> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

Playing double-devil's advocate:

1) Most people have no problem buying ugly food. Much of the standardization of produce comes from packaging and packing requirements. Non-standard produce is still consumed in other forms: juice, frozen, soup, etc.

2) The vast majority of food waste comes from unsold restaurant food and food that goes uneaten at home (goes bad before you can consume it). This has nothing to do with ugly food.

3) The bruised part on apples tastes like crap. It's mealy and sour and fermenting and off-flavored. It's not my responsibility to eat bruised apples because a store can't be careful in handling. Blame the supply chain and grocery staff, not consumers.

I've always had an issue with the "people should buy ugly food" argument. It strikes me as being somewhat elitist, and I have my doubts that the people making this argument actually follow through themselves and pick the ugly food at the supermarket, or really know if actually makes any difference.

I feel like I am doing the right thing by buying fruit and vegetables instead of processed food. Do I now need to make further consideration and question the impact of my choices because I am ignoring the ugly apples? Humans developed a highly sophisticated discernment of fruit quality for a reason.

My local store sells 3Kg of potentially bruised apples for the price of 1Kg non-bruised.

I often buy the bruised ones and cut off the bruised parts before eating. But I make this choice because while I do see a lower value in bruised apples, I don't see the value lower by a factor of 3. I usually cut off just 10-20% of the apple.

If I paid full price for a bruised product I'm right to feel taken advantage of.

but that is a very different situation than paying the same price and getting bruised apples where you have to cut off 10-20%.

"bruised" is non-ugly uglified by (mis-) handling/transport/whatever.

Before that there are lots of "ugly" food that never make it to the shop, related previous thread and single point anecdata:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212680

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18214314

> I've always had an issue with the "people should buy ugly food" argument. It strikes me as being somewhat elitist, and I have my doubts that the people making this argument actually follow through themselves and pick the ugly food at the supermarket, or really know if actually makes any difference.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "people should buy ugly food"--I'm merely observing that there's nothing inherently better about pretty food. But if you want to take my comment as a personal attack on you, I can't stop ya.

I get my fruit and veggies mostly from a CSA, so your accusation of hypocrisy based on "having your doubts" doesn't land.

> Do I now need to make further consideration and question the impact of my choices because I am ignoring the ugly apples?

I don't think so. There's only so much micro-optimization an individual can do in their life, and the impact here is pretty low.

The impact of delivery services as a whole, however, is a lot higher.

> Humans developed a highly sophisticated discernment of fruit quality for a reason.

Really? And what reason is that?

Your entire post is basically, "I think this is wrong because if it were right I'd have to feel bad about my actions", when in fact nobody is trying to make you feel bad, and if they were, your logic would make no sense.

>Humans developed a highly sophisticated discernment of fruit quality for a reason.

Humans also developed a highly sophisticated way of absorbing ideas and images of their environment, some of which portray ideal fruits and vegetables as examples of what should be eaten, and anything outside that norm which was passed down by parents and through the media should not be eaten, or at least looked upon with suspicion.

> Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no accounting for taste. But I don't think it's outlandish for someone to give you a bruised apple.

If I'm making pie or apple sauce, I'll seek out bruised apples—and pay less for them. Paying normal prices for bruised apples? No thanks.

> Paying normal prices for bruised apples? No thanks.

And because arranging different pricing for all the foodstuffs that look less than perfect costs more than profit on these items, into the bin goes perfectly good food.

Arranging different pricing for foodstuff that looks less than perfect happens all the time. How do you think very low price grocery stores are able to sell produce way cheaper than fancy stores. They buy lower grades[1] of produce for people who are more price sensitive.

[1] For an example of how this type of quality separation happens, check out https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/apple-grades-stand...

Apple juice is made from bruised apples. They have to get damaged late enough in the supply chain to get put on a shelf at all.

I bet most bruises are actually caused by shoppers once on a shelf.

It seems like you are making an unstated assumption that food being thrown away is a bad thing.

I'm not convinced. Let's say a farmer wanted to reduce foodwaste. So they only sold perfect fruit that they knew would get bought. That would drive up the prices of those perfect fruit AND there would be less fruit for sale in total.

Therefore, some amount of food waste should be acceptable to ensure the best outcome for everyone.

I used to work in a tomato greenhouse. If a tomato had a spot? It doesn't go into the packaging for stores. It goes into the bin for Heinz.

