years homeless. I ate at soup kitchens and got food from
food banks for a small portion of that time.

I grew up with a garden in the back yard. My dad hunted and some of the meat
on our table was squirrel and deer he killed. My mother cooked from scratch.

I'm used to eating well for relatively little money. Most of the food at soup
kitchens and food pantries fails to meet my expectations for food quality.

Food stamps (EBT) are a good program. You can use them to buy the same food
from the same stores as anybody else and you get to decide what to spend it
on. (Though the program could use more funding. They tend to last only 3 weeks
of the month.)

Soup kitchens and food pantries tend to suck, even the better ones.

I'm not saying we shouldn't provide compassionate support to anyone. I'm just
saying some programs for doing so would be acceptable to people with middle
class expectations and some wouldn't be. For many reasons, including germ
control, we need to be shooting for programs that fit middle class
sensibilities and not act like "beggars can't be choosers."

Furthermore, if you are homeless, you are living without a fridge. Produce
doesn't keep well under those conditions. When I was around a lot of other
homeless people for a time, it wasn't unusual for free produce to go to waste,
in part for that reason. Some idiot would give a homeless person some giant
bag of apples. They could eat a few of them before they rotted, but not all of
them. Maybe they managed to give the rest away. Maybe they didn't.

Last, I have serious reservations about creating systems to serve the poor
instead of creating systems to help them resolve their problems. Systems
designed to serve the poor tend to actively keep poverty alive, a la the
Shirky Principle:

 _" Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the
solution"_

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Food stamps (EBT) are a good program. You can use them to buy the same food
> from the same stores as anybody else and you get to decide what to spend it
> on.

Food stamps tend to suck for a lot of the same reasons food pantries do.
You're still telling people what to buy. It's not as bad because there are
more choices, but it's still the same general problem where you have a
bureaucracy telling you what to buy instead of being able to buy what you need
the most like anybody else.

Sometimes what you really need is food. Sometimes -- or some specific days --
you have access to food and what you really need is to save up enough for a
working car or gas to put in it so you can go to job interviews. Or something
else that the person in question knows they need but arbitrary politicians
have no way to predict.

But if you give people food stamps, they'll buy food with it. Even if they
already have suitable food, because it's free money that can only be used for
one thing. Then it costs the taxpayer $1 and provides the person with $.05
worth of value, which they take because $.05 is more than $0.

Meanwhile just giving the person $1 cash would give the person $1 in value and
cost the government _less_ , because then it isn't necessary to administer a
system to force people to buy the thing they needed less instead of the thing
they needed more.

And eliminating that bureaucracy reduces the Shirky principle problem.

~~~
skrebbel
You didn't at all consider the reason why food stamps might exist in the first
place. I don't know anything about them, but I'd assume it has something to do
with a correlation between homelessness and life problems that make financial
discipline extra hard (eg addictions).

I'm not trying to imply that all homeless people are addicts (quite the
contrary) but if I'm a crack addict and you give me money I'm not sure I'd be
using it to save it up for buying a car one day.

~~~
dragonwriter
> You didn't at all consider the reason why food stamps might exist in the
> first place. I don't know anything about them, but I'd assume it has
> something to do with a correlation between homelessness and life problems
> that make financial discipline extra hard (eg addictions).

I wouldn't assume that, since food stamps aren't particularly focussed on the
homeless.

In fact, the original purpose of the food stamp program was clearing
agricultural surpluses (hence why the program was created in the Department of
Agriculture and not the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare where you
would have expected it to be if it were a welfare program and not an ag
industry support program); you originally had to purchase food stamps, and for
every dollar you got $1 of unrestricted (but still only for food) stamps, and
$0.50 of restrictes-to-items-deemed-to-be-in-surplus stamps.

The exact restrictions and mechanisms changed over time in subsequent
iterations of the program (and it's hard to find a clear purpose for many
changes because lots were compromises between competing visions with
fundamentally opposed goals.)

~~~
ada1981
If your a crack addict, you’ll prob sell your food stamps or the food you
bought to get crack.

Unprocessed trauma coping circuits (aka addiction) highjacks intelligence to
get the dopamine trigger, it doesn’t nessesarily eliminate intelligence.

