The ugly produce section has always been my favorite part of the grocery store. Hugely discounted fruits and veggies that were perfectly edible if not for a little misshapen, plus the bonus of feeling morally superior for helping the environment? I’m sold. What I did not know is that roughly 30% of food produced on farms does not even make it to the sale bin.
Allow me to take you through the lifespan of an average banana. Let’s say we start with a family of ten bananas. They grew up together on a banana farm with a healthy childhood, and all ten of them grew up to be perfectly edible and ripe. Of these ten bananas, one of them will be left on the farm for not being aesthetically pleasing enough- whether bruised or misshapen- for the farmer to supply to its clients. This banana used over a tenth of the water to produce the fruit, which has now gone entirely to waste, alongside a quarter of the land, labour, and energy used. Now we have 9 bananas for the price of 10 being shipped to grocery stores and restaurants. At these establishments, 1 more of the 9 bananas will be turned away due to their shape not being curved enough, or some other aesthetic reason. What happens to the remaining 8 bananas is in the hands of the consumer, but for various other reasons unrelated to aesthetics, 2 more of these bananas will be wasted and uneaten.
This is a trivial example of a massive issue. Scaled up, this means that approximately 40% of all produce grown on farms goes to waste, and 20% of all fruits and veggies produced are never even seen by consumers. Food waste on an industrial scale is already a big enough issue as it is – but such a huge part of this issue hailing from simple aesthetic purposes is abhorrent.
Visually unappealing fruits and vegetables are lost at every step along the supply chain, and no one wins as a result. Farmers suffer huge financial losses for all the wasted resources spent on crops that did not bring in a single dime. On a retail level, grocery stores and restaurants throw away up to 15.4 billion dollars' worth of edible produce annually. From an environmental perspective, food waste causes problems long after its issues in production with wasted natural resources. Once it reaches landfills, the rotting produce contributes to huge methane emissions, as roughly 10% of greenhouse gases comes entirely from food that has been produced but never eaten. It’s also important to look at the role of aesthetics in food insecurity. With ugly produce creating such a discrepancy between the cost of production and the income from the quantity supplied, the cost of individual fruits and veggies in stores is much higher than it needs to be. If society learns to appreciate food in all shapes and sizes, then produce prices are bound to fall, making healthy diets and food security much more accessible to the average person. We've been conditioned to shy away from blemished produce due to the abundance of cartoon quality food available to us visually, and it's taken a toll on the way that we shop on a larger scale.
Several movements, including Misfits Market and Spudsy, are on the rise to combat the conditioning we’ve had towards what food is considered appealing. These are organizations that specifically sell products made with produce that does not fit the emoji shaped mold of what a fruit or veggie should look like. It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of unsustainable practices from industry giants. It’s easy to feel like what we do doesn’t make a difference. But this is a change that households, students, small business owners, and humans alike can make by choosing to prioritize the information right in front of us. By placing a similar value on so-called ugly produce and purchasing a slightly deformed but even sweeter banana where the opportunity presents itself, we can show the industrial giants what we want. In the case of aesthetics in produce, consumers hold all the power. It’s a microscopic change in our shopping and eating habits, but a ripple is what starts a tsunami in the world of food waste, world hunger, and global warming.