> Let's say a farmer wanted to reduce foodwaste. So they only sold perfect fruit that they knew would get bought.

Selling only perfect fruit is literally foodwaste right there. Fruits don't grow all perfect. If most of the fruit you see in store looks flawless, that literally means that most of the fruit harvested was either sold to another company or thrown away.

>Selling only perfect fruit is literally foodwaste right there.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you haven't exactly explained why "food waste" is a bad thing. I've given a reason why it could be considered a good thing: it can reduce the cost and increase total food that is purchased.

For an absurd example, see the "Eat your vegetables, because there are children starving in China" argument. Just because it would be nice if every hungry person had food, doesn't mean that letting any food go to waste is necessarily immoral by itself.

I’m not even sure the person who randomly picks bruised fruit would on their own account eat bruised fruit—just that for someone else they might be less discerning...

You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality.

Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.

in a competitive market (which US groceries mostly are) if the store has to "eat the cost" of bruised fruit, then the price will necessarily have to be higher on the fruit they sell.

Think of it this way, you have fruit at home to be shared by all the members of your family, it was fine when you bought it, but now some of it is bruised. So now you own a mix of fruit: what do you do, throw away the bruised fruit, or trim it, or give a loved one the good looking one and eat the bruised one yourself? Those costs (tossing or trimming or eating slightly lower quality) have to be borne by somebody, in this case the whole family or a member of the family.

You buy a car and you buy insurance for it; that's because a car is expensive and you don't want to bear the burden of a bruised car yourself, you want to share that burden with all the other people who buy insurance; and yet, the insurance company is making money, so apparently you are paying a little extra for this decrease in the variance of quality.

Same with your theory of purchasing fruit: you are not saying (in your original comment) what you think you are saying, that bruised fruit is too expensive; what you are actually saying is that you prefer to overpay for expensive fruit all the time and not deal with imperfections. Because otherwise, if the supermarket could sell all their fruit and not just perfect fruit, and was competing against other supermarkets, then the fruit would be overall actually cheaper across the board; you say "you don't get any discount", but with time you actually would.

I explain all this because it allows you to live your life feeling less miffed.

Makes sense in economics 101. The reality is, the Instacart guy doesn't give a shit and will provide bruising as part of the service of schlepping your crap for you. The in-store shoppers don't really care either.

The explanation that you're providing is really a rationalization for paying more to procure an inferior product. You're always going to have wastage of perishable items. It's much cheaper and sensical to avoid moldy strawberries, close to date meat and dairy, etc by shopping yourself, or hiring your own casual labor without some intermediary subtracting value.

All of these services are hiding costs through VC largesse and exploitation. You can literally get more for less by just hiring a housekeeper and having them pick up stuff for you, but nobody does that because the costs are "above the line", and it feels less nouveau riche and more clean to have some service exploit the poor sap picking your banannas rather than talk to a human.

I think it's more that hiring a housekeeper is an option that most users of these services haven't given serious consideration. They don't know how it works or where they would start.

> The explanation that you're providing is really a rationalization for paying more to procure an inferior product

the explanation I gave is literally for paying less, so you missed the point of it, and you are then blaming econ 101 for your lack of understanding. And you are mixing in other factors that econ 101 covers, but the point of econ 101 is to learn to separate different factors.

The Instacart guy isn't a magic elf. The $0.05 you save on rotten fruit is offset by a $0.50 in labor.

As investors tire of setting money on fire, that will become more apparent, just as it did with Uber as prices went up and quality went down.

What you're missing out on is information asymmetry.

If you're insuring against a risk, and you have more information than the insurer, you may be profiting and the insurer may be running a loss.

If you're picking out your own groceries, you can select the pristine fruit and vegetables, and the grocery store takes the loss. With a disinterested picker, you take a portion of the loss.

You take a disproportionate portion of the loss, because in person shoppers are taking the pristine fruit, leaving more non-pristine fruit for the pickers.

Yes, you are correct that you are essentially paying a premium, but the issue is less about the item's cost and more about the need for time investment and physical presence--correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to get the same level of un-bruisedness from delivery or curbside pickup that you could from going into the store and picking fruit yourself.