~~~
astura
You can't sell food stamps so easily anymore. They used to be paper currency,
but they are in the form of a debit card now, still possible to sell, just
requires some planning

~~~
fipple
Every few weeks I get a person approaching me in the grocery store offering to
buy me $2x of my groceries for an $x cash payment.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Exactly this. More food for less money is a good deal if you are just-over-
the-line for getting food stamps or the ones you have don't go far enough to
really feed your family.

------
jchw
>Our BeetBox CSA supports small farmers of color mostly farming under 50
acres, [...]

...

>Imperfect Produce is only able to make a profit by working with the larger
global agribusinesses, not the picturesque small and mid-sized farms they
project in their marketing campaign.

Can someone explain what I'm missing? They get their produce from small
farmers, Imperfect Produce gets their produce from large farmers, where is the
overlap?

>it certainly doesn’t help small, local farmers or address the source of
waste: overproduction by industrial farms as they produce the perfect produce
sold in supermarkets.

So in this context, the over production is being considered "waste" but once
Imperfect Produce uses it, it's perfectly good food that food banks and soup
kitchens no longer have access to.

Also, there is a lot of implication that all of the food waste going to
support communities is being utilized effectively. But certainly they, too,
discard some portion of food, not to mention issues with quality or
sanitation.

Clearly I'm missing something. That, or they really called it on the "sour
grapes" thing.

~~~
subpixel
They (Phat Beets) are operating under the common misunderstanding that small
farms are always 'better' than larger ones, and that 'local' produce is, ipso
facto, more sustainable than produce grown elsewhere and transported
efficiently in bulk.

There are valid arguments to be made against high-input agriculture. None of
them are discussed in this blog post, which seems to be not so much a case of
sour grapes as one of rigid ideology.

As an aside, a valuable lesson here about what matters to consumers: people
buy things to address their own needs. The business that makes it easier for
consumers to feel good about themselves wins. 'I eat ugly vegetables' is an
easier, even more fun consumer story than 'I help fight entrenched societal
ills by buying vegetables from bad neihborhoods.' All else being equaly, IP
would still dominate here based on resonating with more consumers.

------
hinkley
My girl signed us up for the ugly fruit box, and I’ve done a couple shifts
doing processing (sorting) at two food banks. Maybe this is different
elsewhere but the two streams of food had very little in common.

What has shocked me is that I expected ugly food to get turned into processed
food. You know, lopsided potatoes made into soup or Pringles. Weird looking
apples into fruit juice.

What I get instead is oranges the size of grapefruit, grapefruit the size of
oranges, and a reality check. The food I’m picturing is made on machines.
Machines like to work with uniform inputs and usually can’t cut out bad bits.
So maybe they’re turning all the apples that are between three and four
standard deviations below normal size into applesauce, but they probably
aren’t turning giant or scabby grapefruit into my breakfast beverage.

It does kind of make me wonder if there’s a market for making machines that
_can_ do that though. We have to be close to building that sort of tech at a
competitive price.

~~~
sokoloff
4 standard deviations excludes 63 in a million. Why would a designer of food
prep automation design around that? Why would a market for such outliers form?
At some point, it’s cheaper and more efficient to compost 0.006% of food than
to design ultra-flexible processing equipment.

What’s surprising to me is that the alternate market for such outlier food
evolved. It would seem cheaper to just compost it. I actually wonder how much
of the market is genuine economically driven vs “feel good”/signaling.

~~~
hinkley
OK nerd. When was the last time you saw the word “maybe” in sentences that are
intended to be scientifically accurate? But I’ll bite.

Do we know for certain that fruit sizes are a normal distribution? If not then
you can’t estimate sigma the way you did. Most of our tree fruit comes from
genetic clones, with a different root graft tuned to soil type. So size is
going to come down to weather, health and inputs (water nutrients and sun),
but not really to genetics.

Compost should be the third or forth option for this process. The one cull we
did, all of the rotting fruit went to compost, and the too far gone or gouged
fruit went to a farmer for his cows. Pigs should work just as well (better,
really, since pork is much more efficient than cow, caloricly speaking).

