
Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests - vmateixeira
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/13/us-food-waste-ugly-fruit-vegetables-perfect
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dsfyu404ed
Waste like this is basically a symptom of an inefficient logistics network and
market conditions.

The fresh fruit you see at the grocery store all "made the cut" what didn't
make the cut became canned tomatos, apple concentrate, frozen hash browns and
other more processed fruits. Nobody cares if a canned tomato looks lumpy.

The problem is that the opportunities to redirect produce that doesn't pass QC
are basically nonexistent after a pretty early part of the supply chain.
Supply chain logistics are a mostly solved problem. This won't be fixed until
the benefit outweighs the cost. The cost will most likely have to decrease for
that to happen. A complicating factor is that produce optimized for one track
(e.g. fresh apples) might perform more poorly if repurposed after failing QC
(e.g applesauce) so in some situations it makes more sense to just discard
stuff that doesn't pass QC late in the supply chain than to redirect it into
role it's not optimized for.

If it was more profitable to redirect stuff that doesn't pass QC then people
would do it. Many restaurants already dispose of food waste separately and
give it to pig farms. Pig farmer reduces feed cost and the restaurant reduces
disposal costs.

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Bromskloss
> A complicating factor is that produce optimized for one track (e.g. fresh
> apples) might perform more poorly if repurposed

What optimisations do you have in mind?

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sp332
An apple bred to stay crisp for a long time on the shelf and give a nice
crunch when you eat it might not make the best applesauce.

~~~
Bromskloss
Oh. I'm surprised that the difference is considered to be that great.

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talmand
Growing up in the South it's fairly common to see that many people think that
the fruit you won't eat from the hand, for whatever reason, are often better
for certain recipes of desserts and preserves.

~~~
Vexs
That's because it is. Different acid concentrations, cell walls strengths, etc
lead to some apples being better suited for some things than others. Kind of
like fillet vs strip, it's all the same meat, but very different, and cooks
differently too.

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mkane848
"The demand for ‘perfect’ fruit and veg means much is discarded, damaging the
climate and leaving people hungry"

I mean, you can make a case for damaging the environment, but the thrown away
food is hardly the reason people are hungry. We clearly don't have a shortage
problem.

~~~
vmateixeira
I agree there's not a shortage problem. We are who definitely need to change
our mentality. As an individual customers, not wanting only the pretty and
shiny ones. As a company, by not wanting only max profit disregarding
environment harm. Considering that this may never happen, it would be good if
there would be no logistic issues/transportation costs (maybe subsidized by
the government?) in order to ship this perfect fruit to the hungry.

Once I did and experiment, here in the UK. I bought a bag of apples from Aldi
(non organic ones, but not sure if this makes any difference) and stored one
on top of the refrigerator. Six months were passed and it was still looking
pretty and shiny. That scared my ass off.

~~~
awalton
As much as we want to blame individual consumers, a lot of this problem goes
back to Big Box Retailers. In many, many places there simply isn't a choice -
you go to one of either Walmart or Kroger or Safeway to get food, because
that's the only market in 20 miles from your home.

Because these places put such a high demand on perfect produce, they can
charge more for that produce, and Americans find it harder and harder to
afford eating their fruits and veg because it's too expensive to have food
that rots when you're working 10 hour days vs. something in a can that is
immortal. It can be quite difficult justifying the price tag on that bag of
apples when you're not sure you can get through the whole bag, and two
individual apples will end up costing you just as much as the bag because they
carry the bullshit "organic" label. (And those are usually the two options you
get - no non-organic freestanding take-as-many-as-you-think-you-can-eat apples
by the pound for you; same goes for potatoes, carrots, onions, etc.) Lose-lose
for the consumer.

I've been told again and again that there's some evidence us consumers have to
be looked out for and have perfect, pristine produce, and yet I happily buy
from a farmer's market the most knobbly carrots and potatoes and see many of
my neighbors doing the same out here in Mountain View. They're often even more
flavorful than the supermarket alternative, and since they're from nearer by
(and didn't go through the industrial food transportation and refrigeration
system where they're battered and shocked), they often don't spoil as quickly
either.