When I lived in Brooklyn, the standard at most fruit/veg vendors was to have the best stuff inside and the bruised stuff outside (e.g., at 40cents/lb discount.) We usually brought from the outside and did the math on whether the recoverable portion was worth the discount.

Unfortunately the supermarkets do not work this way -- they seem to have one class of goods. I'm not sure what happens to their bruised goods, but I do wonder if they offload those items to other stores? Does it really go straight into the trash?

My parents used to run a produce market agency in Sydney. Their clients were banana farmers and their customers were national supermarket chains.

From what I remember, not much was ever wasted and trashed out of their warehouses. Any bananas that couldn't be sold in supermarkets due to quality or size issues, were sold to bakers and smaller market retailers, and anything left after that was sold as animal feed.

In Boston, there's an outdoor public market (Haymarket) that operates Friday/Saturday and basically sells dirt cheap produce (and some fish/other food).

The catch, is that it's whatever the wholesalers couldn't sell during the week to the supermarkets and now need to get rid of before next week's shipments come in. It often doesn't have much shelf life left and/or is ugly. And the vendors tend to keep cutting prices to the point of nearly giving away whatever's left towards the end of the day on Saturday. 10% of the normal price still beats throwing it in the dumpster and getting 0%.

It's a nice model that matches people wanting cheap food with the excess/castoffs in the market.

That's because there are classes of supermarket instead.

- Go to a cheap supermarket and expect bruised stuff and pick out the stuff you like.

- Go to a more expensive one and expect no bruising.

- Go to a yet more expensive one and expect nothing but organic and ripe.

It's kind of like class expectations. You don't want to be known as the person who shops at a place with bruised stuff (and the supermarket appeals to shoppers that way).

You find that in farmer's markets as well. Go to an inexpensive one and expect bruising. Go to an expensive one and be angry if there is any bruising.

I don't know if it's still the same, but when I was running the produce department at a Food Lion in the mid 90s we would just discount the damaged produce and only tossed stuff that was rotting. Bruised apples got wrapped 4 to a tray. I don't remember how much the discount was, it was programmed into the scale.

I believe supermarkets then sell it to the next group, which are restaurants or wholesale purchasers that send to factories. Highly unlikely that non-rotten food of supermarket quality is wasted.

I live in the US and 10 years ago ate almost entirely out of dumpsters. Grocery stores throw out perfectly good food every day. If you ask in front they'll say they donate it, but in back there's a dumpster full of cartons of eggs with one egg cracked, and packaged food that's a day past its sell-by date. We waste an absurd amount of food.

It's been about 12+ years since I've regularly dumpstered food, but my experience is that more food was being thrown out before (but maybe not much before) the sell-by date than after.

I think the issue is that of given the choice between something with a sell-by date a few days in the future or 10-15 days in the future at the same cost, nearly everyone is going to take the food with the better date. Which means the arrival of a new batch of inventory makes the older inventory barely salable.

Technical solutions could help here: it is taxing on humans and most POS systems to have to adjust the price of older inventory, but if that could be done automatically (or the labor pushed onto the customer to identify the condition in exchange for a discount) people looking for deals might help reduce this type of waste.

You just need to include the expiration date in the barcode and apply discounts automatically.

> Technical solutions could help here: it is taxing on humans and most POS systems to have to adjust the price of older inventory, but if that could be done automatically

That's a pretty good idea aid seems it could be solved entirely by software (+some signs for awareness).

I doubt you've got a good data stream about sell-by dates, tho - the old and new have the same UPC generally. Maybe OCR of sell by stickers? And this doesn't help things that don't have dates, like produce.

Dang, I figured that stuff would have been included in the barcode. There must be some way to track this automatically because I doubt stores are managing their inventory on tracking this manually in 2020.

Ever done store inventory? It's one of life's little joys.

I've heard of them but I figured it was a periodic thing to make sure the stores automatic accounting aligns with actual stock to adjust for stolen, damaged, or misplaced product. I didn't think it was for checking expectations.

A good grocery store will waste less. They'll have someone merge multiple cartons of eggs to refill ones that have one cracked (assuming the carton isn't soaked). They'll see they have a bunch of inventory about to go past sell-by and will toss up a sale to get rid of as much of the near-expiration items. They'll be careful about rotating stock so that the older items are up front so people who are less date-sensitive will buy them.