Maybe free range chickens too. My friend who is somewhere between
overachieving gardener and homesteader gives her spent cider apples to her
chickens. And I know of small scale chicken farmers who collect restaurant
waste and let their chickens forage on the piles. But at industrial scale it
probably goes to compost.

But even compost and manure can still have a life if the right people are
involved. We should be doing more of that.

New Belgian Brewery (a B Corp), last I heard, double composts their spent
grains. First anaerobically to get methane to fire the boilers, and a second
aerobic composting which gets spread on the property.

And one voice in the permaculture community, Mark Shepard, rotates his cows
and chickens so the fly spawn on the cow patties are in the larval stage when
the chickens arrive. Good protein and the manure is dispersed “for free”.

Even the food we don’t eat can do good.

------
komali2
>Imperfect Produce claims they’re saving the world by reducing food waste–and
helping farmers by buying surplus ugly produce that would have been thrown
out. Sounds great. The reality is that this produce would have otherwise gone
to food banks, to be redistributed for free.

I've been chewing on this for a while. Who's in charge of setting up a social
safety net? Whose responsibility is it to make sure people don't starve in the
streets?

I thought I paid taxes to my government to socialize the issue across my
representative district, but my government (in the USA) has disagreed with me
- that money is to be spent on fighter jets (to quote the executive branch),
while the churches are responsible for taking care of the homeless. And by the
way, the homeless are responsible for policing themselves (to quote my mayor).

A couple weeks ago Domino's Pizza filled a bunch of potholes and stamped their
logo on the asphalt after. I thought that would cause a national discussion. I
thought at the very least, the city that it happened in would be humiliated
enough to make the foolish mistake of maybe trying to slap back at Domino's
for putting their logo all over the street. Nope, business as usual.

In other words, why suddenly are people starving again because imperfect
produce found a capitalist way to reduce waste?

~~~
couchand
> found a capitalist way to reduce waste?

I don't know anything about either of these groups, but the article says that
this is simply the marketing of Imperfect Produce that doesn't bear out in
reality. Do you have information contradicting their points that you decided
not to share?

~~~
komali2
I don't think I understand what you mean... But I almost certainly have less
information than them or probably you, so am happy to hear more.

~~~
sleepychu
IP assert: " _This food was going to be thrown out_ & going to waste. We are
using it for something!"

Article asserts: " _That food wasn 't being thrown out_ it was going to food
banks and homeless shelters."

So while IP is almost certainly helping the farmers by paying them for produce
they can't normally sell they certainly aren't reclaiming mountains of food
otherwise destined for rot.

------
fipple
The author seems to be saying “don’t sell imperfect produce to people... only
sell them perfect produce so that you have to waste huge amounts of resources
in overproduction so that the leftovers can be donated to the poor.”

No. Feeding the poor is important but there must be a better way than that.

~~~
seem_2211
It's not the strongest supporting argument, but I think you can make the case
that Imperfect Produce also do a good job of destigmatizing eating and using
ugly produce.

If you look at the formation of a lot of Western welfare systems, most had a
focus on dignity. It's no fun to be the one kid with the ugly produce, or
explicitly going to something that's for the poor kids. We see it a lot with
adults as well - how many people don't take advantage of benefits they
deserve, because they don't want to be people that have to take these
benefits. If we can support a culture that says produce doesn't have to be
perfect to be socially acceptable, then I think everyone benefits.

While I'm sure Phat Beets do good stuff, I'm not sure if their constant
refrain on helping the poor and marginalised is helpful in the long run. In my
view, a good local grocery store that sells fresh produce at an affordable
price is going to be a massive help, and I think both they and Imperfect
Produce do the same thing.

Finally Phat Beets only deliver in the East Bay. Imperfect Produce also come
to San Francisco.

------
ggm
Food banks are charity which should be tackled by the welfare state. Food
banks do good work. They do amazing work. But it's work which shouldn't have
to be done, and it's an indicator oF economic failure.

Commoditising ugly fruit and veg is good. We should stop treating perfectly
good food as reject and we should stop assuming the best use of ugly food is
donation to the poor.

Poor people need jobs and state intervention not food banks

~~~
komali2
What about when there aren't enough jobs?