Maybe the real problem is that Big Box Retailers have overconsolidated markets
so much that there's no venue to sell this "less-than-perfect" produce to
people.

~~~
hx87
> I've been told again and again that there's some evidence us consumers have
> to be looked out for and have perfect, pristine produce

> out here in Mountain View

It looks like you and your community are ahead of the curve on this one.
You're also less than 200 miles from some of the best agricultural land in the
world, so of course good fresh fruit and vegetables are easy to get. In the
northeast during winter, the choice is between mushy, bland big box produce or
no produce at all.

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thesehands
"I would say at times there is 25% of the crop that is just thrown away or fed
to cattle" One of these is waste, one not. Perhaps their definition of waste
needs to be reviewed.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Yes feeding cattle excess (over demand) crops could be called recycling for
instance. Get _something_ of value out of it instead of e.g. burning it.

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clifanatic
Wow. I started growing my own vegetables a few years ago, and of course, I eat
everything that I can successfully produce. However, I'm always struck by how
much different my own tomatoes (for example) look than the ones that I can buy
at the grocery store - mine are usually smaller, and cracked in a couple of
places, but still perfectly edible. It made me wonder what "professional"
farmers do with similar produce - I always assumed that they sold it to
companies that made tomato sauce or something and sold the better ones to
consumers. I never thought they'd throw away perfectly good vegetables.

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woodandsteel
For thousands of years people ate produce that often had unevenly-colored
skins, but tasted good.

Food industry corporations have persuaded most people to instead eat produce
that looks perfect but tastes worse. And they tell us that is progress.

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fulafel
Food production should not be subsidized, and environmental negative
externalities forced into prices, via taxes eg. (Ys, this would have to be
compensated with more income transfers for the poor)

~~~
vmateixeira
For sure this could be a solution. Unfortunately I see no way of this to
happen.

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sandworm101
>> Vast quantities of fresh produce grown in the US are left in the field to
rot, fed to livestock or hauled directly from the field to landfill,

Only one of those I would call "thrown away". Left in the field to "rot" is a
form of fertilizer. Being fed to livestock, animals that would otherwise eat
something else, equally isn't waste. These are products being put to good
uses, perhaps not the most lucrative uses for which they were designed, but
uses nonetheless. This is farmers recycling unmarketable product. It isn't
waste.

Only when product winds up as landfill, that is waste.

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kazinator
> _scarred vegetables regularly abandoned in the field to save the expense and
> labour involved in harvest._

So what? Most plants on the planet's surface are "abandoned in the field".

Where I live, there are vast areas of blackberry bush. Most of it is not
picked by humans. Oh, the annual waste!

These vegetables will help fertilize the next crop. It's just not yield-
efficient use of the agricultural surface area, that's all.

There is an opportunity for someone who can figure out how to grow perfect
vegetables: they can make as much profit using a small fraction of the farm
size.

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cprayingmantis
I would say 10%-15% is lost to insurance fraud. A lot of times when the crop
yield is less than 50% of expected yield farmers will just disc the fields and
claim 100% loss.

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SteveNuts
Source?

Do the crop insurance companies not go out and verify the claim?

Do they not correlate crop loss with other events in the area (flooding, high
winds)?

~~~
cprayingmantis
It was just conjecture on what I grew up around. They do go and verify the
claim but most of the time they won't fault the farmers if the field is
already reseeded after all they need to make sure the cover crop comes in good
if the main crop failed. There's a lot of insurance fraud in agriculture
mostly because the companies don't have the resources to go and check every
farm. And to your final point they do correlate it to natural disasters, those
events are rarely as catastrophic as they're reported though.

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becauseracecar
Why I subscribe to
[http://www.imperfectproduce.com/](http://www.imperfectproduce.com/)

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antisthenes
Let me guess, it's CA only.

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Pica_soO
make ethanol from it?