> They'll have someone merge multiple cartons of eggs to refill ones that have one cracked

That's technically illegal. Grocery stores are not allowed to repackage pre-packaged food. We have strict food-handling regulations in place to protect consumers, which is part of what makes food waste such an issue.

Nah, if it goes to anybody, it goes to food banks (or other 501(c)(3) organizations). The supply chain bifurcates much further up; it'd take a lot of effort for a relatively low volume of unsaleable but unspoiled food at the store level to make it to a restaurant or a wholesaler.

I worked in a supermarket about 10 years ago as a stocker, among other things. A lot of our expired products were donated to various places, but a not-insignificant amount was also thrown away or literally poured down the drains due to laws preventing it from being sold or given away (IIRC). Also this is the end of the chain, I don't know how they operate at a higher level of distribution.

I used to live 20 floors above a supermarket. I could see quite clearly when they'd bring in a large garbage container and dump hundreds of pounds of produce into it, pêle-mêle, and then it getting carted away.

Just had grocery curbside pickup last week, including two pineapples. Both looked much greener than any I would have selected myself. (I normally select a pineapple where the inner leaves come out easily.) A bit of research online, pineapples don’t ripen once picked. Cut them up, and they were both fantastic.

What I'm saying is that your perception of quality is not actually objective quality.

This car has dents but those don't matter. Full price for you. Car still gets you from a to b just fine. This jacket has some holes and few stains but it will still keep you warm.

I know this isn't the point you're making, but the right dent patterns can increase fuel efficiency and make cars more desirable to some buyers.

Ok, now I need to know about these dent connoisseurs who measure their impact on fuel efficiency.

Effectively, there is no difference between an apple and one with a bruise. I still get the same nutrition and taste, most other differences being unimportant.

A jacket with a hole has massive loss of effectiveness, and I don't receive a new jacket to wear each day.

A car with a dent has significant loss of value, not that it's something I'm terribly concerned with, I run all cars until they die.

>Effectively, there is no difference between an apple and one with a bruise. I still get the same nutrition and taste, most other differences being unimportant.

That's simply not true. The bruises become rot spots and before getting there they introduce oxidation which affects taste. The shelf life is then also diminished not only for the bruised apple, but for any that are nearby.

Relatively speaking, I think the bruise on an apple is actually a measurably greater decrease in (relative) value than the dents in a car.

You could compare it to rust instead.

I can understand that for a crooked carrot, but for example a tomato with broken skin actually gets bad pretty quickly.

Neither is yours. But if yours is satisfied with the food you can get by ordering online, you're free to order online.

It doesn't sound like they are claiming that their perceptions are objective.

In your previous post, you trip all over yourself acknowledging that their preferences are valid.

It's obvious enough that's what they are driving at; they want a shopping service that accounts for their preferences.

If the vast majority of shoppers perceive a product as lower quality it is, almost by definition, worth less in a market. Quality is a very tricky idea to pin down (read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance if you'd like to hear a lot on the idea) and claiming that your own highly biased opinion on the matter is what counts as "objective" is a pretty bold claim.

This is true in some cases, but not most.

They should price the produce according to its quality then.

They already do to a certain extent. Damaged goods often find their way into the "reduced" section.

Perhaps this was the “actual price” of the produce anyway, including the wasted and donated food. Delivery means there’s more reliable metrics about the average quality of food stocked and expected by shoppers (in a given area). This is a good thing if they make it so customers can easily post reviews and request refunds.

That's a great marketing gimmick that some companies have made, but it's largely false.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

I am highly skeptical. The author of that article makes a lot of claims, but doesn't really go into a lot of how the information was obtained.

I'm not denying there's some marketing involved here--I'm sure there is.

But there's also some element of truth here. I've worked at a food co-op and they definitely composted a lot of food. In the article's logic, that's not food waste, but I think that feeding people is still a lot better.

That article is an interview with an expert in the field. You can look up Sarah Taber and find more information and citations. Just because there's not a Works Cited list attached to a Vox interview doesn't mean it's just made up.

You realize that crops have to have organic material to grow, right? Using leftovers, spoilage, and damaged produce from the previous crop is how agriculture is traditionally done. If farmers don't use composting, then they have to buy some other source of organic material and fertilizer to grow the next year's crops. You say "feeding people is better", but there's more than enough food for everyone. The answer to hunger is not to force farmers to give the leftover produce to poor folks. Rather, it's to give the poor folks the means with which to buy the food they need. There's plenty to be bought! So much that lots of it gets thrown out! It'd be much healthier for the entire system if we addressed the problem at the source and made use of the systems that are in place rather than trying to short-circuit things, resulting in a lot of unintended side-effects.