~~~
occamrazor
They need other welfare services: food stamps, long-term unemployment
benefits, medicaid, vocational training, minimum income guarantees, free
daycare for children, etc.

These services should be provided by the local government rather than
charities.

------
darawk
> It’s a clever money making scheme, but it certainly doesn’t help small,
> local farmers or address the source of waste: overproduction by industrial
> farms as they produce the perfect produce sold in supermarkets.

No...that's literally exactly what they are addressing. They are creating
demand for the imperfect produce. That was the problem in the first place,
lack of demand for imperfect produce and the inseparability of imperfect
produce production from perfect produce production.

------
p1mrx
Does the food industry have a moral obligation to produce waste for the poor?
It seems they discovered a market segment that had been previously overlooked.

Being transparent about where the food _would_ have gone might make people
think twice before lowering their quality standards, but in aggregate, I think
the technology to route second-rate food to bargain hunters is a genie that
won't be easily rebottled.

~~~
eropple
We are all, at the close of everything, equally human, and I would argue that
there is not a human alive who _has_ who does not bear some measure of
responsibility for those who _have not_. Even a small measure at the very
least, and getting shady at the expense of nonprofits and foodbanks is
probably enough for, y'know...most Americans with the luxury--and it is a
luxury, an extreme one--to _found a venture-backed startup_ to surpass theirs.

------
rabboRubble
I signed up for Imperfect Produce about 6 months ago. I'm relatively happy
with the service. Despite calling the produce "imperfect" often the freshness
and taste is better than what I find at the store. Caveat, I have not liked
the quality of the fruit so I stick to their vegetable offerings. The main
driver for me sticking with the service so long is that a) we do not have to
make grocery trips as frequently, b) my diet has improved. I feel a pressure
to eat the veg we have on hand before the next delivery, which means eating
veg for breakfast many days. And lunch. And twice for dinner.

I also don't own a car, and having services like this helps me continue the
car-free lifestyle.

I am sympathetic to phatbeets' criticism. Despite leaning towards not changing
my consumer habits, I will have to mull over their points and evaluate my
priorities.

At some point though, I need to eat and if the service fits within my overall
lifestyle but I care about community hunger, maybe I can donate a box of
produce to a food shelter through IP?

------
gertiew
I’m beginning to think VC is the most important driving force of rising
inequality. It replaces natural flourishing of community connected
entrepreneurship with a winner take all market. It crushes the less connected
and resourced with tactics that would be called dumping in other markets.

~~~
calhoun137
I strongly disagree. In my opinion, the relationship between VC and rising
inequality is indirect at most. The primary factors which contribute to
inequality in a given country are related to the number of available jobs, the
distribution of wages among various subsets of the working population, the
robustness of social safety net programs, and the underlying distribution of
political and economic power.

Our startup movement, more so than any other segment of the global economy,
embodies the idea of the "American Dream" that if you work hard you can be
successful and move up the social ladder. It's not perfect, and clearly it's
not a pure meritocracy, but to claim that the VC world is "the most important
driving force of rising inequality" is very inaccurate in my judgement.

It is true that silicon valley style tech companies are more and more becoming
an important part of the economy, but the types of startups which are part of
the tech startup eco system are creating jobs and are disrupting existing
industries as part of a healthy capitalist process.

Here are two factors which I consider to have a much more significant
influence than VC's on the global trend of rising inequality:

1) It is well understood that middle class families keep on average the
majority of their wealth in the form of a house which they own. The housing
crisis, which was fueled by wall street excess, wiped out an incredible amount
of wealth from poor and middle class families and the bailout and shorting
transferred this wealth to the top 0.1%

2) Approximately 3 trillion is collected by the US government every year in
taxes, and approximately 1.5 trillion is borrowed by the government, for a
total budget of approximately 4.5 trillion. This money is handed out by
congress members to powerful banks and corporations from their state as a form
of quid pro quo for campaign donations. The budget deficit is then used to
justify a never ending cycle of cuts to social safety net programs.

------
hycaria
Article is terrible. At the last part

>A Case of Sour Grapes?

I thought there was going to be something interesting but no, that's only a
header no content afterwards to answer that rhetorical question.

Also I am kinda bothered by the repetitive use of small farmers of color. This
also surprisingly seems to be mentioned nowhere else on their pages. Why not
just Precarious ? local? Engaged for affordable quality or whatever? Is really
color the most accurate and essential way to describe the farmers in this
project?

I already have no sympathy for this organization after reading what should be
an unfair case that could help to bring traction about them.

------
sidhuko
Social programs should really plan for these types of disruptors more often.
We've had Asda (Walmart to you US folk) trying to do the same by adding boxes
of below commercial grade into supermarkets couple years ago. It really
pressured our local small suppliers by people seeing the cost of two trips
higher than the difference in prices. I don't think the author should feel
more cornered though - imperfect food still makes perfect meals at a higher
margin - perhaps they should use this encouraging response from their
community to take their stock, teach to cook healthy and retain profitablity
to support their existing programs? They would even be able to maintain a
reliable % for food banks and reducing waste by converting excess into food
for a later time.

------
skybrian
Does anyone have a better source than this article on what's really going on
in the industry?

I don't know anything about it, but I'm skeptical. I would have thought that
an ugly carrot would end up as carrot juice or sliced up into bits and put
into soup.

------
gandutraveler
Many here are not getting the point of this article. Imperfect produce claim
that most of the ugly produce used to get wasted , which is not true.
Imperfect produce is also killing small non profits like Beetbox by taking
away their customers.

Also, what happens when Imperfect produce gets big enough that there isn't
enough ugly produce to source. This is a problem with investor driven, profit
hungry companies. Other example is SeatToTable which claimed to deliver fish
from local fishermen to your doorstep was actually sourcing from other parts
of world.

------
jondubois
It seems that industries have become negative-sum games.

In the software development industry, there is a similar problem; SaaS
services have been replacing free open source solutions even though they are
expensive and they take away flexibility from those who use them.

Advertising has become too powerful - It allows for-profit companies to use
big VC funding to fund campaigns to trick people into making bad decisions.
They end up paying more for the same thing.

In effect, they're changing the world for the worse but they're packaging it
nicely.

~~~
chillydawg
With SaaS and as a business owner and operator, I see the value in a
specialised company offering hosted X and charging for it. My general purpose
sysadmin employee will never be as good at looking after whatever niche tool
than the SaaS company offering it and charging me $500/mo or whatever.

Even at several thousand/month (approaching thr salary of a sysadmin), the
economics can work out fine as you're being more productive and the sysadmin
can be working on the really custom things that are core to your business like
specific CI pipelines or monitoring and optimising our own software. It's the
same argument as AWS. EC2 is really expensive, but it's still usually cheaper
than actually running your own hardware at the same service level as AWS can
provide.

Scale of operation changes things, but the vast majority of companies are
small enough that spending money on SaaS and IaaS is usually better than
building a local team of commodity staff doing nothing unique for the
business.

~~~
jondubois
The idea that it's difficult to self-host these open source solutions is often
part of the marketing but it often isn't true. Many times, I've seen companies
host their own HTTP servers but outsource their WebSocket servers even though
they don't require much additional DevOps skills if they used the right open
source tools.

Often, those companies would actually have benefited from being able to
integrate their backend systems more closely.

Regarding back end services; I've used various Amazon AWS services at
different companies and, every time, it made development and deployment way
more complicated - For example, one corporation I worked at, there was only 1
person in the whole company who had the full knowledge to work with our Lambda
setup; this person worked very slowly (probably not their fault) so they were
blocking all other teams in the company. It would have been much faster if the
company operated the server themselves.

~~~
jondubois
Big for-profit companies have always been marketing against open source
software; before, they would say that because it's free; it means that it's
insecure and low quality.

Because it's now obvious that this is not true, for-profit companies have
resorted to focusing their marketing on the idea that it's "too much effort to
manage and scale" open source software.

~~~
user5994461
>>> they would say that because it's free; it means that it's insecure and low
quality.

It's not free, it costs money to setup and keep running. It's also often
abandoned and unmaintained.

------
Joboman555
So they’re complaining that they’re being out-competed?