> Just because there's not a Works Cited list attached to a Vox interview doesn't mean it's just made up.

For all I know it is just made up. Maybe if media companies got in a better habit of providing citations they'd be more trustworthy.

> If farmers don't use composting, then they have to buy some other source of organic material and fertilizer to grow the next year's crops.

Which, from what I've seen first-hand growing up in the rural Central Valley (and what I continue to see first-hand in other rural areas) is exactly what's happening. Those crops ain't being composted with any sort of regularity (I'm sure some of it might be, since store-bought compost has to come from somewhere, but I'm highly skeptical of the idea that the farms themselves are doing it).

The nugget of truth in the article is that they ain't getting "thrown away", either. Rather, they're typically getting sold to companies using them for raw ingredients on a more industrial scale (think canneries and baked-goods factories and TV dinner makers and such) and/or (more recently) companies that specifically market "ugly produce", and whatever's left over from that often ends up being animal food (whether through manufacture - e.g. dog/cat food - or fed directly to e.g. livestock).

I think it makes sense to be a lot more skeptical of the claims of companies like Imperfect Foods who have a vested interest in getting people to buy unappealing produce (from them, of course) than an independent food scientist staking her personal reputation on these claims.

Thank you, I remember reading this as a tweet but couldn’t find it (twitter search is.... lacking)

when you mentioned a tweet i had a feeling it would be by dr sarah taber, and she was indeed quoted in the vox post. i highly recommend following her on twitter; i have learnt a startling amount about food production and the realities of farming in america.

There's a fundamental question that the article doesn't seem to answer: if "ugly produce" is a myth, then where are these companies getting their ugly produce, and how are they able to sell it at a discount?

I'm fully prepared to accept "it's a marketing gimmick and they're selling at a loss" as the actual answer here, but it seems to go unasked and therefore unanswered.

They aren't selling at a discount, which is why it astounds me anyone pays for it!

https://slickdeals.net/article/buying-guide/imperfect-produc...

> But when a crop is complete, farmers plow everything back into the soil. Some of it ends up as organic matter that is supporting soil health, and that is okay, too.

Basically declaring that the waste is not waste. Solving problems by changing definitions.

If a field is harvested too efficiently it needs to be left fallow to rebuild lost nutrients. Leaving some in the ground is not waste by any definition.

Well... You do need to account for the lost inputs, e.g. fertilizer that runs off instead of being sequestered, water pumped in for irrigation, gasoline to power a tractor, and so forth.

A cover crop (e.g. clover) specifically for building soil that grows without aid of fertilizer or irrigation is a better story in this regard.

No, pointing out that what some people call waste is not actually being wasted, it is serving a useful purpose. "Waste" means it is serving no useful purpose at all.

It's fairly difficult to do something that serves no conceivable purpose. I could buy stuff and throw it straight into the trash and we could say it's not waste as I'm supporting manufacturing and the garbage industry.

If you care about limiting some wasteful practice, you have to pick some definition of what counts as waste.

It's it essentially composting? How is that waste?

If I buy a tomato, and throw it in my garden, eating none of it, most people would say I wasted the tomato.

There are far cheaper methods of fertilizing my garden than tossing food into it, which makes it "wasteful".

At a certain point you have to pick a definition of what counts as food waste, and stick with it. Fiddling with the definition isn't going to make the world a better place.

Plowing it back into the fields means less fertilizer is needed for future crops. How is that waste?

That's like a perpetual motion machine. Energy is wasted, there is no way around it.

The sun is a great source of free energy.

But not necessarily nutrients/fertilizers and most tractors and transportation today run on ICEs. So it's still not a free lunch.

It needed that fertilizer to grow to even be plowed back in to start. It's just a waste of space for a "good product". It's basically a free pass for next year. No money gained means no profits means profits loss.

If the produce is lost, it's tax deductible

If the produce goes back to soil, it's an expense and next time it will result in higher output.