------
woohuiren
Why are the comments dissing about phatbeets produce? Their cause is
immeasurably better than Ugly Produce.

Remember just recently there was a Chinese browser that received shit tons of
money and turned out to be just Chrome browser?

There are plenty of shitty startups out there and this is an obvious case that
Ugly Produce is one of them.

~~~
peteforde
What comments diss phatbeets produce? I just read literally every one and I
haven't seen anyone complain about the product.

Look: I live in Canada. I've never heard of phatbeats OR Ugly Produce, so it's
fair to say that I don't have much of a horse in the race. However, it seems
like your ultimate conclusion (UP is a shitty startup and they should DIAF) is
based on logic that isn't nearly as "obvious" as you've decided that it is.

Please, feel free to add more information. I find this topic genuinely
interesting.

------
peteforde
I debated whether to say anything or not because this seems zero-sum and the
potential for downside is huge. Yet, here I am at 4:30am, in Canada, being
opinionated about a problem that I am far-removed from.

20 years ago, I was a 20y/o radical activist. I spent a significant amount of
my time, energy and money participating in street-level activist organizing -
all while holding down a job as a software developer by day.

I have protested the KKK (the Ohio police put us in a big cage while robed
Klansmen hung out with a PA on the courthouse steps). I have personally been
involved with shutting down white power skinhead concerts, which often
involved physical confrontation. I wasn't "in Seattle" but I was "in
Washington", for those of you old enough or inclined to catch the reference.
I've held placards at Free Mumia rallies. I almost got arrested for jabbing
Fred Phelps (the God Hates Fags asshole) with an umbrella.

I offer this - if you're willing to trust me - not to brag or signal virtue,
but to offer some context when I say that holy fuck the language that they use
in their call-to-arms manifesto is irritating to me.

Maybe it's true, what they say about getting old making you conservative.
Maybe this post is giving me an existential crisis. And yet, I don't think so.
What I actually think is that perhaps East Bay food activists are just
guileless in their messaging and are completely tone-deaf to how incredibly
elitist that this kind of intentionally polarizing propaganda actually sounds
to anyone who might not shake their fist at the concept of capitalism still
existing in the bathroom mirror every morning.

Ranting about how a startup is stealing your thunder / community groups
because they are _gasp_ effective is the literal definition of sour grapes. It
has nothing to do with capitalism, which is true regardless of how many
comments you delete.

Seriously, phatbeats: when did you get so scared to innovate? You don't have
to do it in a capitalist framework, but you have to get creative and try new
things or you won't have a legitimate argument to make to 99.9% of the
population. Even Canadians who are moved to tears by Bernie Sanders find your
tone to be grating.

I want so badly to support people who spend their energy making the world
better for people. Maybe these Imperfect Produce folks really do have blood
boys and drink the tears of orphans. But my knee-jerk reaction to your post,
as life-long self-identified progressive, is to cheer for them. That should
not be what's happening, and it's not just because I got old and sold out.

Meta: I am genuinely impressed at how civil this discussion is. We HN
commenters often get a bad rap. We often++ deserve it, but today, we can have
nice things.

~~~
CodeWriter23
I was kind of thinking the same thing. Calling themselves “PhatBeets” though a
clever play on words, does little to describe their mission and implant a
memory in viewers. They now have to compete with a startup, they need to be
kick ass marketers themselves. Why just surrender the food supply that
Imperfect is acquiring? Get out there and get some of that for the PB
programs. Corporations have philanthropy programs, you just need to talk to
different parts of the company. Expanding beyond taking supply from farms
owned by people of color seems like a logical step to increase the supply in
their system. Learn all that stuff and then do some training among other
programs that are suffering.

Maybe all of my ideas suck and would fail. My point is I didn’t hear one word
about what they’re going to do about the situation they find themselves in.
They’re just whining that their business model has been disrupted.

And the key thing about their messaging. They’re not building themselves up,
they’re tearing someone else’s thing down. That’s never a successful strategy.
Though I am thankful for the reveal about Imperfect (who are greedy
assholes)...I think hey would have done a lot better shopping this story to SF
Gate or SacBee. And then using those stories as a touchstone for their new
launch of how they’re going to overcome this issue.

~~~
peteforde
Exactly this: it reminds me of how the ACLU joined YC to learn to think and
act more like a startup.

The ugly truth is that perhaps the most real problem these folks have is the
need to decide whether they are _prioritizing_ fighting capitalism or feeding
poor people.

It's quite likely that they cannot effectively do both at the same time, but
would benefit from focused priorities.

------
raqueldelacruz9
Is anyone else extremely frustrated with Phat Beets about this article? Or are
we all too busy burning down a conveniently placed straw man? Phat beets
haven’t produced any stats or facts of their own here. They just keep tearing
down the ones that Imperfect is providing. Nitpicking statistics and shaming a
company for trying to feed more people with less waste is just as bad as
whatever greenwashing they claim to despise so much. It’s pretty undeniable
that Imperfect is making an impact on food waste and until they or any other
company are using all of the billions of pounds of food that aren’t getting
eaten every year, it’s utterly counterproductive to try to tear them apart for
trying to help this food find a home on someone's table. Why are they so
obsessed with fact-less mudslinging? Why is Imperfect the chosen target and
not a real villain of the food industry like Bayer/Monsanto, Walmart, or
McDonalds?

Here are some facts for you: In 2017, Feeding America reported that they
received over 1.47 billion pounds of produce. As a reference, Imperfect claims
to have recovered 30 million pounds of produce to date. Feeding America and
the NRDC also reported that over 6 billion pounds of crops go unharvested or
unsold ever year. This study was based on 7 key crops so the total is likely
much higher, but let’s assume its 6 billion to be conservative. This means
that even if Imperfect went through 100 times the amount of ugly produce every
year that they’ve recovered to date, they would still be using less than half
of the available supply. Phat Beets, your math doesn’t add up! Provide
meaningful statistics and facts to back up your argument or everyone will see
through your emphatic nourishment of the outrage machine of social media for
the reactionary

Zooming out, there’s also a huge aspect of this that’s a messed up apples to
oranges comparison. Imperfect is a business with a social mission related to
food waste, not a nonprofit solely focused on ending hunger. It’s great that
they are making a difference while also making money but it’s not fair to ask
a company to overthrow capitalism. Do you expect Lyft to overthrow the freeway
system, or ask the computer that you wrote these words on to end exploitative
mining practices that provided the copper for the circuitry? It seems like
you’re making the good the enemy of the perfect and in so doing ignoring the
reality of the situation which is much more nuanced than you portray it. Isn’t
there a way for community CSAs to work alongside companies like Imperfect? It
seems to me that these two groups are working towards admirable, but very
different goals at different scales and this is actually a good thing. There
is plenty of work left to be done and there is clearly more than enough food
for both of you to achieve your goals and then some. Save the abstract
critique of capitalism for philosophy class, the rest of us live in the real
world where we have to make compromises and embrace the grey areas.

My sources- Feeding America report:
[http://www.feedingamerica.org/assets/pdfs/feeding-america-
pr...](http://www.feedingamerica.org/assets/pdfs/feeding-america-produce-
one.pdf) NRDC report: [https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-
IP.pdf](https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf)

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dcgudeman
> “Some may claim we have a case of sour grapes. This is capitalism at its
> best.”

Yep sounds about right

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ohthehugemanate
I don't understand. Now it's bad for people to buy food waste, because
otherwise food waste is donated?

TFA smells like anti-capitalism, upset that someone is doing something
profitable with the source of their charity work... And double upset that
capitalists might have a (gasp) positive impact.

Personally, I am angry and upset at this Phatbeets, for taking food waste away
from the hard working farmers who would otherwise use it for compost. But I'm
also angry at the farmers who, by using ugly food for compost, are stealing
jobs from the good folks of the waste department. Stop undermining our social
systems, you capitalist farmers!

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delbel
The ugly food should be ground up, fermented, and turned into whiskey
moonshine for the homeless. The spent grain should be fed to pigs to make
bacon. Any other waste should be ran in my flattop 1946 Ford 9n tractor to
make more ugly food, with manure from the pigs and free labor from the
homeless, in exchange for the whiskey moonshine and bacon diet. Win/win