It's not just a case of buying 'ugly food' or bruised apples. When I order online, I get potatoes that are sprouting, onions that have gone soft, meat with excessive fat or skin, and goods that are close to their expiry date. I get that, these are sold in order to avoid waste, but it should be my choice to pick them up. When I'm ordering online, I don't want to pay for poisonous potatoes or milk that will go bad in 2 days.

This is odd. In the Netherlands I get the oposite. Most of the stuff in the physical store is always closer to expiration than when I order it from the same store. This is because they stock the delivery cars directly from the warehouse. Which is always fresher than what they have in front.

Several of the US delivery services are just people shopping in your behalf and driving the food to you in their own car. For example Instacart works this way.

We had to experiment a bit to find out which store doesn't stock too much bad produce. After we found that out (the answer was Costco) this problem went away.

Same in sweden.

And I mean it's a bit of a meme about Millenials, but I pick out avocados based on when I plan on using them. Making guac tonight? I'm grabbing the softest-not-going-bad avocados I can. Making guac for friends (back when having friends over was a thing)? Firm is great, they'll be ripe just in time for Saturday.

> Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no accounting for taste.

I find that once an apple gets a small bruise, it typically grows larger very quickly. If you eat it immediately, you can just cut out a small part. But if the grocery delivery comes with 50% of the apples bruised, that means you’re having to cut out (waste) a fair amount of your apples.

Specifically to bruised apples, the bruising may suggest crisp vs softness and factor into quality of the product. If I go looking for crisp apples, I avoid anything with a bruise as they often feel soft anyway and aren't worth checking. They are still edible, just not what I prefer or choose. I get that is a luxury of sorts, but I'd pick other fruit before a soft apple unless it is for baking.

Notwithstanding the baby carrots example, most ugly produced is still used and sold. It’s made into soups, salsas, juices, etc.

I’ve read that one reason we get so many e-coli infections from lettuce is that there is no secondary market (no lettuce juice) so the farmers drive it to the livestock farms and track back germs to the lettuce farm on their wheels.

The shavings from baby carrot production are still used, for juice and pulp.

For the benefit of any other perplexed non-Americans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_carrot#%22Baby-cut%22_car...

They are certainly not limited to America. You can buy them in many countries - they're common in the stores here in Norway, for example.

The 'cut' type? I've never heard of them in the UK - chantenay or other small but whole carrots sure, but not 'regularly' sized carrots trimmed down to a smaller 'carrot shape'.

Lol you don't have baby carrots, they are my fav, ready to just eat like chips. They just started selling carrot chips :O

Thank you, I really was confused!

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves.

that's a fair point, but it's not hard to come up with a counterexample where the produce is meaningfully different. I usually buy limes for their juice, and if I get a lime that produces less than 1oz of juice, that means I have to cut another one open and juice it. not only is this annoying, since limes are priced by quantity at my grocery store, but it means that I'm probably going to waste most of the second lime (or use cellophane to wrap up the second half, creating plastic waste).

I don't care too much about the aesthetic appeal of limes, but I'm definitely going to pick them all up to select the heaviest ones. these usually yield just a bit more than 1oz of juice, perfect for most of my use cases.

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food

It's said to be 31% of the retail and consumer food in the US[1]. While that is enormous, I don't think it necessarily should be considered unacceptable. The food supply chain is a system we want to have a lot of slack in.

So what level of food utilization would we have to have for someone to deliberately buy a very bruised apple at full price? I don't know, but I'm guessing it's too high to prevent a food security issue in a crisis.

[1] - https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/food-loss-and-waste

> an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

This isn’t true at all. It’s literally a myth made up by people who want to sell ugly food to consumers. Ugly produce is used as animal food, sold to food service companies where it’s ugliness wont matter after they prepare it, or occasionally tilled back into the soil as fertilizer.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

When I first started going to Whole Foods back in the day, the produce looked like a picture out of a catalog. I’d never seen such flawless produce in my life.

Not even. If the produce made it to the store shelves then it is by it's definition not ugly. They should see the amount of produce that isn't sold at markets because it doesn't meet supermarket chain standards for appearance. We used to fill up the back of a pickup truck, in the late 80s and early 90s, with reject carrots for $10 from a local farmer. They were perfectly fine. We'd always keep a bunch for ourselves, of course, but the bulk of these carrots were used as bait traps. That still goes on today anywhere that carrots are grown.

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

Price them down, ppl would consider the deal. It's a market, isn't it?

Or, well, it's a supermarket being part of super-chains... Potatoes by pound priced like fruits.

There's at least one company trying to do this - Misfit Markets sells boxes of ugly produce delivered to your door, and they claim to be cheaper than supermarket prices as an ugliness discount. (Disclaimer: I've never used them, a relative works for them)

My wife bought into one of these services, the $25 box we received contained about 10 - 15 dollars worth of produce from my local store but at a lower quality. It was also random and often contained undesirable items in large quantities (who needs 12 lemons for the week?, What am I supposed to do with 3 fingerling potatoes?). I used to work in food service and it was pretty obvious to me that they were sourcing items from Sysco or US Foods by the way the items were tagged and packaged. I think the shipping costs eat away any value you could expect from something like this.

The 25 vs 15 dollars issue means their business sucks unless they have a value add on top?

If you were getting 15 lemons per week, maybe contract the vendor and try to address the issue?

> The 25 vs 15 dollars issue means their business sucks unless they have a value add on top?

As I am buying "less desirable produce" (from what I can tell it all came from normal cases that a restaurant would order, I think this fools some people as they aren't used to seeing produce that still has dirt on it and is less presentable like that) I would expect more of it for my money, not less. I understand they have to pay for shipping but it's not as if I don't have to go to the grocery store anyway, maybe I just don't see the value proposition, for us it just wasn't there.

>If you were getting 15 lemons per week, maybe contract the vendor and try to address the issue?

Even if the product was more evenly distributed it wasn't enough for it to provide value for me. That point was just the final nail in the coffin.

On the other-other hand, Instacart et al are all shopping in stores that already have this filter. So you're getting the expense, questionable selection, and all the waste.

I love my local CSA box, dirty root veggies and all. I know that our CSA has seen a huge business increase (to the point that they had to refuse new customers for a while) so I hope this change persists.

Bruised apples cannot be stored as long, so I try to avoid them.

Bruised fruit goes bad much faster than none bruised fruit.

> Bruised apples are perfectly edible.

And you have to eat them fast, because they get bad more quickly compared to non-bruised apple. And that is big difference, between apple that I can eat next two weeks and one I can not.

Not really. Here's one article that says otherwise (there are a lot more): https://thecounter.org/weve-heard-staggering-statistics-food..., but ultimately the crux of it is that there are things like applesauce and canned diced tomatoes out there. Companies can pay less for ugly produce to make those products where looks don't matter, so they do that. The market works well in this case.

> an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

Citation needed.

I don't believe this is actually true. The food industry is much smarter than you think.

"Around 25 per cent of edible fresh produce is thrown away due to visual imperfection or cosmetic damage every year in Australia. According to a 2013 study from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO),"

https://www.ausfoodnews.com.au/2014/12/10/woolworths-launche...

Original source is somewhere in there - sorry for the laziness.

Even without the citation I believe this and take it at face value. I'm not sure what would make you not believe it? Have you never passed over something based purely on looks or noticed someone else do the same? My kids instinctively do this when they eat fruit; even my 2 year old does it and they've never been told to!

What makes me not believe it is that I read the study you're indirectly quoting[1]. I can't see how the articles you & the sibling comment could be written by a journalist with any other agenda than to deliberately misinform.

The 25% number is not 25% of food produced, but 25% of the waste in the supply chain being on the consumer side. Nowhere that I can see in the 2013 study cited does the FAO make the claim that "fresh produce is thrown away due to visual imperfection", that number also encompasses e.g. people overbuying produce that goes bad etc.

By the criteria of the article you're citing if the production & distribution part of the supply chain got more efficient that scary 25% number would rise. Indeed if you read the study this is what's happened in industrialized countries, we have a higher food waste percentage on the consumer side because we have more relative savings in the rest of the supply chain.

1. http://www.fao.org/3/i3347e/i3347e.pdf

I have an anecdote too - I used to work for SAP and lead their FMCG practice in EMEA. We did many ERP projects for large grocery chains and we could see that a lot of their material waste was down to damaged good and expired goods. Two of the largest chains had a field in the their system to track items that had expired due to being left to rot on the shelves, the amount of fruit and veg that expired was large and it was mostly oddly shaped veg. We introduced a business process where the suppliers could only send produce that met a certain 'grade', this radically changed the amount of wastage on the store side but increased the wastage on the supply side.

Programmes like 'the odd bunch' where produce that looks funny is sold cheaper has gone some way to addressing the issue for certain grocery chains.

I don't believe there are any public studies on individual store wastage over this issue.

Wow. I know that folks prefer better looking produce, but I hadn't realized it was quite that dramatic.

France had aan ugly fruit campaign because of this:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-2693000/Forg...

>I don't think it's outlandish for someone to give you a bruised apple And apparently grocery stores put people with opinions like yours in charge of packing produce boxes, which leads to lost sales. Nobody's arguing that they're inedible, but how much of a discount is the retailer prepared to offer me for accepting his low grade produce?

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

In London there's a startup which sells such rejected, ugly fruit and veg: https://www.oddbox.co.uk/ (no affiliation beyond being a happy customer)

Considering their stated purpose, the fruit and veg in their marketing are remarkably photogenic

It's not just ugly fruits/veg, it's food that would otherwise be discarded for any reason.

I've only been receiving their boxes for a few weeks now, and gotten some strange J-shaped cucumbers, but most of the produce looks normal.

My understanding is the ugly food is often times used to make packaged foods like pre-chopped fruits and veggies, salads, apple sauce, baby carrots.

That’s a myth. Most ugly produce is sold to food processors:

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

> it's your preference, not something that's objectively better

well, is that not a valid reason to want to pick out produce myself? How do I know the store working will have the same preference as me? What if I prefer my fruit to be under-ripe, and the store worker thinks I prefer over-ripe fruti?

One could argue that those preferences make the world a worst place. If we just accepted the first carrot we see rather than overlooking the crooked ones, there would be less waste.

We are so picky and so fussy that extra waste and energy is expended just to make fussy people happy.

I like to get what I want too but I can't help think that if we were all a little more relaxed in this area that the world might be a better place.

There is more to picking produce than just cosmetics. I don't care if my carrot is crooked. I care a lot if my banana is too ripe, or my apple is bruised.

Also, is blemished food wasted because people refuse to eat it, or would food be wasted regardless, and the wasted food is blemished because people select the unblemished food first?

Even though automated grading of produce is not unheard of, it's not represented properly in the market.

I think the first company to offer automated (or just standardized manual) grading and pricing on produce could be a big winner; I know I'd use it. It'd be especially good if the process distinguishes produce that's just ugly, from produce that is flavour/texture- or nutrition-compromised; eventually the latter could become well-defined enough that it goes straight to the compost heap rather than waiting with the produce that will actually sell at some price.

The first one that comes to mind for me is brussels sprouts: there is a huge variety in flavour/texture, nutrition, and beauty, and sometimes I really care about what they look like, often I do not, but also often there is a big difference in other qualities.

Just sell ugly food cheaper and people will start to buy it. In fact I wonder if there is not a huge market for someone who would say "No need to choose anymore: with 'ugly foods', you can save money and the planet"

Check out Imperfect Foods (I am not affiliated; simply a happy customer) - they send you a box with "imperfect" food that otherwise would have gone to waste.

There are also other similar companies doing this.

There are other things I consider when shopping, too, that pickers don't.

I try to pick fruits and vegetables at various levels of ripeness, so that I can have ripe produce throughout the week at home.

I don't want only green bananas or only super ripe ones; I need some ripe ones for today, and then some greener ones for later in the week.

> heard someone refuse to buy eggs because they farmer got them from her own chickens

OK, I'll bite- where else could a farmer get [chicken] eggs from besides their own chickens?

From an egg factory or an egg tree. :)

I think OP meant, that there are people that need a certain level of reality distortion to consider a thing to be proper. If it came out of a chicken just recently it's disgusting, but packaged and sorted with a stamp is how it should be for those people. Basically a silly brain fart, that goes with a civilization, where thanks to a proper label we can divorce ourselves from animalistic and disgusting bounds of reality.

My branded grocery store bundles up old veggies and sells them at a steep discount, they're really good for freezing, smoothies, or cooking same day.

In general I agree here. In case of bruised apples I am a bit picky because of patulin. It is a toxic produced in rotting apples.

I'll buy them. At half the price. Otherwise they can turn them to juice or stewed apples or whatever.

one bad apple spoils the bunch